Technology adoption in professional services firms has long been plagued by a familiar pattern: the IT team builds what they believe is a perfect solution, rolls it out with minimal consultation, provides generic training, and then wonders why adoption rates remain disappointingly low. But what if there’s a better way?
A recent conversation between David Hymers, IT Director at Wedlake Bell, and Matthew Stringer, CEO of Stridon, reveals how one 400-person London law firm transformed their approach to technology adoption—and achieved remarkable results in the process.
The Problem: When Good Technology Goes Unused
Like many professional services firms, Wedlake Bell had invested in multiple dashboards and technology solutions. The tools were sophisticated, feature-rich, and theoretically valuable. Yet they sat largely unused, gathering digital dust while employees struggled with daily frustrations around accessing key information.
“We already had a whole range of dashboards that people could use, but they were just too involved. There was too much information on them. People struggled to use them,” explains David Hymers. Sound familiar?
The firm’s accounts team had even attempted to build a simplified dashboard years earlier, but the project “just died a death” due to lack of engagement and communication. This failure highlighted a critical insight: the problem wasn’t technological—it was human.
A Different Approach: Starting with People, Not Technology
Rather than diving straight into solution-building, Wedlake Bell partnered with Stridon to conduct a strategic technology assessment. This involved speaking with 60 people across the organization—15% of the entire firm—from legal directors and partners to trainees, business support staff, and secretaries.
“We need to peel back the layers, which involves engaging with people at every single level,” notes Matthew. “You start to see themes coming out of an organization where people think they’re talking about different problems, but actually they’re just perceiving things in slightly different ways.”
This comprehensive listening exercise revealed that while employees thought they were facing different challenges, the underlying issue was consistent: difficulty accessing key information needed to do their jobs effectively.
The Champions Model: Building Solutions with Users, Not for Them
Armed with this insight, the team took an approach that fundamentally differed from traditional technology implementations. Instead of building a solution in isolation, they formed a “champions group” of approximately 10 people who had specifically mentioned information access challenges.
Crucially, this group represented diverse roles across the organization, including secretarial staff. “We were careful to include secretarial representation because people in different roles need different information,” David emphasizes.
The champions weren’t just consulted—they were integral to the solution design process. Rather than prejudging what the solution should look like, the team listened first, understood specific needs, and built around the feedback they received.
The Power of Role-Specific Insights
One particularly valuable insight came from the secretary on the champions group. She explained how busy fee-earners often delegate administrative tasks to secretaries, who then need specific information to complete these delegated responsibilities. This perspective led to dashboard features that specifically supported secretarial workflows – something that would never have emerged from a traditional IT-led approach.
“What the secretary was telling us was that her fee-earners are super busy. They don’t have time to do certain admin tasks themselves, so they delegate it to the secretary, and there’s certain information that the secretary needs to do those admin tasks,” David recalls.
Simplicity Over Sophistication
The resulting solution was a Power BI dashboard containing just four or five pieces of key financial information. While this might seem limited compared to the comprehensive dashboards that already existed, its simplicity was its strength.
“We literally just put four or five bits of information on there to keep it simple, intuitive. It wasn’t difficult to use,” David explains. The dashboard required virtually no training because it focused on essential information presented in an accessible format.
The Adoption Dividend
The results speak for themselves. The project received hugely positive feedback from its first phase, and the firm is now planning phases two and three. More importantly, the success has created momentum for larger-scale technology adoption and innovation initiatives.
“You see naturally adoption levels go up. It changes positive impact on employee experience, how people feel about technology,” Matthew observes. “We’re leveraging that energy to move further and quicker with larger scale technology adoption and innovation because it’s created the right foundation.”
Lessons for Professional Services Firms
Several key principles emerge from Wedlake Bell’s experience:
Start with Problems, Not Solutions: Before building anything, understand the real challenges people face in their daily work. These problems might manifest differently across roles, but often share common themes.
Engage Early and Broadly: Speak to people across all levels and functions of your organization. The insights from a secretary might be just as valuable as those from a senior partner.
Form Champions Groups: Identify people who have experienced the problems you’re trying to solve and involve them in solution design. Turn potential critics into invested advocates.
Prioritize Simplicity: Resist the temptation to build comprehensive solutions that do everything. Focus on solving specific problems well rather than trying to boil the ocean.
Don’t Wait for Perfection: “Good was good enough,” as David puts it. Get something valuable into users’ hands quickly, then iterate based on real-world feedback.
Personalize the Experience: One-size-fits-all training doesn’t work. Different roles need different information and different approaches to technology engagement.
Starting Small, Thinking Big
Perhaps most importantly, firms shouldn’t be intimidated by the scale of change management. “You can start simply in an organization with a smaller scaled-down approach,” Matthew advises. “Don’t immediately go to the biggest possible change project that you could possibly choose.”
The key is to focus on something meaningful but manageable, build internal capability through the process, and use early successes as a foundation for larger initiatives.
The Path Forward
Technology adoption in professional services isn’t ultimately about technology—it’s about people. By starting with human needs, engaging users as partners rather than recipients, and prioritizing simplicity over sophistication, firms can create the conditions where technology adoption happens naturally.
The traditional model of building solutions in isolation and then hoping for adoption is broken. The future belongs to organizations that recognize technology adoption as a collaborative journey, not a destination dictated by the IT department.
As professional services firms face increasing pressure to innovate and improve efficiency, those that master this people-first approach to technology adoption will find themselves with a significant competitive advantage—and employees who actually want to use the tools they’re given.
This news post is based on insights from the Technology in Professional Services (TiPS) research project’s Festival of Adoption Acceleration, featuring discussions with innovation leaders and legal professionals about their real-world experiences with technology implementation. Find more information about the festival here.