How to Build a Successful Business Case to Convince Key Stakeholders

According to market analysts, legal technology budgets will increase threefold through 2025. 

In other words, the shift to digital innovation has started and, whether you are prepared or not, you are part of it. 

You are reading this because, like other legal firms, your firm is experiencing a growing pressure both in terms of managing legal workload and driving efficiency in your operational departments. Now you need to convince key stakeholders that innovative digital solutions are the way to go. But this takes time and requires a lot of your efforts while your problems keep growing.

Other innovative legal tech companies have already introduced innovative solutions to digitize workflows, enhance customer and lawyers’ experiences, and boost the efficiency of their operational teams. The result? They now have the tools and time to respond to the fast-changing market, resulting in attracting new clients and increased customer satisfaction.  

Without innovation, your work processes keep slowing down and the quality of your legal services continuously decrease. This leads to more and more clients leaving and opting for innovative providers. With a better market offer, these innovative players continue to take market shares. This leaves legal firms like yours with the challenge to not fall behind in your tech innovation.

But, it’s not too late, we’re here to help. Legal innovation doesn’t have to be daunting. In fact, it can be quite fun.

It’s not a single business case, it’s a party

Think about it this way: legal innovation is like hosting a party. So, where do you start? You prepare by selecting the right date, picking the music people want to hear, and inviting the people you want there. 

The dress code to enter is a revision of your digital innovation strategy to stay ahead with low-code/no-code. But what platforms are out there? What key (internal) information do you need to gather? How do you identify the value and investment short and long term? What stakeholders do you involve? 

Let’s start off by saying that there are different business case models out there that help different types of firms with their problems. However, implementing a low-code/no-code solution is not a fix for a single problem, use case, or application. Instead, this is about building a business case for a strategic decision which solves a multitude of your problems.

The way to do this? Building an air-tight business case 

Whether you already have a concrete problem you want to solve or are still determining this, it’s crucial to prove that your project is a good investment by showcasing that the benefits outweigh the costs. We see reaping success amongst our clients again and again. I hear you thinking.. how did they do it? Here’s the answer:

1. Identify the (business) pain

Whether you feel the pain in your own daily work routine or are responsible for optimizing processes from different teams/departments, it’s important to involve your stakeholders early-on. A way to achieve this is through an ideation portal where you collect, validate, and prioritize ideas and potential solutions. 

Once you have collected the needs and pains you can start to assess and pick the use case(s). How? Firms usually start with the use cases which have the clearest or most tangible ROI. This is often naturally the most logical thing to do. After that, it's time to grab the attention of the most important stakeholders you're trying to convince. How? By catering your business case to their specific pains. Here are the values we often see which resonate and trigger:

The right invitation for the right party guest

• What is the impact on our revenue/internal operations if we proceed with the current way of work?
• What is the impact on our revenue/internal operations if we implement digital solutions?

CIO & CTO: Do more with less. The value here is that a low-code/no-code platform provides speed and is flexible. To speed up development even more, collaboration with the business users is the way to go. You eliminate the gap between the business and IT by transforming innovative thinkers into developers where IT stays in full control to minimize any risks. Provide these stakeholders with answers to these questions:

• Our business needs are usually not reflected fast and accurately enough into our IT applications. What is the impact of this?
• What do we as an organization gain when our IT applications smoothly fit our business requirements with low effort?

• How does the growing workload of lawyers and manual adjustments impact the backlog and stability of our IT framework now and in the future? 
• Imagine that there’s a tool out there that speeds up application development and easily adds missing functionality without having to fully rebuild everything. What will you do with all that time you saved because of this?

This might sound very obvious, however, getting the right stakeholders involved early by customizing the urgency and value towards specific stakeholders is crucial to get your project approved. If they do not feel the pain, they don’t feel the need to act now. 

This is the front-end of the invitation to your party. Now let's take a look at the behind-the-scenes details of the location, time, and dress-code.

2. Start small

So, how do you define a clear ROI for your project? Translating your business problems into a low-code/no-code solution requires a different focus. In our experience, we strongly believe that the following elements are crucial for establishing a clear ROI for implementing low-code/no-code development: 

1. Analysis of the current situation: describes how the process or situation you are looking to change currently works. It’s important to stay factual and not highlight any issues yet. 
   
2. Reasons for change: describes the desired situation, how it differs from the current situation, and why it’s important to make the proposed change. You already did some pre-work in step one. A good addition here is to include legal market trend reports from analyses like Forrester and Gartner that support the long term impact.
   
3. ROI (short and long term): decrease time to market with:
   • Reduce number of FTE roles involved when creating new applications
   • Decrease dependency on overheated software specialists market
   • Decrease risk by reducing shadow IT
   • Reduce cost of maintenance for software applications
     
4. Cost-Benefit analysis: When you start to dive into end-to-end application platforms like  low-code/no-code, they seem to be more expensive at first compared to off the shelf solutions. Spoiler alert: they are actually cheaper as a long-term investment. Why? It’s agile. Meaning it’s reusable, scalable, and future proof as it grows hand in hand with your needs. You want to minimize the risk of coming across unexpected costs along the way when you run into limitations. An example is that you pay for the same application twice when you want to adjust because it doesn’t fulfill your exact needs anymore. This often occurs with an off the shelf solution and will throw mud in your ROI calculation. To avoid this, we offer the 4-Week Guarantee product, where price, product and time are fixed. 
   
5. Implementation steps and timeline: the ‘how to’ part demonstrates to stakeholders that you have the process and people to implement it. This makes your new strategy tangible. The steps differ per platform and therefore it’s important to get a deep understanding of this beforehand. 

Despite starting with a single solution, leading law firms typically achieve a much better return on investment (ROI) when implementing a low-code/no-code platform strategically. The next part explains why. 

3. Think big  

Now that you claimed the spotlight, it’s time to shine! 

How do you convince your stakeholders that a low-code/now-code platform is a solution for the long run? The answer: you accelerate over time because the platform grows and builds with you. 

As the market is always moving, you want to easily build and adjust your applications based on changing different (business) requirements and needs. So you adapt to your customers’ changing needs in real time. A long term investment like low-code/no-code facilitates this with no additional costs involved. 

Long story short, the investment in time and budget pays off because you have more time and expertise in-house to innovate faster.

Isn’t that what a party is all about? With all of this information, you’re in the drivers’ seat on your way to the party. We provide you with the directions to arrive on time. Together we connect your needs with the platform possibilities to reach the best possible result. From a strategic to a detailed technical level.

Want to learn more about how we can support you to build your business case? Schedule a session with one of our solutions architects to get started now. Please visit this page to find more information.

Let’s hit the dance floor!