Bridging the Gap Between IT and Legal

If you are reading this I'm willing to bet your career is in IT, law, or somewhere in between; and it is likely your job involves working with both of these groups. If you don't find yourself somewhere in the mix of the aforementioned groups, then you might just be a big nerd, like me. I have a legal background with tech experience and have spent many years working in roles that served as a liaison between legal and IT teams. I have always worked with legal technology, and because it fascinates me, I have a nice big "nerd" badge.

One thing that has really helped my career is embracing the fact that it is difficult to bridge the gap between lawyers and information technology professionals; as both groups tend to be a little stubborn. In this article, I will discuss three key points that have helped me build a bridge to lessen the gap between the two and ease the process of working together:

• First, know your audience. Don’t talk to a Senior Partner at a law firm or General Counsel at a corporation and expect them to know or care about the details of your error message. Keep your communications clear and concise with whomever you speak to (this advice is generally ubiquitous) and let them know you are working to solve the issue with the greatest expedience.  Lawyers do not like it when you: a) "talk down," for example, by explaining a very rudimentary feature in Microsoft that everyone knows about (such as: what “read-only” means); or b) use IT jargon. If you're talking to an attorney about “unhandled exceptions,” “resource contention,” “I/O," etc., which they probably don't understand, they will tune you out. DO be clear with your IT staff about technical jargon, but if you are in a role where you have both legal and technical experience, you are not likely responsible for running SQL scripts or checking the event handler for application errors / warnings / etc.  Communicate with IT as the end-user, and if necessary, insist that you get on the call with your IT staff and your vendor’s technical support staff to troubleshoot and escalate issues as need be.  

• Second, be prepared. This involves making sure that you have researched and tested the issues and / or problems you are working on prior to making your recommendation to your legal and IT teams.  Be sure to run a thorough QA of the results of your work before you send it on to the legal team, and test / troubleshoot / resolve what you can on your end before escalating issues to your IT Support Team. Before contacting anyone from Legal or IT - ask yourself "what questions are they going to ask me?" Make sure you have answers (or status on things you don't know the answer to yet).

• Third, do what you can to be pro-active. Let's say you're aware that your file server is running low on space, or your indexing service may have been disrupted because of that unscheduled but absolutely necessary mid-day server reboot, take some time each afternoon before you leave the office and each morning when you return to do a full system check to be sure that you have covered your bases.  Finally, document EVERYTHING and make sure all interested parties are being updated in a timely manner and before they'd think to ask you.

These key points will help you become a trusted advisor within both groups at your organization, as well as expert liaison in between IT and legal groups. If you have additional ideas that you've learned along the way please share them in the comments - I look forward to discussing this topic with you!

Ryan Vago
Founder & President
RION Corp.