The cost of context switching: why legal tech works best within existing workflows

Avail explores how well-integrated technology tackles bottlenecks in processes, leading to significant time and cost savings along with meaningful ROI

Law firms have invested heavily in legal technology in recent years, yet many continue to face the same challenge: turning implementation into lasting value.

The issue is rarely the technology itself. The real test comes afterwards. Are lawyers continuing to engage with the platform? Has it become embedded within day-to-day workflows? Can the firm demonstrate a measurable return on investment?

Too often, the answer comes down to a single, underestimated problem: context switching. When technology requires lawyers to move between platforms, manually transfer documents or re-enter data they already have elsewhere, friction builds and stunts adoption. The firms that close the gap between implementation and lasting value are those that treat workflow integration not as an afterthought, but as the foundation on which everything else is built.

Adoption is driven by outcomes, not features

Lawyers rarely adopt technology because of its features alone. Longer-term adoption occurs when users experience tangible value in their day-to-day work and experience it quickly. The speed at which a solution delivers that first meaningful result is one of the strongest predictors of lasting adoption. This is what practitioners mean when they talk about time to value.

In practice areas such as real estate, where large volumes of information must be reviewed under tight deadlines, this matters enormously. A lawyer who runs a title investigation on a live matter and receives a structured, accurate result in thirty seconds (rather than spending an hour manually pulling and reading registers) has experienced time to value immediately. That single moment is often what turns a sceptical user into an advocate.

But delivering value quickly is only part of the picture. How that value is delivered matters just as much. Technology that requires lawyers to leave their existing workflow by opening a separate platform, manually transferring documents and re-entering data they already have elsewhere, creates friction that undermines adoption regardless of how powerful the underlying product is.

Removing friction: the iManage story

 This is something we experienced directly at Avail. As adoption grew across our law firm clients, a pattern began to emerge in the feedback we were hearing. Lawyers were finding value in the platform, but a recurring frustration was slowing them down: having to manually download and re-upload every document from their document management system (DMS) iManage into Avail. It was a small step, but in a profession where time is billed in six-minute increments, small steps matter. The friction was real, and it was affecting how consistently lawyers were engaging with the platform.

Rather than treating this as an individual complaint, we recognised it as a systemic adoption blocker. The feedback was consistent across multiple clients and the solution was clear: remove the manual step entirely. We worked with our product team to build a direct integration between iManage and Avail, allowing documents to flow automatically from the firm’s DMS into the platform without any additional handling.

The impact was immediate and measurable. Following the integration, our active user base grew by 200%. Lawyers stopped thinking about Avail as a separate tool they had to remember to use. It became part of the workflow they were already in, and when that happened, adoption took care of itself. For firms using other DMS’, the principle is the same: technology should come to the lawyer, not the other way around.

Extending value beyond day-to-day matters

One example illustrates this well. A client was using Avail to manage a large portfolio of titles but needed the output structured to map directly to the data fields in their HighQ workflow system. Without this, their team faced the familiar problem of context switching: receiving a report in one format and having to manually reformat and re-enter data into the system they actually worked in. Every additional step between the output and their workflow was costing time and creating room for error.

Rather than accepting that friction as inevitable, we configured Avail’s output to feed directly into their HighQ environment with no manual handling, reformatting or switching between systems. The results spoke for themselves: across 185 titles, the project saved the team 50 hours of manual work and £20,266 in costs. More importantly, it changed how the team experienced the technology. When the context switching disappeared, engagement increased and the team began applying Avail to new workflows they had never previously considered, demonstrating that the platform’s value had always been there, waiting to be unlocked by removing the friction that had been getting in the way.

Overall, technology implementation is only ever the first step. The firms seeing the greatest return on legal tech investment are those that understand a simple truth: legal technology works best when lawyers barely notice they are using it. When solutions integrate directly into existing workflows (removing the need to switch between systems, reformat outputs or handle data twice) adoption follows naturally, value compounds over time, and the gap between implementation and lasting return closes for good.