Alex Joannou, Head of Revenue at LEAP Enterprise
By Alex Joannou, Head of Revenue at Legal Futures Associate LEAP Enterprise [1]
Alex Joannou has spent a decade selling technology to law firms and is now the Head of Revenue for LEAP Enterprise [2], where he leads commercial strategy and a team of account executives focused on helping mid-sized and large law firms improve efficiency and profitability through legal technology.
Why should a managing partner take your read on the market seriously?
Over the past decade, I have worked with more than 1,500 law firms across England and Wales. That has given me first-hand exposure to a wide range of firms, practice areas, operating models, leadership structures and levels of technology maturity. Having experienced that evolution has helped me distinguish between a new technology trend and a meaningful change in the way a firm operates.
I also don’t think thought leadership means presenting yourself as having all the answers. It means combining experience with curiosity, recognising patterns across the market, constructively challenging accepted thinking, and helping people make better-informed decisions.
Firms are entitled to be sceptical about that. Technology providers have a responsibility to be honest about what firms are ready for, what may need to change and where a particular capability may not yet be the right priority.
AI is dominating the conversation. Where is it genuinely delivering, and where are expectations running ahead of reality?
AI is understandably receiving much of the attention, and it can create significant productivity improvements. But it is not a substitute for clear processes, reliable information or good leadership.
AI will amplify the environment into which it is introduced. A well-designed process can help it scale. In a fragmented or poorly governed process, it is more likely to expose and accelerate the weaknesses.
Cloud technology should be viewed the same way. Moving to the cloud is not, by itself, the transformation. It is a foundation that should enable better integration, collaboration, resilience, and innovation. The sector has a habit of treating the foundation as the finished building.
What makes a pilot successful?
A successful pilot is not necessarily a successful transformation programme. A new capability may produce an impressive result for a small group of motivated users but still fail to create wider value because it is disconnected from the firm’s data, processes, governance or strategic priorities.
There’s also a measurement problem behind it. Implementation is not the same as adoption, and adoption is not the same as business impact. Firms should look for evidence such as faster billing, improved cash collection, fewer manual steps, stronger management information, more consistent matter handling, and a better experience for users and clients. If a programme can’t produce that evidence, the announcement was the deliverable.
You’ve said the platform is “only part of the answer”. Can you expand on that?
It’s a statement of where responsibility actually sits, and it cuts both ways.
The quality of the implementation, the clarity of the firm’s objectives, the alignment of its leadership team and the involvement of users will all determine whether the investment creates lasting value. Some of that is the firm’s to own. The implementation is ours.
What I’d resist is the version of that argument where the supplier signs the contract and then attributes every subsequent difficulty to the client. The relationship between a law firm and its technology provider needs to become less transactional. Firms should expect openness, constructive challenge and shared accountability. They should expect a partner that understands that signing a contract is only the beginning of the outcome, not the outcome itself.
Firms should also be able to ask difficult questions about technology without feeling they are already behind. The goal is not necessarily to be first to every trend. It is to be intentional, prepared, and capable of acting when the opportunity arises.
Where does that leave mid-sized firms?
Mid-sized firms occupy a particularly interesting position. They may have outgrown technology designed for smaller practices, but they do not necessarily want the expense, disruption, and ongoing maintenance traditionally associated with heavily customised enterprise projects.
Their real problem usually isn’t a lack of technology. It is the accumulated complexity of the technology, data and processes they already have. Most firms have made sensible decisions over many years — a system introduced for a departmental requirement, a manual process to bridge the gap between two platforms, a successful team that developed its own way of working. Each decision may have made sense in isolation. Collectively, they create an operating environment that is fragmented, difficult to manage and increasingly expensive to change.
That has consequences beyond IT. It can slow billing and cash collection, reduce confidence in management information, duplicate effort, create inconsistent client experiences and place unnecessary administrative pressure on lawyers and support teams.
So the question I’d put back to leaders is a different one. Rather than asking, “Which new system should we buy?”, firms should increasingly be asking, “What kind of operating model are we trying to create?”
Last one. Who wins the next phase of this market?
Not the firms with the longest list of technology products.
The firms that lead will be those with the clearest operating models, the most trusted information and the least unnecessary friction between their people and the work they need to do.
The purpose of transformation is not to make a law firm more generic. Established firms have institutional knowledge, specialist expertise and client relationships that need protecting. It is to remove the friction that stops the firm performing at its best, with them, not to them.