The Software KPI That Actually Matters: Workarounds Removed

The insight: count workarounds, not logins

Every firm I talk to can tell me how many seats they pay for. Almost none can tell me how many spreadsheets, shared docs, group texts, and "just email me when that happens" habits their team has built around the software those seats belong to.

That second number is the one that predicts whether your intake converts, whether your matters move, and whether your reporting is worth reading. Seats are a billing artifact. Workarounds are the honest record of where your tooling stopped fitting the job.

So here is today's tip: make "workarounds removed" a tracked KPI. Not "adoption." Not "logins per week." Adoption can look perfectly healthy while your paralegals maintain a parallel universe in Google Sheets because the case management system can't represent how your firm actually handles a lien, a referral fee split, or a co-counsel matter.

The stat everyone is quoting — and the part they're skipping

The U.S. Chamber's 2025 report found that 58% of small businesses self-reported using generative AI, up from 40% in 2024 and 23% in 2023. Adoption has more than doubled in two years.

The usual read on that number is "get on board or get left behind." That read is lazy. A self-reported usage figure tells you people are touching the tools. It tells you nothing about whether those tools are wired into a process, whether the outputs are auditable, or whether anyone is accountable for what the software produced.

The useful takeaway is the operating gap sitting behind the statistic: the team bends its process around generic software, adds spreadsheets and workarounds, and loses adoption and accountability in the process. Generative AI joins the stack the same way every other tool did — as another surface people poke at, feeding a shadow process that lives outside the system of record.

For a law firm, that gap is not a productivity annoyance. It is a malpractice-adjacent risk surface and a revenue leak at the same time.

Adoption statistics measure how many people touched the tool. Workaround counts measure whether the tool was ever built for the work.

What a workaround actually costs a law firm

Workarounds are cheap to create and expensive to keep. They tend to show up in the same places across firms:

• Intake. A lead form drops into a CRM that can't model your qualification logic, so the intake coordinator keeps a separate sheet of "maybes" nobody else can see.
• Handoffs. The system has no state for "signed but not yet assigned," so the handoff happens in a text thread. When someone is out, the matter sits.
• Permissions. A role needs to see three fields but the software only offers all-or-nothing access, so someone exports to a spreadsheet and shares the spreadsheet instead. Now your client data lives in a file with no access log.
• Reporting. Leadership wants a number the platform doesn't produce, so an admin rebuilds it by hand every Monday. The number is late, inconsistent, and quietly wrong.
• Marketing attribution. Call tracking, forms, and matter outcomes live in three systems that don't reconcile, so cost-per-signed-case becomes an argument instead of a fact.

Each one of these was a reasonable five-minute fix when someone invented it. Collectively they are why your team distrusts the dashboard, why onboarding a new hire takes three months, and why you cannot answer a simple question about your own pipeline without asking two people to check something.

The 30-day version you can start today

You do not need a platform decision to begin. You need an inventory and a discipline.

1. Inventory the workarounds

Ask every person on the team one question: "What do you do outside the system to get your job done?" Not "what's broken" — people will say "nothing" out of loyalty. Ask specifically about the sheets, the docs, the sticky notes, the personal reminders, the group chats. Write each one down with the role that owns it and the time it consumes per week.

2. Rank by cost, not by annoyance

The loudest complaint is rarely the most expensive problem. Rank by hours consumed, revenue exposure, and risk. A quiet spreadsheet holding client PII with no audit trail outranks a clunky UI that irritates everyone.

3. Remove one at a time — and verify

Here is the part most firms skip. Removing a workaround means the underlying need is now met inside the system and users have actually stopped using the old method. Go look. Check whether the sheet still gets edited. Check whether the text thread is still active. Self-reported adoption is the same trap as self-reported AI usage — it measures intention, not behavior.

4. Track support tickets weekly

Pick one number and watch it every week: internal support requests and "how do I…" questions. It is a clean proxy for fit. When software matches the work, that line goes down and stays down. When you've shipped a change that only looks like a fix, the line stays flat while a new workaround quietly forms underneath it.

Where custom software earns its place

Off-the-shelf legal tools are built for the average firm. Your firm is not the average firm — your practice mix, referral relationships, fee structures, and intake logic are specific, and they are usually the reason you win.

Custom software should make the support-ticket number easier to improve, because it can be built around the things generic platforms treat as configuration afterthoughts: roles, permissions, audit logs, and data controls. When a role can see exactly the fields it needs, nobody exports to a spreadsheet. When the system logs who changed what, nobody keeps a private record "just in case." When a workflow state exists for the way your firm actually hands off a matter, the text thread dies on its own.

The goal is not to rebuild your stack. The goal is narrower and more defensible: replace the highest-cost workaround with software that fits the actual users, actual data, actual permissions, and actual decisions — and prove it worked with evidence rather than optimism.

That framing also protects you from the failure mode the Chamber's numbers are quietly setting up. A lot of firms are about to adopt generative AI the same way they adopted everything else: bolted on, unowned, generating outputs nobody can trace. If your process is already full of workarounds, AI does not clean them up. It adds one more place where work happens outside the system of record.

Your next step

This week, do three things. Run the workaround inventory across your team. Pick the single most expensive one. Start tracking weekly internal support tickets so you have a baseline before you change anything.

Then decide whether the fix is configuration, training, or software that was actually built for how your firm operates. If it's the third, see how we approach custom software — starting from the users, the permissions, and the decisions, not from a feature list.