Ricoh's team selected a small but diverse group of attorneys and their legal assistants to participate in this phase of the research project, which involved using the prototype in their daily work activities.

What had before been a laborious practice of searching through voluminous amounts of paper became, for those employees who adopted the token, a reliable way to find information instantly. For those employees, the paper token drastically reduced the time that had previously gone into searching for information in a paper system.

Insight

By observing the way the employees interacted with the token, we found that there were three distinct work styles: digital, hybrid, and paper-based:

• Paper-based work style: Those who do their research and writing onpaper and are not as comfortable with digital solutions.
• Hybrid work style: Those who use a combination of digital and paper media for research and writing; their preference depending on the task.
• A digital work style: Those who have a strong preference for doing research and writing on the computer, are comfortable with interacting with various user interfaces, and quickly adopt new technology as long as it increases efficiency.

Once we analyzed the data we collected by observing these three types of employees, we made an important discovery: it was their work styles, rather than the caseload volume, that drastically affected a legal assistant's time.

Attorneys with a digital-based work style readily adopted this token, which meant that their legal assistants only had to spend 10 percent of their time searching for information. Those with a hybrid style partially adopted the token, which reduced an assistant's time so that they only spent 20 percent of their time searching. The paper-based attorney didn't adopt it at all and searching took 80 percent of their assistant's time.