Evaluation Debt: 54% of Legal Teams Now Say Technology Decisions Are Their Biggest Challenge — Ahead of the Actual Work

For the first time, more legal teams cite technology decisions (54%) than work volume (52%) as their hardest problem. That is a strange and revealing result: the constraint has moved from doing the work to choosing the tools that do the work. This is evaluation debt — the accumulated cost of decisions deferred, pilots never concluded, and vendors renewed on inertia. Here's how firms accumulate it, why it compounds, and the one decision that has to be made first because it constrains all the others.