Public sector legal work operates under a set of conditions that fundamentally differ from commercial practice. It happens inside institutions with long memories, under deadlines that are often written directly into statute, and with the expectations that decisions may be reviewed well after the fact—many times by people who weren’t there, don’t know the context, and have the benefit of hindsight.
For government legal teams, oversight isn’t an occasional event. It’s not like an audit that happens once a year; it’s a continuous part of the operating environment. And the output of their work—whether it’s a FOIA response, investigative record, enforcement action, or something else—don’t just resolve a single matter. This work can shape public trust, policy outcomes, and an agency’s credibility over time.
Despite that, much of the legal technology ecosystem still approaches government as a variation on enterprise. The assumption is well-intentioned: build flexible tools, layer in compliance, and let agencies adapt them to their needs. Sometimes that works, but often, it leaves important gaps.
The Cost of Designing Without Context
When technology is built without a deep understanding of public sector realities, the limitations don’t usually show up in demos. They surface later: under deadline pressure, during audits, or in moments of public scrutiny.
In government legal work, those moments aren’t hypothetical so much as they’re simply expected. Decisions are made with the understanding that they may need to be revisited, explained, or defended long after the original context has faded.
A commonly underestimated dynamic is how much defensibility shapes day-to-day decision-making for the public sector.
“People outside government often underestimate how closely public sector decision-making is scrutinized,” said Aurora Bryant, formerly of Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. “You’re constantly working to ensure your processes and actions are defensible, even to an outsider who, months or years later, may be reviewing them without context.”
That reality influences everything from how work is prioritized to how records are kept. Government legal teams aren’t just focused on resolving today’s task; they’re thinking ahead to help ensure their actions will be understood accurately by someone who wasn’t in the room, under different pressures.
In this environment, efficiency alone isn’t enough. Speed matters, but so does clarity. Government legal teams need systems that help them explain not just what they did, but why they did it—and how that decision aligns with policy, law, and public expectations.
When tools fall short here, the impact can introduce real risk: uncertainty during review, inconsistent outcomes across matters, or gaps in the record that are difficult to reconstruct after the fact. Over time, those small cracks can undermine confidence inside an agency and out.
While software providers can’t use this context to anticipate every scenario, they should recognize that government legal work is shaped as much by future accountability as by present-day execution, and build systems that support both.
Why Lived Experience Changes the Questions We Ask
Public sector practitioners don’t just bring domain knowledge; they bring a different way of evaluating risk.
That skill is shaped by experience: by having worked on matters where timelines were fixed, review was ongoing, and the consequences of delays or missteps extended beyond the immediate legal outcome.
“When you’re representing the United States, what you argue, defend, and do become the position of the United States,” said Brian Thompson, former enforcement attorney and director of Environmental Protection Agency’s eDiscovery Division. “Your work has to hold up under judicial scrutiny in the moment and oversight for years after. That drives you to want predictable processes, defensible decisions, and a record that can stand on its own.”
Questions evaluating this readiness tend to surface early for people with government experience, often as a natural result of working in environments where decisions are part of a longer institutional record.
Lived experience shapes not only which questions get asked, but when they are asked and how much they’re weighed. When that perspective informs design, technology tends to fit the work more naturally—supporting how government legal teams actually operate over time, including the realities of review, handoffs, and work that extends well beyond the moment it’s completed.
FOIA, Investigations, and the Reality of Pressure
Certain workflows expose the gap between theory and reality more visible than others.
FOIA is a prime example.
“FOIA productions must meet statutory deadlines, and agencies may face significant fees, injunctive orders, or employee discipline for noncompliance,” said Chris Martin, a veteran federal e-discovery practitioner. “When volume spikes and deadlines stay fixed, minor inefficiencies quickly turn into material risk. Speed, repeatability, and auditability are mission critical.”
FOIA work tends to compress multiple challenges into a single process: fixed deadlines, unpredictable data volumes, and clear expectations for transparency. When requests surge, teams aren’t given additional time to adjust. Instead, they rely on processes that can absorb pressure without breaking down.
In those moments, legal data platforms go beyond moving documents from one stage to another; they play a major role in helping ensure that responses are accurate and consistent, decisions can be traced, and work can be repeated reliably (even when conditions aren’t ideal).
Investigative and enforcement work brings a different, but related, set of pressures. These matters often unfold over long timelines, involve multiple stakeholders, and require careful coordination and collaboration across teams.
At the same time, agencies are expected to modernize the tools they use to support that work.
“Agencies can’t pause their core work to adopt new systems,” said Michael von Isenger, whose background includes law enforcement and early federal legal technology initiatives. “Any modernization effort has to respect operational continuity, or it won’t last.”
That constraint shapes how new technology is evaluated. Tools need to integrate into existing practices, support handoffs between people and teams, and prove their reliability over time. Modernization that disrupts mission-critical work, even temporarily, can introduce risk rather than reduce it. Usefulness and optimization have to go hand in hand.
Taken together, these factors highlight why progress in government legal technology adoption often looks incremental. Change is by technical capability, yes, but also by trust, policy considerations, and the need to keep essential (and never-ending) work moving without interruption.
From Individual Experience to Institutional Learning
Individual experience matters most when a team makes room for it to inform decisions and have impact beyond a single project.
In government settings, that often means translating what practitioners have learned on the ground into shared practices: processes, standards, and systems that reflect how the work actually unfolds, and a team collaborates, over time.
“For software providers, the opportunity for real impact comes when practitioner insight is treated as a design input, not an anecdote,” said Casey Custardo, who has worked at the intersection of government, technology, and public-sector collaboration. “Concerns about transparency, defensibility, or AI explainability—these are foundational questions in government, so incorporating them into design and onboarding protocols is essential.”
When those insights are built in early, they help shape technology in ways that make it easier to adopt and sustain. They also help organizations avoid reliving the same lessons repeatedly, especially as teams change and institutional knowledge shifts.
This is particularly important as AI and automation play a larger role in legal workflows. These tools promise efficiency and scale, but in the public sector, their success will depend on more than capability. Questions about how decisions are made, how outputs can be explained, and how systems behave over time all influence whether adoption feels responsible and durable.
What This Means for the Legal Technology Industry
For the legal technology industry, building for government calls for a different posture than building solely for commercial environments.
Technical sophistication and compliance awareness matter, preparing for matters of a large and complex scale matter—but these strategies are not enough on their own. Government legal work is shaped by forces that aren’t always visible from the outside: long timelines, layered accountability, and the expectation that decisions will stand up to scrutiny well after they’re made.
Building for that reality requires listening closely to practitioners who have carried legal responsibility alongside public accountability. It also requires an openness to learning from workflows that don’t always optimize for speed, but prioritize consistency, defensibility, and clarity that endure.
In this context, success looks a little different. Outcomes still matter, but so does credibility—within agencies, across oversight bodies, and with the public. Technology earns its place not just by enabling work to move faster, but by helping organizations feel confident in how that work is done.
When all these considerations work in concert, you have a design philosophy grounded in context, experience, and trust.
Jocelyn Deshur is a director at Relativity, focused on helping the team and product better serve our public sector and corporate customers.
