Technology

iManage Used To Be Where You Stored Your Files. Now It's Where Your Files Work For You.

The classic document management company has evolved into a cutting-edge knowledge management platform while you weren't looking.

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Last week, iManage hosted their annual ConnectLive conference in Brooklyn, providing customers and affiliates with a “State of the Company” address and offering robust training sessions for anyone interested. It’s been quite the journey for the document management stalwart, which escaped the tire fire known as Hewlett-Packard in 2015 and set a course toward rebuilding the brand for the workplace of the future. The company has doubled in size, acquired a cutting-edge artificial intelligence company, and engineered a turnaround in customer satisfaction that took them from ranked 13th in customer support to ranking first among software providers. At the core of this turnaround is a commitment to becoming less a document management system than a full-service tool to allow users to get the absolute most out of their documents.

As a young associate, I worked with iManage. Besides the annoyance of having to constantly remember to shut off the iManage document identification footer before filing, the system did a good job of keeping documents saved and searchable based on user input. Comparing that system to iManage’s Work 10 last week was — to employ one of my favorite phrases — the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it. When I had to find a model back in the day, I searched key categories and then hopped in and out of every appropriately tagged document looking for the ideal template. With the assistance of RAVN, the AI integrated into iManage, the system organizes search results by relevance by scouring the metadata and finding terms and clauses within the content. That’s exactly, as a user, what I’d dreamed of. Now it’s a reality.

The RAVN integration is, in many ways, a model of how artificial intelligence should be applied in the legal space. Peter Wallqvist, RAVN co-founder and current VP of Strategy at iManage, told me that he doesn’t even like using the word “AI” when discussing the product — in part because of the baggage “artificial intelligence” carries — preferring instead to focus on the platform’s practical uses. “The relevant thing isn’t ‘AI,’ but what it can actually do.”

And what it can do is expanding every day as RAVN — both the algorithm and its human handlers — learns from iManage’s users what they need. Wallqvist’s enthusiasm for the iManage integration evokes an analogy to SIRI:

Long-term, to get adoption, you need to get in front of a lot of people. You probably would never have downloaded SIRI, but because it came with your phone, you use it.

Likewise, iManage allows RAVN’s technology to get in front of its over 3,000 customers worldwide, and Wallqvist said this exposure is constantly allowing the team to discover new ways to leverage their technology to provide all users a better experience. One core function of the new iManage is a security feature that locks down documents by matter, preventing just anyone from accessing sensitive material. When I first heard about this feature at LegalTechNY, I casually mused that this would take potentially valuable models out of the firm’s collected work product reservoir. Apparently, iManage figured that out too and started working on a way to allow a user searching for material to see if there’s some locked down material that could help them and let them go to the gatekeepers of that material to seek one-off access to the document in question.

Dan Carmel, the Chief Marketing Officer at iManage, outlined another key aspect of the iManage philosophy: taking the product to the customer rather than the other way around. As the platform continues to develop, Carmel explained, it will keep striving to work the way a user would expect technology to work. “No one needs training to use Amazon or Google… lawyers want a thinner, lighter experience.” In other words, rather than building a program they need to teach to lawyers, iManage is striving to build a program that lawyers will already intuitively understand. Something that can be seamlessly accessed, ideally, from their work, home, or mobile while maintaining the utmost security with a minimal amount of “context switching” — the hot term for the annoying practice of closing out of one program to go to the next program to perform an otherwise simple task.

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Most of iManage’s users still haven’t converted to Work 10 — it takes a while for institutions to catch up to technology, after all — but with a platform that evolves from the experience of use, as more and more users convert over the coming year, next year’s ConnectLive might reveal a product that makes this week’s edition look quaint.

Earlier: Why the iManage Acquisition Of AI Company RAVN Is Something To Crow About
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