It’s a Monday morning. Your company is served with a subpoena either demanding documents or that your CFO appear somewhere, sometime. You groan. You have to clock it in. You need to diary it for a response. You have to figure out who is to respond and what to say. You have to figure out where all it needs to go and who will respond. You know you will have to nag that person to get it done or get ready. All of this gobbles up a chunk of time and you are already behind on the project to get the CEO ready for the board meeting on Friday. Worse than that, it’s a royal pain in the ass.
When I come to conferences like CLOC’s Global Institute, I meet with lots of vendors. Much of the time it’s talk about stuff that’s not all that new, that isn’t much different from what others have done or, perhaps worse, really doesn’t do something that’s all that useful or alleviate a real pain point.
But every once in a while, I talk to a vendor who has looked at things that are really pains for its customers and takes that pain, and just that pain, on with a simple solution.
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Exterro’s Subpoena Manager
Exterro, a self-described unified data risk management software provider, appropriately announced its new Subpoena Manager on the Institute’s opening day. I say appropriately since the Institute is a legal ops conference and legal ops is the discipline that focuses on ways business principles can be applied to the practice of law and management of legal matters. Subpoena Manager brings just that focus to providing a better way to manage the subpoena workflows that are so painful. And it does it in a way that resonates on both a practical and a conceptual basis.
The Practical
It works by using agentic AI to automate the entire process, taking the human out of much of the loop. I talked with Exterro’s CMO, John Vincenzo, on a Monday afternoon before the conference kicked off in earnest. Vincenzo talks with a twinkle in his eye and has a real sense of humor. He even got my reference to the TV show, Hill Street Blues, in a recent post. But underneath that, he understands, steely-eyed, the needs of his customers and how to address them. He also gets tech, having come from a cybersecurity background.
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And here’s what he saw: “You have to upload the subpoena and scan it… then pull the information and tie it to your systems…. Between typing the information into word and then typing it into an Excel file and then converting to PDF, that just takes time. You’re typing it multiple times and then you’re having to put in different systems. Then you’re having to email each person involved in all different places. Then you have to go back and respond to each of them. It’s a lot of time.”
But he saw something else: “How many subpoenas do you get in the course of a week, a month, and a year? …What if we could get to a point where those manual steps of getting a subpoena in, triaging it, moving it around, contacting who needs to respond, could be made autonomous?”
Hence the birth of Subpoena Manager which uses automatic agentic workflows to reduce substantially things like intake and routing time. And takes away pain.
The Concept Matters
Things like Subpoena Manager are important not just from the practical side but from a conceptual side. We have written before about too much emphasis on coming up with AI for AI’s sake and not enough focus on what AI can do for customers. As Vincenzo put it, Subpoena Manager isn’t as sexy as some AI platforms that do less. But it gets at something customers really want: tools that reduce cost and make life easier whether they are GenAI or, now, agentic AI-based, or just plain automation tools. As Vincenzo put it, you have to show the savings, not just talk about efficiencies. Not to mention that it frees up people to do other, more valuable things.
But more than that, Vincenzo and Exterro see Subpoena Manager as just the first step in a journey to make other work flows more automated. Exterro calls the framework for doing this ARMOUR (Autonomous Risk Management, Orchestration and Unified Response; I know, it’s a little much). Exterro hopes it will serve as the vehicle for how litigation, internal investigation, and data governance tasks will be tackled in the future. Vincenzo believes by starting with an agentic process that is simple and can work effectively, customers will become used to and trust agentic AI for bigger and more complicated things.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
I like the Exterro approach. It demystifies and makes AI less scary when you talk more about the benefits that can be obtained. It’s not turning over everything to an agentic agent. It’s using an agent to do things it is good at and in some cases can do better than a human. Things like making sure the time for responding to a subpoena isn’t missed because the human was tired, stressed, or bored and just missed it.
The things Subpoena Manager does are primarily administrative functions at which AI does well. Yes, AI is good at bigger things like strategy, vision, and brainstorming. But sometimes vendors forget that what customers want is not the grandiose but something that works and helps them day to day.
It’s an important lesson: start with a pain point. Find a simple solution and talk solutions and savings instead of pie in the sky AI.
And those pain in the ass subpoenas? Let AI worry about them while your team focuses on what really matters.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.