The NetDocuments user conference, Inspire 2024, took place in Atlanta this week. NetDocuments is a sophisticated cloud-based document management system. It offers an end-to-end platform for document and email organization and management. NetDocuments has over 7,000 customers globally.
Three things stood out from the Conference.
- NetDocuments is positioning itself to be a player in the AI, GenAI, and automation market by combining these tools with its document management services platform.
- NetDocuments is positioning itself as a one stop platform for all document management services for customers’ content.
- Most importantly, the tools NetDocuments is offering and will offer in the future provide a glimpse into just how disruptive GenAI will be in the legal marketplace. And how ill-prepared we are for it.
NetDocuments AI Strategy
It’s about bringing AI to your content. It’s not about bringing your content to AI.”
First, NetDocuments AI strategy. I had previously written about the advantages NetDocuments has. It has access to most, if not all, of a law firm’s internal documents through its cloud-based platform. If GenAi could be securely applied to that content, it could provide a ton of useful information and efficiencies. As immigration lawyer Greg Siskind put it in some promotional quotes shown on screen at the keynotes, “The success of NetDocuments approach…comes from leveraging AI that is powered by a firm’s own work product and insights.”
NetDocuments calls this intelligent DMS. As Josh Baxter, NetDocuments CEO and several NetDocuments speakers noted, “It’s not about bringing your content to your AI. It’s about bringing AI to your content. It’s not about bringing your content to AI.”
Steve Kearns, Search Manager at Elastic and Inspire speaker, said it this way, “GenAI tools and LLMs have lots of knowledge, but they don’t have knowledge about a law firm’s internal documents and content.” But if they could be applied to this content, lots of doors open up.
Or, as Baxter put it, “AI becomes the lens. It sits on top of your knowledge. It gives you really advanced insights and answers that are all at opposite sides of your content.”
Baxter also believes that bringing AI to internal content better meets security challenges since it’s not relying on someone else’s security protocols but on the firm’s own.
Multiple Services At One Stop
Secondly, NetDocuments is pitching itself as one-stop for the tools and services a firm might need to leverage its content both substantively and administratively. The NetDocuments tools will certainly enable things like case management, document summarization, and even brief writing. But they will also leverage content for adminstrative non billable tasks like billing and invoicing.
Baxter talked about the advantages of having a one stop for all these tasks. He described the problem facing many law firms in selecting vendors as follows: “What’s it like as you’re starting to stand up and want to deploy solutions to solve each individual problem? It’s not a scalable approach. It creates governance issues and security risks for your organization. It creates an environment where you’re dealing with multiple vendors, your costs start to pile up, the workflow and the experience for your end users get worse. It’s frustrating and inefficient.”
NetDocuments’ strategy is a good one. Law firms don’t like selecting vendors to begin with. They aren’t good at it. Firms have trouble trying to make different vendors’ products work across various tasks. It’s clunky and time-consuming. If NetDocuments can be a one-stop platform that reduces the need for multiple vendors, it’s on to something.
The NetDocuments Tools
There was a lot of talk about the tools NetDocuments has or will have to advance its strategy to maximize the use of GenAI on internal cloud-based content. It’s easy to get hung up on the technical aspects of these tools and how they work. Like other legal tech providers, it’s also easy to get lost in the names of all the different tools. Semantic Search, Legal AI Assistant, SetBuilder, PatternBuilder, PatternBuilder MAX, ndMAX portfolio, ndMAX Studio, ndMail. The number of products can make your head swim: it’s hard to keep track of what does what.
But what’s really important is what these tools do or will do and how that will impact the future. Here’s a sampling of what the NetDocuments do now or may do in the future:
- Enable natural language inquiries of documents in the NetDocuments Cloud
- Summarize multiple documents contained in files
- Answer interrogatories and creating objections
- Automate redlining of documents and changes
- Make suggested changes to documents based on what’s contained in other documents
- Analyze the claims and their strengths and weaknesses of the party based on pleadings
- Review invoices and bills to ensure compliance with clients’ demands and guidelines
- Create deposition summaries
- Prepare and manage emails
NetDocuments also promises greater collaboration with Microsoft Copilot to enhance the AI capabilities. The idea is that inquires can be made of CoPilot that, where necessary, will be answered by the documents contained within the NetDocuments platform in a secure way. Since most law firms use the Microsoft platforms, this collaboration will, according to NetDocuments representatives, enhance and enable user experiance.
Are Firms Focused on What’s Most Important?
Several speakers pointed out that these tools will make NetDocuments customers more efficient and will do things that associates and administrative staff now do. Granted, increased efficiency is a good thing. But wholesale efficiencies will be disruptive. Make no mistake, these tools will replace a lot of things humans now do. And a lot of people will get displaced.
We saw the same thing on a smaller scale with the advent of the word processor several years ago. In the 80s and even into the 90s, the common areas of a law firm were humming with activity. Most lawyers had their own secretary (yes, that’s what they were called back then), and some had two or even three. In addition to creating documents based on the lawyer’s dictation, these secretaries handled various administrative tasks like managing correspondence, scheduling meetings, and filing documents.
Everything about law firms may be about to change
But that role has evolved with technology. Technology has allowed firms to automate certain administrative tasks, reducing the number of secretaries needed. Today, administrative assistants have, by and large, replaced the traditional secretary. These assistants are responsible for more specialized functions like managing case files in legal software systems, e-filing documents with courts, and coordinating technology used by lawyers. Suffice it to say that the world of the traditional secretary was upended in unanticipated ways by technology and the word processor.
The disruption coming as a result of GenAI will be the likes of which we have never seen. It will range from the displacement of administrative assistants (who replaced secretaries), paralegals and even lawyers. There is speculation that GenAI will impact the fundamental business model of many law firms, the billable hour. The demise of the billable hour, in whole or even in part, will have a tremendous impact on law firms since the billable hour is not only a business model, it serves as the basis of law firm advancement, compensation, and culture.
Law firms, by and large, aren’t talking about all this disruption
But law firms, by and large, aren’t talking about all this disruption. Several speakers made the point that in the rush to adopt and implement GenAI tools, firms aren’t thinking about or planning for the fallout.
Nikki Shaver, CEO of LegalTech Hub, for example, noted this failure in a panel discussion on Preparing Law Firms for 2025 and Beyond, “People need to be talking about it now. And one of my concerns is, I think those conversations are not happening enough. We’ve already seen two instances this year of firms that have the leveraged AI in a particular practice area, seeing high adoption, and immediately seeing a corollary reduction in the number of billable hours without having those discussions upfront, meaning there was an critical impact on the bottom line.”
Everything about law firms may be about to change. How will the roles of legal professionals change and evolve? What will happen to all those people performing functions that GenAI will replace? How will firms deal with compensation, advancement, and culture when value is no longer defined by time but more by value?
The biggest takeaway from Inspire 2024: there’s a complete disruption to law firms on the horizon. While firms may be talking about and even using GenAI, most aren’t even talking about what’s important: how people, processes, and legal work will be fundamentally changed.
P.S. A Word About LegalTech Conferences
Of late, vendor conferences have become much more of experience than user training. Famous actors giving keynotes, big name entertainers, biger and more extravagant parties. The NetDocuments event was a little more low key. It seemed to focus more on NetDocuments’ products and less on entertainment. Make no mistake, attendees (and writers) like to be entertained. But I wonder if we are looking at the entertainment bar being constantly raised at the expense of product focus. Time will tell.