Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Behind every great law firm is a team of professionals working hard to keep operations running smoothly. With the challenges of staying on top of complex billing requirements, managing time reports, and navigating constantly shifting industry trends, it’s easy to see why most firms write off millions in uncollected revenue each year.
To help your firm stay in the green, we’re introducing Studio A, a new podcast from Aderant.
Studio A is purpose-built to help you run your firm like a well-oiled machine. In each episode, legal business leaders and industry experts will share problems firms face and the revolutionary approaches and cutting-edge software they use to solve them. Because ultimately, in the business of legal firms and the ever-evolving world of technology, you can’t afford to fall behind.
Lisa Erickson (00:00):
We can produce all the technology we want and that's what we are doing in terms of, hey, this technology will help and allow you to become more of an AI native law firm, but the technology does not come without the people and the change involved in that.
Will Ayers (00:15):
Behind Every Great Law Firm are bold leaders and powerful solutions that help them run a better business. Welcome to Studio A, the home of Legal Tech Innovation. Welcome to Studio A, powered by Aderant, your podcast for the latest conversations shaping legal tech. I'm Will Ayers. Today we are talking agentic AI and its impact on law firms around the world and we have a special guest. She is no stranger to Studio A. We have Lisa Erickson, SVP of Product Management and AI at Aderant to talk to us about all the great things going on at Aderant as it pertains to AI and innovation. Lisa, how are you doing today?
Lisa Erickson (01:04):
I'm good. How are you?
Will Ayers (01:05):
I am doing very good. I love to have you on Studio A because I always learn new things, so I'm ready to learn and talk AI.
Lisa Erickson (01:14):
Let's talk.
Will Ayers (01:15):
Now, when you talk about work to cash today, because that's a huge topic in our industry, where does work to cash still feel most broken and what is Aderant doing to fix it?
Lisa Erickson (01:28):
It's not as connected throughout the entire work to cash cycle as it could be, but you can get pricing and proposals perfectly. You could get time capture perfectly. You could get your e-billing perfectly. But what needs to happen is those things become interconnected parts of the system so that when a bill comes back and something is appealed, you learn from that. Or when pricing proposals go in and a price is set and then certain rates are used during that particular matter, you then learn from that so that in the financial system, when you're then looking at things like, "Hey, should our rates go up? Should our rates go down? How are we performing?" We have access to that data and that information. So there's lots of other use cases, but it is about the connectedness of the system.
Will Ayers (02:18):
Now, Aderant has long been embedded in the financial backbone of law firms around the world. How are expectations shifting since clients are expecting advanced intelligence?
Lisa Erickson (02:30):
Instant access to data that drives their decisions, data that doesn't just drive a decision on one financial outcome with one client, but across the system, immediate access correlating that and then helping the firm drive everything from their financial strategy to their business strategy.
Will Ayers (02:48):
Now you are doing a lot of amazing work. You are hearing directly from law firms navigating these tools like iTimekeep Onyx. What are they asking for that goes beyond efficiency?
Lisa Erickson (03:02):
If you look at what they're asking for, it may help improve efficiency, productivity, profitability, all of that, but it comes back to automation. How do you make this easier for us and our firm users? Tactically speaking, for timekeeping, it is, "Hey, make this less burdensome. Get the timecards in without it being a manual proces. Make sure that time is compliant. I don't want to have to write rules for compliance and time over and over and have that be my day job. I want to worry about something else." So it really comes back to that automation.
Will Ayers (03:40):
I want to lean into that a little bit more. What are some common use cases for AI?
Lisa Erickson (03:46):
I will talk about the real ones that are in our applications or products today because I think that they're very impactful. Things like all the way in the front of doing a pricing proposal. So a prospect comes in to have AI be able to say, "What kind of matter is this before? What have we done before? How was that priced? Who did we put on it? " AI is going off finding that information using the historical data and helping you create that pricing proposal template with the data from previous matters on the fly. It is a productivity use, but it is based upon real data in the friend. Timekeeping. From manual time to AI timekeeping, this allows those timekeepers, attorneys who do not live every day to enter their time, to go from doing time to just reviewing time and to automate that. So those are a couple of tangible ones.
Will Ayers (04:49):
Now, how do clients react when workflows become more predictive? And can you get deeper and talk about how it impacts each position across the law firm?
Lisa Erickson (04:59):
I won't talk about every position because there's too many, but the outcome of becoming more predictive in a workflow is that those roles can then start to worry about other things. It frees up capacity for strategy and other work to go on in those roles. That can be something like an attorney worrying more about the client relationship, somebody in finance worrying about the next financial strategy, the CFO thinking about things like growth in the firm as compared to their financials today. People can start to worry about those things that really then drive the ability for the firm to execute, grow and serve their clients.
Will Ayers (05:44):
Love that. Love that. Now Aderant has launched the Aderant Agent Center and that's huge news across our industry. What is the Agent Center and what are the benefits for law firms?
Lisa Erickson (05:54):
Yeah. So it's one hub with agents for firm operations where folks can go and then use those different agents depending upon your role, the applications they're using. The value of that is you get insight into your data, your firm operations and then start to automate that. A couple of really good examples of that are the first three agents that are going into our early adopter program. That's a collections agent, an appeals agent and a talent evaluation agent. So take the talent evaluation agent from that you can understand the performance of a particular person, maybe a practicing attorney on matters and use that to help craft automatically an evaluation draft. So imagine that if you have several people who you have to do evals for, you're no longer doing that manually. And the data that is coming there to help craft that evaluation is actually coming from real performance on how we did with our clients.
Will Ayers (06:53):
Incredible, incredible. Now things are moving very fast in our industry and sometimes innovation breaks at the point of adoption. So what does it take to move from implementation to real behavior change in a firm? Because I think getting people on board and actually changing their behaviors, that's a tough task.
Lisa Erickson (07:16):
Yeah. So we can produce all the technology we want and that's what we are doing in terms of, hey, this technology will help advance your firm into the age of AI and allow you to become more of an AI native law firm. But the technology does not come without the people and the change involved in that. And I think it's really important when it is behavior change, what has to happen is you have to have buy-in not just from your leaders, but also within those teams and you need to have champions to pull that through. You need champions in the team that can help move that forward and start to use that technology, pilot it, show its proof points to the leadership and then start to roll that out. It's never a big bang.
Will Ayers (07:59):
From a client perspective, what builds trust faster automation that removes work or AI that augments decision making?
Lisa Erickson (08:07):
Augment's decision making. You're never going to get away from the nuanced thought process from a human being that truly understands the ins and outs of the firm. AI can help with that decision-making process, but paired with the person or the people that truly know the firm operations is what's going to make it impactful.
Will Ayers (08:28):
Shifting gears just a litle bit before we wrap, as firms rely more on cloud platforms and AI-driven workflows, what's changed for you and your team during this era of innovation?
Lisa Erickson (08:41):
So we're in product management. We are looking at what we build, why we build it, what the impact will be to the firm. And so thinking of that as our starting point, it changes a lot of how we do our job. What that means is the entire product team has been able to go from weeks and months to go from zero to one. So brand new idea, I'm ideating, I'm not sure what it would look like to now I have screens, I can get feedback and it's a prototype. That idea, the what and the why part, we're able to come up with a prototype, show it to a client, tweak it, and then work with R&D to start to deliver on it. What that means to our clients is that then they start to see that innovation faster and the value goes up over time.
Will Ayers (09:34):
Before we close, in this moment and looking ahead, what excites you the most about what you and your team at Aderant are building?
Lisa Erickson (09:43):
I think what we showed today, which is the transformation of how firms go from financial management to intelligent financial management, from work to cash to autonomous work to cash. The same thing with docketing with talent and having this platform that kind of meets them where they are in terms of how they use applications, improve their productivity, their efficiency, their speed, their accuracy, and free them up to do higher level work.
Will Ayers (10:13):
Thanks, Lisa. It's truly an honor and a pleasure to have you on Studio A. I hope we can have you on again. Once again, you have delivered and given us a lot of insight on all things innovation, so we look forward to having you back on soon.
Lisa Erickson (10:27):
Thank you, Will.
Will Ayers (10:29):
You've been listening to Studio A Power by Aderant, your podcast for the latest conversations shaping legal tech. You can check us out on all major streaming platforms and if you are on YouTube, be sure to subscribe to the Aderant YouTube channel. You can check out all of our episodes and more. You've been tuned in to Studio A, Powered by Adder. Thanks for listening to Studio A. For more from this episode, visit aderant.com. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss a beat and we'll see you next time in Studio A.