iManage on r/legaltech

a person after my own heart! The answer might vary dependent on whether you are customer trying to leverage the APIs or a third party vendor. If a third party vendor you can join our tech partner programme here are details - To become a partner:

If someone wants to become a partner they can use our website form. Once they fill in the form, we qualify and the partner team will contact them: https://imanage.com/resources/partners/become-a-partner/

If you are a customer, first you need to regsier your custom app - details here - https://docs.imanage.com/cloud/cc-help/en-US/Adding_an_application.html, the APIs documentation is available via our support site help.imanage.com

Noted, this is something we are reviewing. I think with the advent of tooling like Claude Code its important that LLMs have knowledge of the codebase to be able to successfully navigate.

Most AI use cases start with a set of documents that the user wants to use as context for questions, analysis or extraction. For that reason we are investing heavily in improving the search, tagging and retrieval experience in iManage. iManage has ways to incorporate other structured data so that you can combine document search with attributes that are in financial or practice management systems. This capability is available in our insight+ product. Using this capability you could for example find a document based on the attributes of the matter like governing law, industry, profitability etc.

Lastly we have hundreds of software applications that complement iManage. That is because a variety of legal workflows need access to documents. Lately we have seen a huge interest in AI applications that need access. We have an extensive API and partner ecosystem to facilitate building integrations and complementary solutions,

Reducing hallucinations is a fundamental challenge that we need to overcome as an industry to drive pervasive usage of AI technology. We believe that grounding AI tasks in well defined context windows and providing easy/fast ways to validate the response from AI is important. A lawyer said to me last year, getting it right is far more important than doing it fast.

If i am honest i dont see a lot of skeptical CIOs at all, i see many who know there is a load of opportunity but arent always clear as to how to do that. Also there is a very strong presence of FOMO across the market. Reminds me of a quote "Comparison is the thief of joy", and we could all do with reminding ourselves of that a 100 times a day. I think to answer your questions on adoption and fears of security. I think they are two distinct areas of focus, a partner needs to trust in the security of the platform. iManage has a long history of understanding and meeting some of the most complex security requirements of any platform and so we know what needs to be done when we build our products, we hope that the iManage brand goes a long way to providing trust in how the data is managed. We know that we need to provide evidential certainty in everything we do, this is in our DNA

It is the reality of the tech world, we have navigated this in the past in the spirit of coopetition. We also have third party developers that have built integration between iManage and competing products as a way to provide solutions to customers,

We are open to the right acquisitions if they add value to the end user experience. We will not do acquisitions that are financial engineering. We also have invested significantly in scaling our organic development. Our org has grown 8x in the last 10 years most of those new hires are engineers or customer success

confidentiality and security is at the core of everything we do, the work we have been doing with our tech partnes such as Harvey and Legora has this at its core. Also MCP again is incredibly valuable because it maintains the data where it is trusted and managed, you get access to the AI but without haveing to manage copies of the data in different stores. The iManage platform has exstensive knowledge capabilites today, our iManage Insight+ capability enables customers to build managed collections of knowledge and surface them up into an advaned knoweldge interface with the ability to ask natural language questions of the managed collections, this also extends these collections into Copilot experiences to support things like drafting in Word, or email drafting in Outlook.

We have a team that is focused on this very problem. I would recommend you take a look at what we are doing with Insight+ to help curate the gold standard documents and maintain those collections over time.

Not being close enough to the end user experience. See my response to hiring more lawyers in product roles above

I am truly excited about MCP and what it enables. I know some in the market write it off as a "fancy API" , but its more than that to me. Its the ability to bridge this gap between the reasoning capabiities of the LLM and the systems of record. It lowers the bar to integrate and enables true field level workflows to be built by the people who know best, the lawyers. As we enter the Agent Builder phase of the adoption of AI i believe MCP is well place to provide huge freedom of choice to the market. I think as always the rest of the legal tech sector needs to catch-up and develop their MCP services. On a personal note, Claude Code is blowing my mind, i have lost way too much sleep in recent months as it enables me to turn an idea into a fully functioning prototype in hours, rather than weeks.

I am most excited about the work we are doing to support MCP, it will enable our customers to leverage their data with any AI orchestrator.

Also excited about the work we have been doing to tag documents in an automated fashion. We believe it helps end users develop relevant context windows for the AI task at hand

Yes, our MCP services for iManage Work are currently in Early Access Programme. This isnt just the search and rettrieve API is extends to other actions such as Move, Copy, Folder Create etc. We will have to tread carefully as customers need to be able to control the agent so that it doesnt go rogue and perform destructive actions i.e delete etc, and so we are developing best practices to help guide customers with that. We are evaluating all our APIs including Task Management (Tracker), Knowledge (Insight+), Ethical Wall Management (Security Policy Manager) etc for applicability to be surfaced through MCP. Our iManage AI APIs, MCP services are also in the mix to be opened up. We are just launching our Ask iManage Power Automate connector as an aside as its pivotal to open up the ecosystem as much as we can, always with data safety in mind.

We will invest on both fronts:

a. Make it easier for a end user to securely access the right documents from a third party AI application. We see our MCP services to be make this process significantly easier. We are also investing in improving the ability to tag documents and make search more effective.

b. We will continue to provide native AI experiences for end users to apply AI skills to one or more documents right from the Work 10 UI. We believe that doing so will enable the pervasive use of AI for a variety of end user workflows.

We feel confident that the security, governance, reliability and performance are not easy problems to solve at the scale this industry demands and the rational thing to do is to use the API's to add value. However the world is not always rational (:-

We have enabled it for Insight+ customers, and for approved partners and its in active use. We are keen to understand the use cases customers and partners have for it so we can make sure it delivers to their needs, please reach out to me directly to learn more.

We have prioritized security, performance, scale, maintainability for the types of workloads we manage. You will see the pace of innovation pick up for some of our newer applications, for example we had 4 significant releases for Ask iManage last year each based on direct feedback from end users using the application.

I think there’s a happy middle ground -where we partner with the AI natives and provide that secure, governed foundation our customers are asking for

I am surprised, our newer cloud application is significantly faster than the older generation. Can you DM me and I will have someone in our support team take a look. There are several factors that go into performance on your desktop and we should be able to diagnose the issue.

Hey u/WilliamFalke thank you for the praise! If someone wants to become a partner they can use our website form. Once they fill in the form, we qualify and the partner team will contact them: https://imanage.com/resources/partners/become-a-partner/

Hi, yes you can. We ask that this go through our tech partner programmes so that we can best support the integration in terms of support and security etc. You can signup to become a partner through our website form. Once they fill in the form, we qualify and the partner team will contact them: https://imanage.com/resources/partners/become-a-partner/ . Note, while we have scaled the team behind this, we have seen unprecedented submission requests in the last 12 months. By our own calculations we have witnessed over 700+ Legal Tech AI startups have appeared in the last 2 years, and many need to integrate to the data, we only foresee these numbers growing with the barriers to entry to build an app dropping every day.

Hey, we are all looking over our shoulders with Claude Code! i am a big user of Claude Code, although not yet for production-quality code. We use it for fast prototyping, internal single-use apps, etc. We definitely see that we are evolving to a much more agile development cycle, i think we are still some time of true enterprise SaaS being replaced with homegrown/open source developments. We are interestingly navigating back to a time (90's/Early Noughties) where custom code was prevalent in most organisations, and they have spent 20 years unhooking these customisations as while they delivered for mid-term gains, they did saddle the org in the long term with a lot of tech debt. To me, the questions still remain on support, maintenance, scale, performance, distribution and security. Claude Code doesn't magically fix these issues. Building the first version is now trivial. Building version 10 that scales to 3,000 concurrent users across 40 countries with SOC 2 compliance? That's still hard.

Hi, thank you for the honest feedback. We would be interested in getting more feedback from yourself on this. I checked our ideas portal and cant see anything around the .com routing to .co.uk etc. Would you be open to a discovery call with one of our PMs? you can contact me direct if so.

This is a real tension and you're right to be thinking about it. If you've invested in Copilot, users will naturally want to use it - that's the whole point of the investment.

Here's how I'd think about it: both tools have legitimate value, they're just solving different problems.

If you've gone all-in on Microsoft and Copilot, you get seamless AI integration across all your files and a consistent UX everywhere. That's genuinely valuable. But iManage gives you matter-based context, client/matter intelligence, ethical walls, privilege protection, and structure that understands legal work. OneDrive knows your file is called "motion_v3_final_FINAL.docx" - iManage knows it's the third draft in Smith v. Jones, who worked on it, what matter it's against, and what related documents exist.

The organizations doing this well don't make it either/or. OneDrive for personal/internal work, iManage for client work. Different tools, different purposes. Some overlap is inevitable and that's fine.

The key is making sure your users understand what they're getting from each system and when to use which one. If they're just seeing iManage as a storage obligation rather than a capability multiplier, that's a training and positioning issue, not a technology issue.

he API is open and as a policy we dont block anyone, customers and technologoy partners can both leverage it today and do at scale. We do certify to Tech Partners to ensure that platform best practices are respected. In cloud in partoicular we take extra precautions to protect the performance of the platform and to ensure security of our customers data. Its essential to us that customer have the access to their data and to the tools they need to best leverage that data, whether they be provided by us or a third party. Both IntApp and DeepJudge are tech partners and some the bigegst users of our APIs.