1 00:00:02,921 --> 00:00:05,020 Katrina Dittmer, how are you today? 2 00:00:05,548 --> 00:00:06,380 Great, thanks. 3 00:00:06,380 --> 00:00:07,499 How are you? 4 00:00:07,587 --> 00:00:14,810 I am good and looking forward to our conversation today, which is a long time coming. 5 00:00:15,650 --> 00:00:26,214 You and I worked on a chapter of a book recently on this topic that we're going to talk about today, which is legal collaboration. 6 00:00:26,615 --> 00:00:37,319 And yeah, we share a lot of philosophies on this and I think there's going to be a good conversation. 7 00:00:37,971 --> 00:00:41,995 But before we jump in, let's get you introduced for those that don't know you. 8 00:00:41,995 --> 00:00:43,456 You've been around for a long time. 9 00:00:43,456 --> 00:00:51,383 So like me, in fact, I season vets, I'm trying to think when you and I met, I think it was at a SharePoint symposium. 10 00:00:51,864 --> 00:00:53,771 I know it was more than 10 years ago. 11 00:00:53,771 --> 00:00:56,069 I don't know if it was quite 15. 12 00:00:56,456 --> 00:01:18,343 I it might have been 2013 or 14, ah only because I remember it was after like the first, the Baker and Daniels and Fagry and Benson merger, just based on who I was there with. 13 00:01:18,343 --> 00:01:19,803 Yeah, I remember. 14 00:01:19,803 --> 00:01:21,187 I remember who you were there with. 15 00:01:21,187 --> 00:01:23,329 You guys talked about InfoPath. 16 00:01:24,451 --> 00:01:27,228 Yeah, I remember. 17 00:01:27,228 --> 00:01:29,891 Without buying a big third party tool. 18 00:01:30,733 --> 00:01:31,312 Yeah. 19 00:01:31,312 --> 00:01:37,576 um So you started your legal tech career, looks like, in Lit Support. 20 00:01:37,736 --> 00:01:47,822 You were in KM &I roles at Fagry for many years, and now you're at Evershed's. 21 00:01:48,083 --> 00:01:48,942 So. 22 00:01:48,942 --> 00:01:51,262 I have to say Evershed Sutherland. 23 00:01:51,262 --> 00:01:53,195 We got to have the whole name. 24 00:01:53,195 --> 00:02:00,140 And I joined the US side of the firm a little over two years ago. 25 00:02:00,572 --> 00:02:00,973 Okay. 26 00:02:00,973 --> 00:02:02,206 You guys are clients now. 27 00:02:02,206 --> 00:02:05,534 need to, I need to thank you for correcting me. 28 00:02:05,534 --> 00:02:07,268 ever said, ever shed Sutherland. 29 00:02:07,268 --> 00:02:09,522 need to say it right. 30 00:02:10,013 --> 00:02:16,587 You know, these firms that are born uh of combinations, we have to use that right word, right? 31 00:02:16,587 --> 00:02:17,989 oh 32 00:02:19,467 --> 00:02:20,860 The names matter. 33 00:02:22,248 --> 00:02:22,561 Yeah. 34 00:02:22,561 --> 00:02:23,171 get it. 35 00:02:23,171 --> 00:02:25,752 You know, and I just, I just realized something. 36 00:02:25,752 --> 00:02:31,955 You, you and I did a webinar way back in the day with Ilta. 37 00:02:32,050 --> 00:02:33,856 I think we were talking about, do you remember this? 38 00:02:33,856 --> 00:02:38,737 um Yeah. 39 00:02:39,498 --> 00:02:41,109 It's still out on YouTube somewhere. 40 00:02:41,109 --> 00:02:42,959 I saw it not too long ago. 41 00:02:43,860 --> 00:02:44,360 Yeah. 42 00:02:44,360 --> 00:02:49,042 um A little different than today. 43 00:02:49,069 --> 00:02:49,764 Sure. 44 00:02:49,764 --> 00:02:54,676 And so was my, you know, I haven't had hair in a long time, but my beard had more color. 45 00:02:54,676 --> 00:03:02,768 Um, yeah, that was a really long time ago, but it's good to, um, do this with you again. 46 00:03:02,768 --> 00:03:16,022 And today we're going to talk about legal collaboration and you have a background in this and, um, you guys have been, your firm has been, um, 47 00:03:16,062 --> 00:03:21,565 kind enough to participate with us in our build out of our solution. 48 00:03:23,326 --> 00:03:27,748 and the reason our motivation for charging down this path. 49 00:03:27,768 --> 00:03:30,220 So we started our journey as Acrowire. 50 00:03:30,220 --> 00:03:46,045 built a lot of bespoke extranet solutions and we help firms like manage the solutions that they already had stood up and the product, the, um, the market was right for a different 51 00:03:46,045 --> 00:03:48,337 solution and alternative out there. 52 00:03:48,337 --> 00:03:56,742 We all know that Haikyuu dominates the extranet market and there's just not been a lot of choice in the marketplace that's legal specific. 53 00:03:56,742 --> 00:04:12,112 um And it seems to me that, and I don't know if you disagree, if I had to guess, I think you would, but my take is that there hasn't been a ton of innovation in this legal 54 00:04:12,112 --> 00:04:14,393 collaboration space in quite a while. 55 00:04:14,393 --> 00:04:15,714 You know, the two, 56 00:04:15,966 --> 00:04:21,754 primary vendors, both internal facing um collaboration, i.e. 57 00:04:21,754 --> 00:04:26,502 Intranet and external facing Extranet, got bought by much bigger companies many years ago. 58 00:04:26,502 --> 00:04:28,574 And it just doesn't seem like there's been a lot of innovation. 59 00:04:28,574 --> 00:04:30,066 Is that your take as well? 60 00:04:30,742 --> 00:04:31,494 Um. 61 00:04:33,215 --> 00:04:35,247 agree-ish. 62 00:04:35,247 --> 00:04:51,900 mean, I see some of the firms and even some of the sites that have been developed with, am I allowed to use the incumbent name, with Haikyuu, right? 63 00:04:51,900 --> 00:04:55,573 That are really progressive. 64 00:04:55,573 --> 00:04:59,646 They push the platform quite a lot. 65 00:05:01,028 --> 00:05:02,637 From my vantage 66 00:05:02,637 --> 00:05:13,803 point, I would prefer to build to grow capabilities with tools that we already own and are familiar with. 67 00:05:14,484 --> 00:05:17,375 And that's Microsoft, right? 68 00:05:17,375 --> 00:05:32,032 And I think Haikyuu made a ton of sense when we were fighting with SharePoint online and every time there was a platform uh upgrade needed, it was a behemoth. 69 00:05:32,032 --> 00:05:43,727 of a project because you're standing up all new hardware and migrating content and all of those things for not much functionality improvement. 70 00:05:43,727 --> 00:05:56,583 So high Q is fabulous, you know, as an alternative, but fast forward to SharePoint online and you know, Microsoft's cloud journey and investment. 71 00:05:56,583 --> 00:05:59,173 And I think we're in a bit different place. 72 00:05:59,199 --> 00:06:04,939 Yeah, the on-prem days were rough, especially when it came to sharing externally. 73 00:06:04,939 --> 00:06:13,459 You used to have to like stand up a DMZ and put a web front end out there at a minimum. 74 00:06:13,459 --> 00:06:19,219 And you had to muddy up your Active Directory infrastructure with external users. 75 00:06:19,219 --> 00:06:20,699 And it was just messy. 76 00:06:21,099 --> 00:06:30,409 Well, candidly, the UI, the user experience at that time for SharePoint. 77 00:06:31,989 --> 00:06:33,534 Not spectacular. 78 00:06:34,568 --> 00:06:36,600 Yeah, that's that's saying it kindly. 79 00:06:36,600 --> 00:06:40,553 um It's gotten a lot better and SharePoint online. 80 00:06:40,553 --> 00:06:50,692 You Microsoft is really doubled down on M365 and SharePoint online is now is now a very mature platform. 81 00:06:50,692 --> 00:07:01,841 We started out in the early days so we back when we were consultants and you know trying to build the business we said yes to things we should have never said yes to, but you know 82 00:07:01,841 --> 00:07:03,646 how it is when you're trying to like. 83 00:07:03,646 --> 00:07:04,666 earn a dollar. 84 00:07:04,666 --> 00:07:07,746 It's like, yeah, I can do that and figure it out later. 85 00:07:07,746 --> 00:07:11,226 Um, I'm glad those days are behind us because that was painful. 86 00:07:11,226 --> 00:07:15,926 Um, but we started doing, it was, do you remember BPOS? 87 00:07:16,386 --> 00:07:20,025 The that's, that was the predecessor to Microsoft 365. 88 00:07:20,025 --> 00:07:25,526 It was called business productivity online suite BPOS for short. 89 00:07:26,123 --> 00:07:34,113 maybe I had heard of that second reference, but I had not heard of it as the acronym that does not roll off your tongue. 90 00:07:34,113 --> 00:07:35,094 No. 91 00:07:35,094 --> 00:07:40,000 And there was nothing that really made sense in that world. 92 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:47,610 They basically took the on-prem products and tried to make a multi-tenant and hosted, and it was really clumsy and it was really tough. 93 00:07:47,610 --> 00:07:48,671 And we moved. 94 00:07:48,671 --> 00:07:49,993 So the first big... 95 00:07:49,993 --> 00:07:51,223 uh 96 00:07:51,223 --> 00:07:53,247 Sounds about as good as Clippy. 97 00:07:53,247 --> 00:07:54,847 Yeah, it was. 98 00:07:54,847 --> 00:07:56,027 It was a lot like Clippy. 99 00:07:56,027 --> 00:07:59,747 Microsoft's had a lot of those whiffs over the years. 100 00:08:00,347 --> 00:08:13,567 But the first viable iteration of Office 365, as it was called back then, now it's just Microsoft 365, was something called Wave 14. 101 00:08:13,647 --> 00:08:17,627 And that happened in like maybe 2012, maybe 2013. 102 00:08:17,747 --> 00:08:19,267 And we moved a massive client. 103 00:08:19,267 --> 00:08:22,107 We moved Sunoco, the oil and gas company. 104 00:08:22,376 --> 00:08:24,217 that's owned by Energy Transfer Partners. 105 00:08:24,217 --> 00:08:25,167 It's like Fortune 20. 106 00:08:25,167 --> 00:08:31,630 They're a massive company and they picked us to help them move because we had some depth. 107 00:08:31,790 --> 00:08:34,831 And uh man, it was painful. 108 00:08:36,372 --> 00:08:41,494 Even as far as things had progressed with Wave 14, it was still really tough. 109 00:08:41,494 --> 00:08:49,258 And today it's a lot easier and it feels like law firms maximizing their investment in M365. 110 00:08:49,842 --> 00:09:04,832 just makes a lot of sense from skillset perspective, from consistency perspective, from um just limiting the number of vendors and licensing and all of that sort of stuff. 111 00:09:04,832 --> 00:09:08,844 It just seems to make a lot of sense to think about that path. 112 00:09:10,007 --> 00:09:25,117 think there's another part to it that is so many corporate clients sit on top of the M365, like that's the ecosystem they work in. 113 00:09:25,510 --> 00:09:27,151 They're comfortable with it. 114 00:09:28,373 --> 00:09:28,733 Right? 115 00:09:28,733 --> 00:09:38,271 It's another, maybe the branding is a little bit different, but in terms of base functionality, it's what they're used to. 116 00:09:38,323 --> 00:09:39,183 Yeah. 117 00:09:39,343 --> 00:09:45,786 Well, and you know, back to the thinking about the incumbents in the intranet, extranet space that are legal specific. 118 00:09:45,786 --> 00:09:53,649 Um, you know, they were bought by much bigger companies and you know, like focus changes over time. 119 00:09:53,649 --> 00:10:01,902 You know, there's a lot of focus on, there's a lot of focus on AI on the practice management side, which is where Handshake went. 120 00:10:01,902 --> 00:10:04,052 That was the incumbent in the space. 121 00:10:04,173 --> 00:10:07,966 You know, their practice management is still largely on-prem. 122 00:10:07,966 --> 00:10:10,748 So they're very focused, it seems like, moving to the cloud. 123 00:10:10,748 --> 00:10:14,071 And they've got their own AI ambitions as well. 124 00:10:14,071 --> 00:10:24,160 um But yeah, as focus changes, so sometimes does the investment. 125 00:10:24,160 --> 00:10:31,746 when something becomes misaligned with a strategic direction, it doesn't always keep up. 126 00:10:34,455 --> 00:10:35,216 Well, for sure. 127 00:10:35,216 --> 00:10:54,103 And I think when you start considering other capabilities, other features that you want to be able to present to your clients through an extranet, staying in that platform where 128 00:10:54,103 --> 00:11:01,529 your data lives, and where you're comfortable doing development, doing integration. 129 00:11:02,579 --> 00:11:04,653 It just makes sense. 130 00:11:07,959 --> 00:11:12,463 I can't imagine that, you know, it's not a risky bet, right? 131 00:11:12,463 --> 00:11:19,278 I mean, it's where you're spending most of your time and money anyway. 132 00:11:19,278 --> 00:11:29,416 And when I think about, you mentioned AI, when I think about the maturity of like co-pilot studio and we're still in early, early days, right? 133 00:11:29,416 --> 00:11:31,168 I mean, what is this phrase? 134 00:11:31,168 --> 00:11:35,631 This is the worst it's ever gonna be, right? 135 00:11:39,615 --> 00:11:55,455 Well, and you know, another, I think interesting benefit to deploying your solutions in M 365 is it's all the ancillary capabilities that Microsoft brings to the table. 136 00:11:55,455 --> 00:12:09,095 You know, Azure open AI, Azure AI search, power automate, power BI, power apps, like all of that is now accessible when you deploy within 137 00:12:09,500 --> 00:12:12,704 that M365 boundary. 138 00:12:15,821 --> 00:12:22,481 even, I mean, even just some of the core M365 elements, I mean, they used to be called SharePoint lists. 139 00:12:22,481 --> 00:12:38,721 Right now they're just Microsoft lists and I can't keep track of all of the name changes, frankly, but all of those other elements that are just available to help you with basic 140 00:12:38,721 --> 00:12:43,913 information that might be valuable, relevant in 141 00:12:43,913 --> 00:12:48,586 the information that you share and manage with and for your clients. 142 00:12:50,241 --> 00:13:03,301 You know, even before you get to the really cool stuff that you just like all the power platform stuff, I mean, you don't even have to necessarily be in that level, although it's 143 00:13:03,301 --> 00:13:04,663 there and that's great. 144 00:13:04,663 --> 00:13:06,725 uh 145 00:13:10,913 --> 00:13:16,906 But yeah, I just think far more Lego blocks available to you. 146 00:13:16,924 --> 00:13:18,915 Yeah, for sure. 147 00:13:18,915 --> 00:13:30,684 And you can also kind of start to center around a common authentication mechanism like, Entra, which is a beast. 148 00:13:30,684 --> 00:13:34,997 Let's not, let's not, let's be clear on that. 149 00:13:34,997 --> 00:13:45,884 It is a beast, but you know, today you have all these SSO, you know, single sign-on frameworks that are out there that create additional complexity. 150 00:13:46,076 --> 00:13:53,008 So centering your strategy in around a common authentication framework, think also makes a lot of sense. 151 00:13:53,716 --> 00:14:04,475 It does, and obviously we are still very early in our shift over to the Microsoft environment for extranets. 152 00:14:04,475 --> 00:14:12,021 But yes, I'm very much looking forward to that being available for our guests. 153 00:14:12,466 --> 00:14:13,326 Yeah. 154 00:14:13,646 --> 00:14:18,308 So our, know, when we started InfoDash, we had a vision. 155 00:14:18,308 --> 00:14:28,711 It took us longer to get here than I thought we would, but for a good reason, because we got so damn busy on the internet side because our timing was really good, right? 156 00:14:28,711 --> 00:14:31,151 Like all these big firms were moving to the clouds. 157 00:14:31,151 --> 00:14:40,222 So we, we started InfoDash in 2022 and kind of started turning off our legacy Acrowire customers. 158 00:14:40,222 --> 00:14:45,162 So we'd either migrate them to the platform or just part ways. 159 00:14:45,162 --> 00:14:48,542 And we had to do that obviously in an orderly fashion. 160 00:14:48,542 --> 00:14:55,122 So that took some time, but 2022 was really, again, I'd rather be lucky than good. 161 00:14:55,122 --> 00:15:02,202 And we were very lucky in that our timing lined up perfectly with Big Law's real push to M365. 162 00:15:02,202 --> 00:15:05,282 Like some firms had moved messaging already, right? 163 00:15:05,282 --> 00:15:07,278 That's usually, that's always the first step. 164 00:15:07,278 --> 00:15:10,240 is move email because it just makes so much sense. 165 00:15:10,240 --> 00:15:20,088 But then those ancillary M 365 workloads like, like SharePoint, those really started to happen in earnest in 2022 and they're still underway. 166 00:15:20,088 --> 00:15:30,505 I'd say if I had to guess, I would say less than half the AMLaw is in SharePoint online in earnest, right? 167 00:15:30,505 --> 00:15:34,856 They may have a couple of sites, they're doing some project like project management stuff. 168 00:15:34,856 --> 00:15:44,972 But I still think that less than half are there, full blown, fully committed, turn off the lights on prem. 169 00:15:44,972 --> 00:15:46,353 I don't know. 170 00:15:46,353 --> 00:15:47,984 Does that sound right to you? 171 00:15:50,037 --> 00:15:53,695 a great sense of the broader market. 172 00:15:55,340 --> 00:16:09,300 will say when I was pondering, do I make this shift over to Evershed Sutherland, the fact that they had been in the Microsoft, like in the cloud environment already for several 173 00:16:09,300 --> 00:16:10,321 years. 174 00:16:12,329 --> 00:16:27,915 meant to me that I likely had fewer barriers, right, in terms of how I thought about some of the challenges I would face and the way I would approach solving them. 175 00:16:29,687 --> 00:16:35,905 So I feel badly, I guess, for firms that aren't there yet. 176 00:16:35,905 --> 00:16:42,173 I think their ability to innovate is perhaps a bit handcuffed in that. 177 00:16:42,173 --> 00:16:44,818 uh 178 00:16:44,818 --> 00:16:51,298 is, I talk to a lot of folks through, I go to a ton of conferences hosting on this podcast. 179 00:16:51,298 --> 00:16:53,578 We're always engaging with new firms. 180 00:16:53,578 --> 00:16:55,738 We've done business with 110, over 110. 181 00:16:55,738 --> 00:16:59,158 I stopped counting at 110 and AmLaw firms. 182 00:16:59,198 --> 00:17:04,558 Now that number is very slightly inflated because I went back when we were still counting. 183 00:17:04,558 --> 00:17:09,758 Actually, it's probably evened out now because we stopped counting, but like Fagry, 184 00:17:09,970 --> 00:17:13,682 Baker Daniels and Drinker Biddle were both AmLaw clients independently. 185 00:17:13,682 --> 00:17:17,213 Then they merged to become in their clients again as Fagry Drinker. 186 00:17:17,213 --> 00:17:36,571 um But through all of that perspective that I've been able to get access to, it feels like there are going to be the haves and the have nots in this like post-gen AI world because 187 00:17:36,571 --> 00:17:39,043 I, it seems like there's 188 00:17:39,043 --> 00:17:40,584 firms fall into one of two camps. 189 00:17:40,584 --> 00:17:48,207 They're either really doubling down and investing in this and moving forward or it's deer in the headlights. 190 00:17:48,207 --> 00:17:49,547 Like they don't know what to do. 191 00:17:49,547 --> 00:17:50,788 They're overwhelmed. 192 00:17:50,788 --> 00:18:04,173 um They've got a couple of POCs going with maybe some co-pilot pushed out, but not doing anything on the practice side at all because they can't clearly articulate ROI. 193 00:18:04,173 --> 00:18:07,964 And it seems like, those firms are going to have a really hard time 194 00:18:08,094 --> 00:18:19,674 when clients start demanding this tech enabled legal service delivery model and they're still figuring out their strategy. 195 00:18:19,674 --> 00:18:20,986 I don't know. 196 00:18:20,986 --> 00:18:22,598 That's what it feels like to me. 197 00:18:23,233 --> 00:18:32,388 think there, I mean, especially where AI is concerned, I think we're all still trying to figure out the ROI, right? 198 00:18:32,388 --> 00:18:40,182 You're investing a lot dollars wise, perhaps time wise, hopefully for sure. 199 00:18:40,633 --> 00:18:49,157 But if you don't, you know, kind of take an R and D-esque mindset, right? 200 00:18:49,157 --> 00:18:52,589 That you're going to have some misses. 201 00:18:53,493 --> 00:18:56,555 Right, but you've got to have some, you'll find some hits, right? 202 00:18:56,555 --> 00:19:09,645 You'll have, and then you figure out as it matures, as it gets better than today, you're ready to have that ROI talk and really. 203 00:19:12,513 --> 00:19:25,566 have an opportunity to say, we're differentiating this way or we're ahead of market or whatever that is, but to say, I don't know, I'm gonna wait, I think that's a risky bet. 204 00:19:25,566 --> 00:19:26,426 Totally. 205 00:19:26,426 --> 00:19:27,867 completely agree. 206 00:19:27,867 --> 00:19:33,328 And yeah, and you know, and like I beat this drum a lot and it's not because I'm trying to be critical. 207 00:19:33,448 --> 00:19:43,571 It's because we are, our livelihood is tied to the law firm market and I really want to see firms push forward and be successful with this. 208 00:19:43,571 --> 00:19:52,574 So yeah, I hope I'm not being taken as a, um, a critic or a skeptic, but I just see 209 00:19:52,947 --> 00:20:07,228 the writing on the wall and it feels like there's going to be a shift in market share from firms that have, like you said, invested in the R &D and worried less about ROI today, but 210 00:20:07,228 --> 00:20:09,400 looking at the future, like we have to learn. 211 00:20:09,400 --> 00:20:13,343 This is a learning exercise for us and we're going to figure it out. 212 00:20:13,343 --> 00:20:17,626 And when we do, there'll be gold at the end of the rainbow. 213 00:20:17,626 --> 00:20:22,800 But the folks that wait, I'm concerned that the market will have changed. 214 00:20:22,854 --> 00:20:29,361 in a way that they can't accommodate and deliver services the way the market needs because they're so far behind. 215 00:20:29,361 --> 00:20:30,822 That's what it feels like. 216 00:20:30,911 --> 00:20:31,781 I agree. 217 00:20:31,781 --> 00:20:37,128 I will talk about it some as like a crawl, walk, run, right? 218 00:20:37,128 --> 00:20:40,422 And we're still crawling, likely, right? 219 00:20:40,422 --> 00:20:48,801 Getting to walking, but I mean, you can't start running without the other steps. 220 00:20:48,914 --> 00:20:49,144 Right. 221 00:20:49,144 --> 00:20:51,576 Yeah, that's a very good point. 222 00:20:51,836 --> 00:21:03,845 Well, one of the benefits that I think is a first time thing in the legal world, in the internet action art world is we're bringing both internet and extra net together into one 223 00:21:03,845 --> 00:21:07,848 unified platform that we call unified collaboration. 224 00:21:07,848 --> 00:21:16,718 And you've been on board with this vision with us and um it's great to have you guys helping us figure this out as. 225 00:21:16,718 --> 00:21:24,184 By the time this airs, Extranet will be fully launched, which we're super excited about. 226 00:21:24,705 --> 00:21:36,114 from our perspective, and we're not a law firm, um but it just seems to make a lot of sense to have one interface and technology to learn to manage all collaborations, whether 227 00:21:36,114 --> 00:21:37,795 it's internal or external. 228 00:21:37,795 --> 00:21:42,499 Because at the end of the day, an intranet or an extranet is a comms mechanism. 229 00:21:42,499 --> 00:21:46,737 It's a way to communicate, whether it's internally or externally. 230 00:21:46,737 --> 00:21:54,909 and sharing of content, whether that content is documents or docket information or billing or matter information. 231 00:21:54,909 --> 00:22:05,214 um It's, it's, it's comms and having one system to manage your comms internal and external feels like it makes a lot of sense. 232 00:22:05,214 --> 00:22:14,918 And how, how big a deal is having one instead of having a high Q and a handshake environment with diff build on different technologies and 233 00:22:15,378 --> 00:22:23,694 requiring different people to manage and different infrastructure and different licensing and how big a deal is that in your world? 234 00:22:25,047 --> 00:22:26,758 I think it's significant. 235 00:22:26,758 --> 00:22:38,826 think from an end user, I hate to use that word, from a usability perspective, you get to reinforce a common experience. 236 00:22:38,827 --> 00:22:43,670 And folks aren't context switching all the time. 237 00:22:43,670 --> 00:22:45,282 This is intranet. 238 00:22:45,282 --> 00:22:47,013 This is extranet. 239 00:22:47,013 --> 00:22:51,876 This is teams or whatever, for collaboration, like matter work or whatever. 240 00:22:51,876 --> 00:22:53,317 uh 241 00:22:53,599 --> 00:23:10,523 You get to be a little bit more consistent and hopefully deliver up key information, whether it's from your HR system or, you know, BI tool, whatever it is, right? 242 00:23:10,523 --> 00:23:18,159 Those other systems deliver up the key information in a unified experience, right? 243 00:23:18,159 --> 00:23:23,193 Just reduce that effort people have to go through. 244 00:23:23,425 --> 00:23:25,698 to get what they need, right? 245 00:23:25,698 --> 00:23:30,693 And I think, and so that's true for us, for the law firms. 246 00:23:31,815 --> 00:23:42,548 And then if you think about it from a client perspective and knowing how many clients are familiar with Microsoft, it's reducing that load for them as well. 247 00:23:42,548 --> 00:23:44,069 uh 248 00:23:45,538 --> 00:23:49,442 I think Teams is the interesting, is an interesting piece of this. 249 00:23:49,442 --> 00:24:07,729 And I know we talked about this a ton when we were drafting our chapter, uh because as much as I would say like to say that we have a lot of people using Teams sites for where 250 00:24:07,729 --> 00:24:10,791 they do work, we're not there yet. 251 00:24:10,812 --> 00:24:13,704 Yeah, that's a crawl walk, run journey too. 252 00:24:13,704 --> 00:24:20,657 So crawl is presence, chat and online meetings. 253 00:24:20,657 --> 00:24:24,850 That's the definition of crawl and it's real easy to start crawling. 254 00:24:24,850 --> 00:24:38,377 um Walking is when you start leveraging, know, retention policies around when you get a little more formal in how you're structuring your communications. 255 00:24:38,377 --> 00:24:39,257 Cause the 256 00:24:39,784 --> 00:24:43,218 The beauty and the curse of teams is its flexibility, right? 257 00:24:43,218 --> 00:24:46,321 There's a bunch of different places where you can collaborate, right? 258 00:24:46,321 --> 00:24:47,594 Are you going to post in channels? 259 00:24:47,594 --> 00:24:49,464 Are you going to go, go post in chats? 260 00:24:49,464 --> 00:24:51,747 Are you going to have naming conventions? 261 00:24:51,747 --> 00:24:55,451 When do you post in chats versus ah channels? 262 00:24:55,451 --> 00:25:01,707 It's uh we honestly, we're still figuring that out internally and we live and breathe this stuff. 263 00:25:01,707 --> 00:25:02,558 So 264 00:25:03,531 --> 00:25:14,246 Yeah, we tend to have more operations teams, business professionals using teams as a place to work, right? 265 00:25:14,246 --> 00:25:24,010 Like having team sites, documents are there, maybe it's attached to planner or project or that type of thing. 266 00:25:24,010 --> 00:25:31,373 uh I think the lawyers are still largely I manage email. 267 00:25:32,912 --> 00:25:36,682 But we're getting some to shift and and it's 268 00:25:38,271 --> 00:25:45,969 It's fun, I mean, that's a nerdy way to say it, but it's fun to watch them, to see them embrace. 269 00:25:47,694 --> 00:25:56,754 teams to have all of their matter centric communication happening in posts. 270 00:25:56,834 --> 00:25:58,494 It's not an email. 271 00:25:58,494 --> 00:26:00,554 People get added to the matter. 272 00:26:00,554 --> 00:26:02,514 They can get caught up. 273 00:26:03,014 --> 00:26:06,554 We have M365 co-pilot for folks. 274 00:26:06,554 --> 00:26:08,994 So there's that capability. 275 00:26:08,994 --> 00:26:11,874 I know you're a little bit of a critic. 276 00:26:13,154 --> 00:26:14,414 And that's fine. 277 00:26:14,414 --> 00:26:15,334 It's going to get better. 278 00:26:15,334 --> 00:26:17,581 And I think you said that. 279 00:26:17,581 --> 00:26:26,641 So when you start layering these things, these capabilities together, it becomes a compelling story. 280 00:26:26,881 --> 00:26:33,781 But I don't think it's something we're going to be able to, I wanna say force people into. 281 00:26:34,381 --> 00:26:38,141 But we can encourage them, coach them. 282 00:26:40,822 --> 00:26:42,280 Meet them where they are. 283 00:26:42,398 --> 00:26:42,718 Yeah. 284 00:26:42,718 --> 00:26:45,470 You know, I just realized we keep talking about this chapter we wrote. 285 00:26:45,470 --> 00:26:47,392 didn't name the book. 286 00:26:47,392 --> 00:26:56,009 it's, yeah, yeah, Current and future trends in knowledge management and innovation for legal professionals. 287 00:26:56,009 --> 00:27:04,416 It's quite the mouthful and, Patrick D Domenico pulled this together and it's a, it's a great book and it's an easy read. 288 00:27:04,416 --> 00:27:11,812 So for those of you who want to hear more about this topic, Katrina and I put wrote a chapter that I think turned out pretty good. 289 00:27:12,638 --> 00:27:16,738 Um, so right, exactly. 290 00:27:16,738 --> 00:27:22,778 Well, you know, something along the teams lines that I think is worth talking about in collaboration. 291 00:27:22,778 --> 00:27:35,638 So the presence and the, um, pervasiveness of presence indicators within the M 365 suite is so incredibly cool. 292 00:27:35,638 --> 00:27:40,371 You know, you can be working on a word document and see an icon. 293 00:27:40,371 --> 00:27:53,574 with a presence ring around it with anybody who happens to have the document open and you can click on it and say, Hey, I'm thinking about and start co-authoring right there. 294 00:27:53,574 --> 00:27:57,515 mean, and now I don't know what your plans are on this. 295 00:27:57,515 --> 00:28:04,256 It's, B2B sharing where you can enable shared channels. 296 00:28:04,317 --> 00:28:10,518 So in order to do shared channels in teams today, and I think this is going to 297 00:28:10,952 --> 00:28:12,103 This is not going to change. 298 00:28:12,103 --> 00:28:15,065 kind of has to stay this way, but it could get a little easier. 299 00:28:15,065 --> 00:28:17,187 There's like a 13 step process. 300 00:28:17,187 --> 00:28:29,437 The last time I looked to enable B to be sharing that you basically, have to go in, IT has to do this and they have to go in and you have to basically accept the policy, um, choices 301 00:28:29,437 --> 00:28:34,741 of your counterpart of this other domain, who you're sharing information with. 302 00:28:34,761 --> 00:28:35,782 You accept all that. 303 00:28:35,782 --> 00:28:41,046 And then once you do, you can share channels and then your attorneys can share. 304 00:28:41,314 --> 00:28:43,355 Um, content with them directly. 305 00:28:43,355 --> 00:28:57,441 If you use a tool like ours, you know, every time you upload a document into a extranet site, let's say, and your clients are subscribed to that channel, they can get a 306 00:28:57,441 --> 00:29:00,333 notification in line with all their native teams notifications. 307 00:29:00,333 --> 00:29:03,375 It doesn't muddy up their email box with all of that. 308 00:29:03,375 --> 00:29:06,566 Are y'all thinking about heading that direction? 309 00:29:08,429 --> 00:29:09,990 We've talked about it. 310 00:29:09,990 --> 00:29:13,532 We are not pushing the conversation yet. 311 00:29:13,532 --> 00:29:29,980 Like, let's make sure we're good on the base uh capabilities and depending on like who the client is and how much collaboration we're doing with them. 312 00:29:30,701 --> 00:29:32,862 I think we would explore that. 313 00:29:32,862 --> 00:29:38,030 It is not on my immediate to-do list. 314 00:29:38,030 --> 00:29:54,310 But I have to say, okay, so speaking of to do, was co-authoring or co-editing a document with a colleague and in the comments, right, he assigned me a task, right? 315 00:29:54,310 --> 00:30:02,390 So it showed up in my task list in my to do and I was like, oh my God, I kind of love that. 316 00:30:02,510 --> 00:30:04,070 I am. 317 00:30:04,415 --> 00:30:08,848 the type of person that would put something on a list to cross it off. 318 00:30:09,329 --> 00:30:09,870 Right. 319 00:30:09,870 --> 00:30:17,175 So, so to me getting that type of, of notification, not just somebody mentioned you. 320 00:30:17,716 --> 00:30:18,026 Right. 321 00:30:18,026 --> 00:30:19,978 But this is a task to do. 322 00:30:19,978 --> 00:30:23,741 And then he got the notification that I completed it. 323 00:30:24,322 --> 00:30:33,163 Like that's kind of, mean, I know it seems like, I don't say a weird thing, but absent that. 324 00:30:33,163 --> 00:30:35,678 How many emails back and forth could that have been? 325 00:30:35,678 --> 00:30:38,560 100 % and it's so easy for things to get lost in email. 326 00:30:38,560 --> 00:30:45,205 You know, I mean the way I manage email, I don't know if it's ideal or not, but I keep things unread that are still pending. 327 00:30:45,446 --> 00:30:51,971 And um when I need to follow up on things, I create a task with a date as a reminder. 328 00:30:51,971 --> 00:30:57,466 um But you know, that is a very cool capability. 329 00:30:57,466 --> 00:31:05,522 How about one thing I think is an interesting use case, but I don't know how lawyers are going to feel about it is once you enable 330 00:31:05,522 --> 00:31:10,163 be to be sharing your clients can now ping you on teams. 331 00:31:11,044 --> 00:31:11,844 Right? 332 00:31:11,844 --> 00:31:14,074 That seems good and bad, right? 333 00:31:14,074 --> 00:31:17,225 Like, um, all right, you get a pop up. 334 00:31:17,285 --> 00:31:19,046 How quickly do you respond? 335 00:31:19,046 --> 00:31:25,918 You know, if you're a lawyer and are you going to get, are you going to get heat if you don't respond in a timely manner? 336 00:31:25,918 --> 00:31:27,138 It could be disruptive. 337 00:31:27,138 --> 00:31:27,675 I don't know. 338 00:31:27,675 --> 00:31:33,662 Do you have any thoughts on whether or not this is going to be a feature lawyers want to use with their clients? 339 00:31:33,662 --> 00:31:35,203 I remember this story. 340 00:31:35,203 --> 00:31:50,487 I mean, this is probably a decade at least old that a law, and I want to say it was like an Australian law firm that they had through their website, their public facing website 341 00:31:50,487 --> 00:31:56,489 showed the presence indicator like on their attorney bio pages. 342 00:31:56,629 --> 00:31:57,569 And that was the thing. 343 00:31:57,569 --> 00:32:00,170 was like, do you really want? 344 00:32:01,365 --> 00:32:07,849 to show that somebody is available now because I will also say that 345 00:32:09,995 --> 00:32:14,263 And like as a business professional, kind of like live and die by my calendar. 346 00:32:14,263 --> 00:32:16,136 You're probably the same way. 347 00:32:16,136 --> 00:32:18,639 You just have so many meetings and whatnot. 348 00:32:20,919 --> 00:32:27,965 For many lawyers, mean, not to say that they're not over-meeting as well, they work on things, right? 349 00:32:27,965 --> 00:32:33,120 They're like in blocks of time, right? 350 00:32:33,120 --> 00:32:38,545 Working on something, but they may not have it reflected on their calendar, right? 351 00:32:38,545 --> 00:32:39,385 And... 352 00:32:41,269 --> 00:32:49,673 I think it would be bad to interrupt that flow work just all the time. 353 00:32:49,673 --> 00:32:53,455 mean, it could happen in email, but they've got a deadline. 354 00:32:53,455 --> 00:32:55,216 They can turn off email. 355 00:32:55,876 --> 00:33:02,740 But that persistent teams pinging, I guess you could exit out of team. 356 00:33:02,740 --> 00:33:06,066 But that could be a challenge. 357 00:33:06,066 --> 00:33:10,999 Yeah, it's uh Teams is, uh email is much more asynchronous. 358 00:33:11,583 --> 00:33:14,609 Teams is more synchronous. 359 00:33:15,286 --> 00:33:20,509 The other thing too, if you start, and it goes back to your governance topic, right? 360 00:33:20,509 --> 00:33:31,476 If you're allowing a client, you know, in that way, you probably want to capture those chats, right? 361 00:33:31,898 --> 00:33:36,531 Like internally, if we're just, I mean, it depends on your organization, but. 362 00:33:38,581 --> 00:33:47,027 depending on, like if you're just using chats, you may have a rule to say they expire in 30 days or something like that. 363 00:33:47,027 --> 00:33:55,892 And if you're allowing clients to have that same experience with you, you probably don't want to expire them. 364 00:33:55,913 --> 00:33:57,004 Yeah, that's a good point. 365 00:33:57,004 --> 00:34:03,668 You know, I've, I've heard of much, much, much more aggressive retention policies, like three days. 366 00:34:03,668 --> 00:34:08,271 The longest I've ever heard for a chat is seven days, retention. 367 00:34:08,271 --> 00:34:13,114 And the reason is they want people to post and channels related to matters. 368 00:34:13,114 --> 00:34:17,657 And you know, a chat is, you want to go grab coffee, right? 369 00:34:18,077 --> 00:34:25,554 not, Hey, so and so from such and such client wants to do X, Y, and Z with this matter. 370 00:34:25,554 --> 00:34:28,635 That needs to go in a channel. 371 00:34:29,376 --> 00:34:38,681 maybe it's 14 days, but I presented with a couple of firms at Iltta, I don't know if it was last year the year before, and they discussed their retention policies, and one was 372 00:34:38,681 --> 00:34:40,942 three days because of that reason. 373 00:34:41,877 --> 00:34:43,261 It makes sense. 374 00:34:43,828 --> 00:34:44,648 Yeah. 375 00:34:45,388 --> 00:34:51,271 But you know, maybe, maybe lawyers are going to have to adjust how they work and block time on their calendar. 376 00:34:51,271 --> 00:34:53,562 I know it's a crazy thing to think about, right? 377 00:34:53,562 --> 00:35:07,520 But you know, if you're Coca-Cola and you have, um you know, tens of millions of dollars of legal fee, legal spend with a particular law firm, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna 378 00:35:07,520 --> 00:35:10,761 ask for, I'd like to, I'd like to ping you directly. 379 00:35:10,761 --> 00:35:12,442 And the lawyer is going to say, 380 00:35:12,454 --> 00:35:15,221 Yes, I would think. 381 00:35:16,488 --> 00:35:17,388 Right. 382 00:35:17,689 --> 00:35:18,629 Sorry. 383 00:35:19,069 --> 00:35:20,549 I have a back flip problem. 384 00:35:21,688 --> 00:35:36,016 Um, so in addition to the teams in the, in the more frictionless sharing of information with clients, there's some other benefits that I want to get your thoughts on that, you 385 00:35:36,016 --> 00:35:42,830 know, I see it from a product perspective, but you know, with high Q that is a very ring fenced isolated system. 386 00:35:42,830 --> 00:35:45,401 It's on an Island and you want to push data in and out. 387 00:35:45,401 --> 00:35:50,825 You're pushing it into I sheets, which is like an Excel doc, or 388 00:35:50,825 --> 00:35:51,721 a SharePoint list. 389 00:35:51,721 --> 00:35:53,201 SharePoint list right? 390 00:35:53,201 --> 00:35:54,722 Not a relational database. 391 00:35:54,722 --> 00:36:07,275 There are limitations to it, but not with with um with our solution we deploy in your tenant so you can pull information from any and we already stand up our integration hub 392 00:36:07,275 --> 00:36:08,935 that allows you. 393 00:36:09,415 --> 00:36:17,957 Yeah, exactly, so you can pull information from your PMS, docketing, experience management, LPM system, DMS, PMS. 394 00:36:18,578 --> 00:36:19,198 Anything. 395 00:36:19,198 --> 00:36:20,360 um 396 00:36:20,360 --> 00:36:21,411 Do you guys have plans? 397 00:36:21,411 --> 00:36:29,615 But historically, like all those capabilities are super cool, but most law firms use really it's mostly files. 398 00:36:29,615 --> 00:36:34,618 Are you guys thinking you're going to do more now that it's easily accessible? 399 00:36:34,957 --> 00:36:44,153 So I mean, I think that the files piece is certainly the use case that is the strongest. 400 00:36:44,314 --> 00:36:46,157 I think there are. 401 00:36:48,009 --> 00:36:54,769 ways to better leverage, even if it's just the Microsoft list, right, capability. 402 00:36:54,769 --> 00:36:57,564 I think there is some 403 00:36:59,583 --> 00:37:04,557 to do some true, so we say, we call it collaboration, right? 404 00:37:04,557 --> 00:37:10,021 But a lot of times that just means I'm gonna upload some files so you have access to them. 405 00:37:10,021 --> 00:37:16,375 But I think you could have like the next level of collaboration which includes like co-editing, right? 406 00:37:16,375 --> 00:37:19,333 Let's work on this document at the same time. 407 00:37:19,333 --> 00:37:25,552 I mean, imagine the savings you could have under the right scenario, right? 408 00:37:25,552 --> 00:37:27,605 Of I don't have to, 409 00:37:27,605 --> 00:37:34,584 I have my version, you have yours, and now we've got to exchange and redline and, oh, right? 410 00:37:34,584 --> 00:37:38,619 I mean, that co-editing experience could just save so much time. 411 00:37:38,619 --> 00:37:40,741 uh 412 00:37:42,446 --> 00:37:47,529 And again, I think it depends on what is the relationship. 413 00:37:47,710 --> 00:37:51,732 If Coca-Cola, for example, I used to use big client, right? 414 00:37:52,373 --> 00:38:09,865 If a client like that said, we want to see our billing history or WIP or whatever, if the business says that's appropriate, we now have an easier mechanism to do that. 415 00:38:11,017 --> 00:38:20,962 I think that in the high queue world, and this is just our instance of high queue, we would likely run reports and upload them. 416 00:38:21,683 --> 00:38:34,309 As opposed to doing the data connector to an iSheet or to a SQL database or something like that and presenting it in the site, it would just. 417 00:38:37,043 --> 00:38:45,017 likely be a more manual process, eh but I think that gets to be just a whole lot simpler. 418 00:38:45,017 --> 00:38:47,275 You're just removing so much friction. 419 00:38:47,752 --> 00:38:48,362 Yeah. 420 00:38:48,362 --> 00:38:52,884 And I mean, Haikyuu was designed to that way. 421 00:38:52,884 --> 00:39:08,871 it is a, it's an island and you know, back, you know, they started when the cloud was still like scary and you know, you kind of, you kind of had to, people were, got 422 00:39:08,871 --> 00:39:12,572 uncomfortable if it was too easy to share. 423 00:39:12,572 --> 00:39:12,942 Right. 424 00:39:12,942 --> 00:39:16,764 I feel like we've, I feel like we've come a long way since then though. 425 00:39:16,764 --> 00:39:17,774 And now, 426 00:39:17,960 --> 00:39:20,814 people do understand that it's okay. 427 00:39:20,814 --> 00:39:22,650 The cloud's not going to hurt you. 428 00:39:24,621 --> 00:39:31,052 I mean, I think there was a movement, and maybe it's still in play, of being cloud first. 429 00:39:31,915 --> 00:39:32,841 Right? 430 00:39:32,841 --> 00:39:33,797 And. 431 00:39:36,885 --> 00:39:45,832 I mean, you mentioned earlier, there are still a lot of firms that are largely on-prem, but those numbers have to be dwindling. 432 00:39:45,832 --> 00:39:48,133 um 433 00:39:49,940 --> 00:40:10,817 not that this is my responsibility or remit, but I much prefer being able to think about how we deliver solutions than how do we keep like so many physical devices up and running 434 00:40:10,817 --> 00:40:18,533 and right and having to build you know infrastructure to support things to just be able to jump to 435 00:40:18,997 --> 00:40:20,126 supporting things. 436 00:40:20,126 --> 00:40:21,426 Right. 437 00:40:21,926 --> 00:40:24,666 What about skill sets? 438 00:40:26,126 --> 00:40:39,986 you know, like it's, it seems so of the firms I know who have, made significant high Q investments, many of them have teams who manage that, who have to really understand the 439 00:40:39,986 --> 00:40:41,026 platform. 440 00:40:41,346 --> 00:40:47,582 And, um, with M 365, if you understand M 365 and SharePoint and 441 00:40:47,582 --> 00:40:56,522 If you're a developer, they're fairly commodity skill sets, React JS, you have no little SPFX, but you can build customizations. 442 00:40:56,702 --> 00:41:06,902 How much benefit are you going to get from just having more people who are easier to find, I would think. 443 00:41:07,349 --> 00:41:13,705 say people that are easier to find and also organizations that are able to support you. 444 00:41:13,705 --> 00:41:17,238 Like from a consulting perspective, right? 445 00:41:17,238 --> 00:41:35,461 I the the high Q kind of ecosystem, I think, I mean, I can count on one hand, the consultants that I would go to if I really needed something bespoke out of high Q. 446 00:41:36,797 --> 00:41:37,647 Yeah. 447 00:41:38,388 --> 00:41:39,528 It's on limp. 448 00:41:39,528 --> 00:41:40,568 Yeah. 449 00:41:41,309 --> 00:41:42,029 Right. 450 00:41:42,029 --> 00:41:42,489 Yeah. 451 00:41:42,489 --> 00:41:51,392 There's fewer of them and you know, that means that drives up costs that sometimes can, if they're busy, make things take longer. 452 00:41:51,392 --> 00:42:00,556 Um, but yeah, it definitely gives you more choice when it's a, just more of a commodity skillset. 453 00:42:00,556 --> 00:42:02,577 What about on the AI front? 454 00:42:02,577 --> 00:42:06,608 And I know we only have about three, four minutes here, but like, 455 00:42:06,610 --> 00:42:15,949 You and I have talked about potential use cases with AI in the extranet world, like chat bots, like we deployed. 456 00:42:15,949 --> 00:42:19,202 think, I think I can talk about this one because we did a case study on it. 457 00:42:19,202 --> 00:42:20,142 So it's public. 458 00:42:20,142 --> 00:42:32,234 Um, we had a large IP firm who we built and, uh, we built a chat bot on top of Azure open AI and it crawled and indexed all of their policy documents. 459 00:42:32,234 --> 00:42:33,114 So 460 00:42:33,198 --> 00:42:37,082 expense policy that was in a PDF somewhere in a SharePoint library. 461 00:42:37,082 --> 00:42:42,047 um PTO policy that was on a wiki somewhere. 462 00:42:42,047 --> 00:42:52,938 um It could be, you know, sexual harassment policy or, you know, um ethical gift limit policies that's in all these different places. 463 00:42:52,938 --> 00:42:55,621 And we took Azure AI and crawled and indexed all that. 464 00:42:55,621 --> 00:42:57,360 We put a 465 00:42:57,360 --> 00:43:05,667 I'm sorry, Azure AI search to crawl an index and then Azure open AI and build a bot where you can go in and ask any policy question in the Internet and man, they love it. 466 00:43:05,667 --> 00:43:09,101 It's like where do I go to submit a PTO request? 467 00:43:09,101 --> 00:43:15,516 Well, type it and you answer like are there any client facing scenarios like that that makes sense? 468 00:43:16,285 --> 00:43:19,967 I mean, I think that there can be. 469 00:43:19,967 --> 00:43:36,216 mean, in the instant, in that example, I think there are uh firms, right, if they have consistent advice, right, that they are giving people um that experience, I think it's 470 00:43:36,216 --> 00:43:38,037 huge, right? 471 00:43:39,874 --> 00:43:49,862 If you think about kind of like the evolution of like intranet or whatever, it was maybe you would think about the menu structure and browsing, right, to find information. 472 00:43:49,862 --> 00:43:51,424 And then it was search. 473 00:43:51,424 --> 00:43:53,465 Now it's going to be chat. 474 00:43:54,846 --> 00:43:55,207 Right. 475 00:43:55,207 --> 00:44:00,991 And I think the same thing maybe could be true with extranets. 476 00:44:00,991 --> 00:44:08,457 I mean, the, the browsing is probably less of an issue because it's focused on a topic. 477 00:44:08,471 --> 00:44:18,926 But the interrogation piece, Like, you know, I think you the sky is the limit, right? 478 00:44:18,926 --> 00:44:25,418 Imagine having like a co-pilot agent against a document library. 479 00:44:27,041 --> 00:44:30,110 Right, just to be able to do that. 480 00:44:33,259 --> 00:44:48,425 you know, what did we say about X or, you know, what has been filed about something as opposed to largely being restricted by file name metadata and folder structure. 481 00:44:48,688 --> 00:44:48,998 Yeah. 482 00:44:48,998 --> 00:44:56,273 And I hear a lot of people who are confused talk about, well, we've had natural language search for years. 483 00:44:56,273 --> 00:44:56,523 okay. 484 00:44:56,523 --> 00:44:57,244 Yeah, you have. 485 00:44:57,244 --> 00:44:59,476 And what do you get back with natural language search? 486 00:44:59,476 --> 00:45:02,378 You get back a list of links, right? 487 00:45:02,378 --> 00:45:02,828 Yeah. 488 00:45:02,828 --> 00:45:13,366 And what's different here is this is going to be a perplexity like interface where within documents you get back answers, not just links to the documents where you got to go find 489 00:45:13,366 --> 00:45:13,966 it. 490 00:45:14,103 --> 00:45:18,350 And it's semantic understanding, right? 491 00:45:18,350 --> 00:45:23,964 It's not, I mean, even with natural language search, it's just not that good. 492 00:45:23,964 --> 00:45:24,835 Yeah. 493 00:45:25,079 --> 00:45:25,380 Yeah. 494 00:45:25,380 --> 00:45:26,224 Enterprise search. 495 00:45:26,224 --> 00:45:28,813 And that's a whole, another topic. 496 00:45:29,569 --> 00:45:43,657 So Ted, before I know we're just have a minute or so left, but I do want to point out one thing about the extra nets and in the Microsoft world, and that is site life cycle. 497 00:45:44,578 --> 00:45:48,020 And that's been a pain point. 498 00:45:48,100 --> 00:45:51,582 I think for a while, it's very easy to spin up sites. 499 00:45:51,582 --> 00:45:56,725 It's challenging to spin them down and that's a risk. 500 00:45:57,782 --> 00:45:58,102 Right? 501 00:45:58,102 --> 00:46:03,444 You want to remove people when they haven't been visiting. 502 00:46:04,024 --> 00:46:04,565 Right? 503 00:46:04,565 --> 00:46:11,267 And you want to archive sites as a matter of policy when they haven't been used. 504 00:46:11,687 --> 00:46:27,423 And that's a capability that comes kind of in the Microsoft realm that has been missing, em at least from my vantage point in the high queue environment. 505 00:46:28,621 --> 00:46:39,209 uh Because I think it really is a risk and governance concern and being able to close that gap is important. 506 00:46:39,378 --> 00:46:49,888 Yeah, well, you if you think about their licensing model, you know, does it make sense for them to provide capabilities that would reduce your storage or site footprint? 507 00:46:49,888 --> 00:46:56,915 um You know, I don't seems like there's maybe incentive to not make that so easy. 508 00:46:56,915 --> 00:47:02,520 um But yeah, we have put a lot of effort into that. 509 00:47:02,520 --> 00:47:04,932 We because we deploy in your environment. 510 00:47:05,052 --> 00:47:07,174 You know, we have two licensing models today. 511 00:47:07,174 --> 00:47:08,273 This is probably going to change. 512 00:47:08,273 --> 00:47:13,548 It's still brand new, but we have, can license by sites or just like you guys did, just do it enterprise wide. 513 00:47:13,548 --> 00:47:15,329 And then there are no limitations. 514 00:47:15,329 --> 00:47:27,438 You can, as much storage as Microsoft gives you, which is like, if you're on an E3 or E5, I think it's like one, one terabyte per user or some, something crazy. 515 00:47:27,438 --> 00:47:31,681 Like it, there's a lot of storage out there and when you need to buy more, it's cheap. 516 00:47:31,681 --> 00:47:33,362 Um, 517 00:47:33,490 --> 00:47:37,133 But yeah, we've put a lot of effort into the provisioning and the governance piece of this. 518 00:47:37,133 --> 00:47:41,255 Like you can hover over a document and get a preview when we log it. 519 00:47:41,696 --> 00:47:44,158 So it is extremely detailed. 520 00:47:44,158 --> 00:47:53,025 um we think, you know, that's one area where AI, we have some ideas about how to incorporate AI asking analytics questions. 521 00:47:53,025 --> 00:47:59,922 Like, give me the top five sites that haven't been used in the last 30 days or the top three users who 522 00:47:59,922 --> 00:48:04,563 have downloaded the most content or you can do some really neat stuff on the analytic side. 523 00:48:05,344 --> 00:48:06,264 Yeah. 524 00:48:06,864 --> 00:48:07,324 Yeah. 525 00:48:07,324 --> 00:48:11,565 Um, and cause we log everything in Azure app insights. 526 00:48:11,606 --> 00:48:15,377 So it's really easy to query out, but it's manual. 527 00:48:15,377 --> 00:48:20,738 If you do it through the interface, crawl and index that stuff, throw a bot on top. 528 00:48:20,738 --> 00:48:22,809 You can ask some really neat questions. 529 00:48:23,729 --> 00:48:24,070 Yeah. 530 00:48:24,070 --> 00:48:25,800 All that stuff's coming down the pike. 531 00:48:25,800 --> 00:48:28,255 Well, this has been a great conversation as always. 532 00:48:28,255 --> 00:48:32,102 really appreciate you taking a few minutes. 533 00:48:32,102 --> 00:48:34,285 uh Are you active on LinkedIn? 534 00:48:35,008 --> 00:48:35,750 Yeah. 535 00:48:35,750 --> 00:48:38,524 So folks can find you at Katrina Dittmer. 536 00:48:39,488 --> 00:48:40,414 Indeed. 537 00:48:40,414 --> 00:48:43,616 And that's D-I-T-T-M-E-R on LinkedIn. 538 00:48:43,757 --> 00:48:46,569 And you show your face at events. 539 00:48:46,569 --> 00:48:49,761 I see you in places here and there, right? 540 00:48:49,761 --> 00:48:50,823 I will be at Ulta. 541 00:48:50,823 --> 00:48:53,469 think I'm speaking at a session at Ulta. 542 00:48:53,469 --> 00:48:57,207 So we'll connect then. 543 00:48:57,207 --> 00:48:59,053 Yeah. 544 00:48:59,053 --> 00:49:05,672 Well, thanks for uh spending some time and I'm sure I'll see you before Elta, but worst case I'll see you then. 545 00:49:05,672 --> 00:49:07,944 All right. 546 00:49:07,944 --> 00:49:08,885 Thank you. 00:00:05,020 Katrina Dittmer, how are you today? 2 00:00:05,548 --> 00:00:06,380 Great, thanks. 3 00:00:06,380 --> 00:00:07,499 How are you? 4 00:00:07,587 --> 00:00:14,810 I am good and looking forward to our conversation today, which is a long time coming. 5 00:00:15,650 --> 00:00:26,214 You and I worked on a chapter of a book recently on this topic that we're going to talk about today, which is legal collaboration. 6 00:00:26,615 --> 00:00:37,319 And yeah, we share a lot of philosophies on this and I think there's going to be a good conversation. 7 00:00:37,971 --> 00:00:41,995 But before we jump in, let's get you introduced for those that don't know you. 8 00:00:41,995 --> 00:00:43,456 You've been around for a long time. 9 00:00:43,456 --> 00:00:51,383 So like me, in fact, I season vets, I'm trying to think when you and I met, I think it was at a SharePoint symposium. 10 00:00:51,864 --> 00:00:53,771 I know it was more than 10 years ago. 11 00:00:53,771 --> 00:00:56,069 I don't know if it was quite 15. 12 00:00:56,456 --> 00:01:18,343 I it might have been 2013 or 14, ah only because I remember it was after like the first, the Baker and Daniels and Fagry and Benson merger, just based on who I was there with. 13 00:01:18,343 --> 00:01:19,803 Yeah, I remember. 14 00:01:19,803 --> 00:01:21,187 I remember who you were there with. 15 00:01:21,187 --> 00:01:23,329 You guys talked about InfoPath. 16 00:01:24,451 --> 00:01:27,228 Yeah, I remember. 17 00:01:27,228 --> 00:01:29,891 Without buying a big third party tool. 18 00:01:30,733 --> 00:01:31,312 Yeah. 19 00:01:31,312 --> 00:01:37,576 um So you started your legal tech career, looks like, in Lit Support. 20 00:01:37,736 --> 00:01:47,822 You were in KM &I roles at Fagry for many years, and now you're at Evershed's. 21 00:01:48,083 --> 00:01:48,942 So. 22 00:01:48,942 --> 00:01:51,262 I have to say Evershed Sutherland. 23 00:01:51,262 --> 00:01:53,195 We got to have the whole name. 24 00:01:53,195 --> 00:02:00,140 And I joined the US side of the firm a little over two years ago. 25 00:02:00,572 --> 00:02:00,973 Okay. 26 00:02:00,973 --> 00:02:02,206 You guys are clients now. 27 00:02:02,206 --> 00:02:05,534 need to, I need to thank you for correcting me. 28 00:02:05,534 --> 00:02:07,268 ever said, ever shed Sutherland. 29 00:02:07,268 --> 00:02:09,522 need to say it right. 30 00:02:10,013 --> 00:02:16,587 You know, these firms that are born uh of combinations, we have to use that right word, right? 31 00:02:16,587 --> 00:02:17,989 oh 32 00:02:19,467 --> 00:02:20,860 The names matter. 33 00:02:22,248 --> 00:02:22,561 Yeah. 34 00:02:22,561 --> 00:02:23,171 get it. 35 00:02:23,171 --> 00:02:25,752 You know, and I just, I just realized something. 36 00:02:25,752 --> 00:02:31,955 You, you and I did a webinar way back in the day with Ilta. 37 00:02:32,050 --> 00:02:33,856 I think we were talking about, do you remember this? 38 00:02:33,856 --> 00:02:38,737 um Yeah. 39 00:02:39,498 --> 00:02:41,109 It's still out on YouTube somewhere. 40 00:02:41,109 --> 00:02:42,959 I saw it not too long ago. 41 00:02:43,860 --> 00:02:44,360 Yeah. 42 00:02:44,360 --> 00:02:49,042 um A little different than today. 43 00:02:49,069 --> 00:02:49,764 Sure. 44 00:02:49,764 --> 00:02:54,676 And so was my, you know, I haven't had hair in a long time, but my beard had more color. 45 00:02:54,676 --> 00:03:02,768 Um, yeah, that was a really long time ago, but it's good to, um, do this with you again. 46 00:03:02,768 --> 00:03:16,022 And today we're going to talk about legal collaboration and you have a background in this and, um, you guys have been, your firm has been, um, 47 00:03:16,062 --> 00:03:21,565 kind enough to participate with us in our build out of our solution. 48 00:03:23,326 --> 00:03:27,748 and the reason our motivation for charging down this path. 49 00:03:27,768 --> 00:03:30,220 So we started our journey as Acrowire. 50 00:03:30,220 --> 00:03:46,045 built a lot of bespoke extranet solutions and we help firms like manage the solutions that they already had stood up and the product, the, um, the market was right for a different 51 00:03:46,045 --> 00:03:48,337 solution and alternative out there. 52 00:03:48,337 --> 00:03:56,742 We all know that Haikyuu dominates the extranet market and there's just not been a lot of choice in the marketplace that's legal specific. 53 00:03:56,742 --> 00:04:12,112 um And it seems to me that, and I don't know if you disagree, if I had to guess, I think you would, but my take is that there hasn't been a ton of innovation in this legal 54 00:04:12,112 --> 00:04:14,393 collaboration space in quite a while. 55 00:04:14,393 --> 00:04:15,714 You know, the two, 56 00:04:15,966 --> 00:04:21,754 primary vendors, both internal facing um collaboration, i.e. 57 00:04:21,754 --> 00:04:26,502 Intranet and external facing Extranet, got bought by much bigger companies many years ago. 58 00:04:26,502 --> 00:04:28,574 And it just doesn't seem like there's been a lot of innovation. 59 00:04:28,574 --> 00:04:30,066 Is that your take as well? 60 00:04:30,742 --> 00:04:31,494 Um. 61 00:04:33,215 --> 00:04:35,247 agree-ish. 62 00:04:35,247 --> 00:04:51,900 mean, I see some of the firms and even some of the sites that have been developed with, am I allowed to use the incumbent name, with Haikyuu, right? 63 00:04:51,900 --> 00:04:55,573 That are really progressive. 64 00:04:55,573 --> 00:04:59,646 They push the platform quite a lot. 65 00:05:01,028 --> 00:05:02,637 From my vantage 66 00:05:02,637 --> 00:05:13,803 point, I would prefer to build to grow capabilities with tools that we already own and are familiar with. 67 00:05:14,484 --> 00:05:17,375 And that's Microsoft, right? 68 00:05:17,375 --> 00:05:32,032 And I think Haikyuu made a ton of sense when we were fighting with SharePoint online and every time there was a platform uh upgrade needed, it was a behemoth. 69 00:05:32,032 --> 00:05:43,727 of a project because you're standing up all new hardware and migrating content and all of those things for not much functionality improvement. 70 00:05:43,727 --> 00:05:56,583 So high Q is fabulous, you know, as an alternative, but fast forward to SharePoint online and you know, Microsoft's cloud journey and investment. 71 00:05:56,583 --> 00:05:59,173 And I think we're in a bit different place. 72 00:05:59,199 --> 00:06:04,939 Yeah, the on-prem days were rough, especially when it came to sharing externally. 73 00:06:04,939 --> 00:06:13,459 You used to have to like stand up a DMZ and put a web front end out there at a minimum. 74 00:06:13,459 --> 00:06:19,219 And you had to muddy up your Active Directory infrastructure with external users. 75 00:06:19,219 --> 00:06:20,699 And it was just messy. 76 00:06:21,099 --> 00:06:30,409 Well, candidly, the UI, the user experience at that time for SharePoint. 77 00:06:31,989 --> 00:06:33,534 Not spectacular. 78 00:06:34,568 --> 00:06:36,600 Yeah, that's that's saying it kindly. 79 00:06:36,600 --> 00:06:40,553 um It's gotten a lot better and SharePoint online. 80 00:06:40,553 --> 00:06:50,692 You Microsoft is really doubled down on M365 and SharePoint online is now is now a very mature platform. 81 00:06:50,692 --> 00:07:01,841 We started out in the early days so we back when we were consultants and you know trying to build the business we said yes to things we should have never said yes to, but you know 82 00:07:01,841 --> 00:07:03,646 how it is when you're trying to like. 83 00:07:03,646 --> 00:07:04,666 earn a dollar. 84 00:07:04,666 --> 00:07:07,746 It's like, yeah, I can do that and figure it out later. 85 00:07:07,746 --> 00:07:11,226 Um, I'm glad those days are behind us because that was painful. 86 00:07:11,226 --> 00:07:15,926 Um, but we started doing, it was, do you remember BPOS? 87 00:07:16,386 --> 00:07:20,025 The that's, that was the predecessor to Microsoft 365. 88 00:07:20,025 --> 00:07:25,526 It was called business productivity online suite BPOS for short. 89 00:07:26,123 --> 00:07:34,113 maybe I had heard of that second reference, but I had not heard of it as the acronym that does not roll off your tongue. 90 00:07:34,113 --> 00:07:35,094 No. 91 00:07:35,094 --> 00:07:40,000 And there was nothing that really made sense in that world. 92 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:47,610 They basically took the on-prem products and tried to make a multi-tenant and hosted, and it was really clumsy and it was really tough. 93 00:07:47,610 --> 00:07:48,671 And we moved. 94 00:07:48,671 --> 00:07:49,993 So the first big... 95 00:07:49,993 --> 00:07:51,223 uh 96 00:07:51,223 --> 00:07:53,247 Sounds about as good as Clippy. 97 00:07:53,247 --> 00:07:54,847 Yeah, it was. 98 00:07:54,847 --> 00:07:56,027 It was a lot like Clippy. 99 00:07:56,027 --> 00:07:59,747 Microsoft's had a lot of those whiffs over the years. 100 00:08:00,347 --> 00:08:13,567 But the first viable iteration of Office 365, as it was called back then, now it's just Microsoft 365, was something called Wave 14. 101 00:08:13,647 --> 00:08:17,627 And that happened in like maybe 2012, maybe 2013. 102 00:08:17,747 --> 00:08:19,267 And we moved a massive client. 103 00:08:19,267 --> 00:08:22,107 We moved Sunoco, the oil and gas company. 104 00:08:22,376 --> 00:08:24,217 that's owned by Energy Transfer Partners. 105 00:08:24,217 --> 00:08:25,167 It's like Fortune 20. 106 00:08:25,167 --> 00:08:31,630 They're a massive company and they picked us to help them move because we had some depth. 107 00:08:31,790 --> 00:08:34,831 And uh man, it was painful. 108 00:08:36,372 --> 00:08:41,494 Even as far as things had progressed with Wave 14, it was still really tough. 109 00:08:41,494 --> 00:08:49,258 And today it's a lot easier and it feels like law firms maximizing their investment in M365. 110 00:08:49,842 --> 00:09:04,832 just makes a lot of sense from skillset perspective, from consistency perspective, from um just limiting the number of vendors and licensing and all of that sort of stuff. 111 00:09:04,832 --> 00:09:08,844 It just seems to make a lot of sense to think about that path. 112 00:09:10,007 --> 00:09:25,117 think there's another part to it that is so many corporate clients sit on top of the M365, like that's the ecosystem they work in. 113 00:09:25,510 --> 00:09:27,151 They're comfortable with it. 114 00:09:28,373 --> 00:09:28,733 Right? 115 00:09:28,733 --> 00:09:38,271 It's another, maybe the branding is a little bit different, but in terms of base functionality, it's what they're used to. 116 00:09:38,323 --> 00:09:39,183 Yeah. 117 00:09:39,343 --> 00:09:45,786 Well, and you know, back to the thinking about the incumbents in the intranet, extranet space that are legal specific. 118 00:09:45,786 --> 00:09:53,649 Um, you know, they were bought by much bigger companies and you know, like focus changes over time. 119 00:09:53,649 --> 00:10:01,902 You know, there's a lot of focus on, there's a lot of focus on AI on the practice management side, which is where Handshake went. 120 00:10:01,902 --> 00:10:04,052 That was the incumbent in the space. 121 00:10:04,173 --> 00:10:07,966 You know, their practice management is still largely on-prem. 122 00:10:07,966 --> 00:10:10,748 So they're very focused, it seems like, moving to the cloud. 123 00:10:10,748 --> 00:10:14,071 And they've got their own AI ambitions as well. 124 00:10:14,071 --> 00:10:24,160 um But yeah, as focus changes, so sometimes does the investment. 125 00:10:24,160 --> 00:10:31,746 when something becomes misaligned with a strategic direction, it doesn't always keep up. 126 00:10:34,455 --> 00:10:35,216 Well, for sure. 127 00:10:35,216 --> 00:10:54,103 And I think when you start considering other capabilities, other features that you want to be able to present to your clients through an extranet, staying in that platform where 128 00:10:54,103 --> 00:11:01,529 your data lives, and where you're comfortable doing development, doing integration. 129 00:11:02,579 --> 00:11:04,653 It just makes sense. 130 00:11:07,959 --> 00:11:12,463 I can't imagine that, you know, it's not a risky bet, right? 131 00:11:12,463 --> 00:11:19,278 I mean, it's where you're spending most of your time and money anyway. 132 00:11:19,278 --> 00:11:29,416 And when I think about, you mentioned AI, when I think about the maturity of like co-pilot studio and we're still in early, early days, right? 133 00:11:29,416 --> 00:11:31,168 I mean, what is this phrase? 134 00:11:31,168 --> 00:11:35,631 This is the worst it's ever gonna be, right? 135 00:11:39,615 --> 00:11:55,455 Well, and you know, another, I think interesting benefit to deploying your solutions in M 365 is it's all the ancillary capabilities that Microsoft brings to the table. 136 00:11:55,455 --> 00:12:09,095 You know, Azure open AI, Azure AI search, power automate, power BI, power apps, like all of that is now accessible when you deploy within 137 00:12:09,500 --> 00:12:12,704 that M365 boundary. 138 00:12:15,821 --> 00:12:22,481 even, I mean, even just some of the core M365 elements, I mean, they used to be called SharePoint lists. 139 00:12:22,481 --> 00:12:38,721 Right now they're just Microsoft lists and I can't keep track of all of the name changes, frankly, but all of those other elements that are just available to help you with basic 140 00:12:38,721 --> 00:12:43,913 information that might be valuable, relevant in 141 00:12:43,913 --> 00:12:48,586 the information that you share and manage with and for your clients. 142 00:12:50,241 --> 00:13:03,301 You know, even before you get to the really cool stuff that you just like all the power platform stuff, I mean, you don't even have to necessarily be in that level, although it's 143 00:13:03,301 --> 00:13:04,663 there and that's great. 144 00:13:04,663 --> 00:13:06,725 uh 145 00:13:10,913 --> 00:13:16,906 But yeah, I just think far more Lego blocks available to you. 146 00:13:16,924 --> 00:13:18,915 Yeah, for sure. 147 00:13:18,915 --> 00:13:30,684 And you can also kind of start to center around a common authentication mechanism like, Entra, which is a beast. 148 00:13:30,684 --> 00:13:34,997 Let's not, let's not, let's be clear on that. 149 00:13:34,997 --> 00:13:45,884 It is a beast, but you know, today you have all these SSO, you know, single sign-on frameworks that are out there that create additional complexity. 150 00:13:46,076 --> 00:13:53,008 So centering your strategy in around a common authentication framework, think also makes a lot of sense. 151 00:13:53,716 --> 00:14:04,475 It does, and obviously we are still very early in our shift over to the Microsoft environment for extranets. 152 00:14:04,475 --> 00:14:12,021 But yes, I'm very much looking forward to that being available for our guests. 153 00:14:12,466 --> 00:14:13,326 Yeah. 154 00:14:13,646 --> 00:14:18,308 So our, know, when we started InfoDash, we had a vision. 155 00:14:18,308 --> 00:14:28,711 It took us longer to get here than I thought we would, but for a good reason, because we got so damn busy on the internet side because our timing was really good, right? 156 00:14:28,711 --> 00:14:31,151 Like all these big firms were moving to the clouds. 157 00:14:31,151 --> 00:14:40,222 So we, we started InfoDash in 2022 and kind of started turning off our legacy Acrowire customers. 158 00:14:40,222 --> 00:14:45,162 So we'd either migrate them to the platform or just part ways. 159 00:14:45,162 --> 00:14:48,542 And we had to do that obviously in an orderly fashion. 160 00:14:48,542 --> 00:14:55,122 So that took some time, but 2022 was really, again, I'd rather be lucky than good. 161 00:14:55,122 --> 00:15:02,202 And we were very lucky in that our timing lined up perfectly with Big Law's real push to M365. 162 00:15:02,202 --> 00:15:05,282 Like some firms had moved messaging already, right? 163 00:15:05,282 --> 00:15:07,278 That's usually, that's always the first step. 164 00:15:07,278 --> 00:15:10,240 is move email because it just makes so much sense. 165 00:15:10,240 --> 00:15:20,088 But then those ancillary M 365 workloads like, like SharePoint, those really started to happen in earnest in 2022 and they're still underway. 166 00:15:20,088 --> 00:15:30,505 I'd say if I had to guess, I would say less than half the AMLaw is in SharePoint online in earnest, right? 167 00:15:30,505 --> 00:15:34,856 They may have a couple of sites, they're doing some project like project management stuff. 168 00:15:34,856 --> 00:15:44,972 But I still think that less than half are there, full blown, fully committed, turn off the lights on prem. 169 00:15:44,972 --> 00:15:46,353 I don't know. 170 00:15:46,353 --> 00:15:47,984 Does that sound right to you? 171 00:15:50,037 --> 00:15:53,695 a great sense of the broader market. 172 00:15:55,340 --> 00:16:09,300 will say when I was pondering, do I make this shift over to Evershed Sutherland, the fact that they had been in the Microsoft, like in the cloud environment already for several 173 00:16:09,300 --> 00:16:10,321 years. 174 00:16:12,329 --> 00:16:27,915 meant to me that I likely had fewer barriers, right, in terms of how I thought about some of the challenges I would face and the way I would approach solving them. 175 00:16:29,687 --> 00:16:35,905 So I feel badly, I guess, for firms that aren't there yet. 176 00:16:35,905 --> 00:16:42,173 I think their ability to innovate is perhaps a bit handcuffed in that. 177 00:16:42,173 --> 00:16:44,818 uh 178 00:16:44,818 --> 00:16:51,298 is, I talk to a lot of folks through, I go to a ton of conferences hosting on this podcast. 179 00:16:51,298 --> 00:16:53,578 We're always engaging with new firms. 180 00:16:53,578 --> 00:16:55,738 We've done business with 110, over 110. 181 00:16:55,738 --> 00:16:59,158 I stopped counting at 110 and AmLaw firms. 182 00:16:59,198 --> 00:17:04,558 Now that number is very slightly inflated because I went back when we were still counting. 183 00:17:04,558 --> 00:17:09,758 Actually, it's probably evened out now because we stopped counting, but like Fagry, 184 00:17:09,970 --> 00:17:13,682 Baker Daniels and Drinker Biddle were both AmLaw clients independently. 185 00:17:13,682 --> 00:17:17,213 Then they merged to become in their clients again as Fagry Drinker. 186 00:17:17,213 --> 00:17:36,571 um But through all of that perspective that I've been able to get access to, it feels like there are going to be the haves and the have nots in this like post-gen AI world because 187 00:17:36,571 --> 00:17:39,043 I, it seems like there's 188 00:17:39,043 --> 00:17:40,584 firms fall into one of two camps. 189 00:17:40,584 --> 00:17:48,207 They're either really doubling down and investing in this and moving forward or it's deer in the headlights. 190 00:17:48,207 --> 00:17:49,547 Like they don't know what to do. 191 00:17:49,547 --> 00:17:50,788 They're overwhelmed. 192 00:17:50,788 --> 00:18:04,173 um They've got a couple of POCs going with maybe some co-pilot pushed out, but not doing anything on the practice side at all because they can't clearly articulate ROI. 193 00:18:04,173 --> 00:18:07,964 And it seems like, those firms are going to have a really hard time 194 00:18:08,094 --> 00:18:19,674 when clients start demanding this tech enabled legal service delivery model and they're still figuring out their strategy. 195 00:18:19,674 --> 00:18:20,986 I don't know. 196 00:18:20,986 --> 00:18:22,598 That's what it feels like to me. 197 00:18:23,233 --> 00:18:32,388 think there, I mean, especially where AI is concerned, I think we're all still trying to figure out the ROI, right? 198 00:18:32,388 --> 00:18:40,182 You're investing a lot dollars wise, perhaps time wise, hopefully for sure. 199 00:18:40,633 --> 00:18:49,157 But if you don't, you know, kind of take an R and D-esque mindset, right? 200 00:18:49,157 --> 00:18:52,589 That you're going to have some misses. 201 00:18:53,493 --> 00:18:56,555 Right, but you've got to have some, you'll find some hits, right? 202 00:18:56,555 --> 00:19:09,645 You'll have, and then you figure out as it matures, as it gets better than today, you're ready to have that ROI talk and really. 203 00:19:12,513 --> 00:19:25,566 have an opportunity to say, we're differentiating this way or we're ahead of market or whatever that is, but to say, I don't know, I'm gonna wait, I think that's a risky bet. 204 00:19:25,566 --> 00:19:26,426 Totally. 205 00:19:26,426 --> 00:19:27,867 completely agree. 206 00:19:27,867 --> 00:19:33,328 And yeah, and you know, and like I beat this drum a lot and it's not because I'm trying to be critical. 207 00:19:33,448 --> 00:19:43,571 It's because we are, our livelihood is tied to the law firm market and I really want to see firms push forward and be successful with this. 208 00:19:43,571 --> 00:19:52,574 So yeah, I hope I'm not being taken as a, um, a critic or a skeptic, but I just see 209 00:19:52,947 --> 00:20:07,228 the writing on the wall and it feels like there's going to be a shift in market share from firms that have, like you said, invested in the R &D and worried less about ROI today, but 210 00:20:07,228 --> 00:20:09,400 looking at the future, like we have to learn. 211 00:20:09,400 --> 00:20:13,343 This is a learning exercise for us and we're going to figure it out. 212 00:20:13,343 --> 00:20:17,626 And when we do, there'll be gold at the end of the rainbow. 213 00:20:17,626 --> 00:20:22,800 But the folks that wait, I'm concerned that the market will have changed. 214 00:20:22,854 --> 00:20:29,361 in a way that they can't accommodate and deliver services the way the market needs because they're so far behind. 215 00:20:29,361 --> 00:20:30,822 That's what it feels like. 216 00:20:30,911 --> 00:20:31,781 I agree. 217 00:20:31,781 --> 00:20:37,128 I will talk about it some as like a crawl, walk, run, right? 218 00:20:37,128 --> 00:20:40,422 And we're still crawling, likely, right? 219 00:20:40,422 --> 00:20:48,801 Getting to walking, but I mean, you can't start running without the other steps. 220 00:20:48,914 --> 00:20:49,144 Right. 221 00:20:49,144 --> 00:20:51,576 Yeah, that's a very good point. 222 00:20:51,836 --> 00:21:03,845 Well, one of the benefits that I think is a first time thing in the legal world, in the internet action art world is we're bringing both internet and extra net together into one 223 00:21:03,845 --> 00:21:07,848 unified platform that we call unified collaboration. 224 00:21:07,848 --> 00:21:16,718 And you've been on board with this vision with us and um it's great to have you guys helping us figure this out as. 225 00:21:16,718 --> 00:21:24,184 By the time this airs, Extranet will be fully launched, which we're super excited about. 226 00:21:24,705 --> 00:21:36,114 from our perspective, and we're not a law firm, um but it just seems to make a lot of sense to have one interface and technology to learn to manage all collaborations, whether 227 00:21:36,114 --> 00:21:37,795 it's internal or external. 228 00:21:37,795 --> 00:21:42,499 Because at the end of the day, an intranet or an extranet is a comms mechanism. 229 00:21:42,499 --> 00:21:46,737 It's a way to communicate, whether it's internally or externally. 230 00:21:46,737 --> 00:21:54,909 and sharing of content, whether that content is documents or docket information or billing or matter information. 231 00:21:54,909 --> 00:22:05,214 um It's, it's, it's comms and having one system to manage your comms internal and external feels like it makes a lot of sense. 232 00:22:05,214 --> 00:22:14,918 And how, how big a deal is having one instead of having a high Q and a handshake environment with diff build on different technologies and 233 00:22:15,378 --> 00:22:23,694 requiring different people to manage and different infrastructure and different licensing and how big a deal is that in your world? 234 00:22:25,047 --> 00:22:26,758 I think it's significant. 235 00:22:26,758 --> 00:22:38,826 think from an end user, I hate to use that word, from a usability perspective, you get to reinforce a common experience. 236 00:22:38,827 --> 00:22:43,670 And folks aren't context switching all the time. 237 00:22:43,670 --> 00:22:45,282 This is intranet. 238 00:22:45,282 --> 00:22:47,013 This is extranet. 239 00:22:47,013 --> 00:22:51,876 This is teams or whatever, for collaboration, like matter work or whatever. 240 00:22:51,876 --> 00:22:53,317 uh 241 00:22:53,599 --> 00:23:10,523 You get to be a little bit more consistent and hopefully deliver up key information, whether it's from your HR system or, you know, BI tool, whatever it is, right? 242 00:23:10,523 --> 00:23:18,159 Those other systems deliver up the key information in a unified experience, right? 243 00:23:18,159 --> 00:23:23,193 Just reduce that effort people have to go through. 244 00:23:23,425 --> 00:23:25,698 to get what they need, right? 245 00:23:25,698 --> 00:23:30,693 And I think, and so that's true for us, for the law firms. 246 00:23:31,815 --> 00:23:42,548 And then if you think about it from a client perspective and knowing how many clients are familiar with Microsoft, it's reducing that load for them as well. 247 00:23:42,548 --> 00:23:44,069 uh 248 00:23:45,538 --> 00:23:49,442 I think Teams is the interesting, is an interesting piece of this. 249 00:23:49,442 --> 00:24:07,729 And I know we talked about this a ton when we were drafting our chapter, uh because as much as I would say like to say that we have a lot of people using Teams sites for where 250 00:24:07,729 --> 00:24:10,791 they do work, we're not there yet. 251 00:24:10,812 --> 00:24:13,704 Yeah, that's a crawl walk, run journey too. 252 00:24:13,704 --> 00:24:20,657 So crawl is presence, chat and online meetings. 253 00:24:20,657 --> 00:24:24,850 That's the definition of crawl and it's real easy to start crawling. 254 00:24:24,850 --> 00:24:38,377 um Walking is when you start leveraging, know, retention policies around when you get a little more formal in how you're structuring your communications. 255 00:24:38,377 --> 00:24:39,257 Cause the 256 00:24:39,784 --> 00:24:43,218 The beauty and the curse of teams is its flexibility, right? 257 00:24:43,218 --> 00:24:46,321 There's a bunch of different places where you can collaborate, right? 258 00:24:46,321 --> 00:24:47,594 Are you going to post in channels? 259 00:24:47,594 --> 00:24:49,464 Are you going to go, go post in chats? 260 00:24:49,464 --> 00:24:51,747 Are you going to have naming conventions? 261 00:24:51,747 --> 00:24:55,451 When do you post in chats versus ah channels? 262 00:24:55,451 --> 00:25:01,707 It's uh we honestly, we're still figuring that out internally and we live and breathe this stuff. 263 00:25:01,707 --> 00:25:02,558 So 264 00:25:03,531 --> 00:25:14,246 Yeah, we tend to have more operations teams, business professionals using teams as a place to work, right? 265 00:25:14,246 --> 00:25:24,010 Like having team sites, documents are there, maybe it's attached to planner or project or that type of thing. 266 00:25:24,010 --> 00:25:31,373 uh I think the lawyers are still largely I manage email. 267 00:25:32,912 --> 00:25:36,682 But we're getting some to shift and and it's 268 00:25:38,271 --> 00:25:45,969 It's fun, I mean, that's a nerdy way to say it, but it's fun to watch them, to see them embrace. 269 00:25:47,694 --> 00:25:56,754 teams to have all of their matter centric communication happening in posts. 270 00:25:56,834 --> 00:25:58,494 It's not an email. 271 00:25:58,494 --> 00:26:00,554 People get added to the matter. 272 00:26:00,554 --> 00:26:02,514 They can get caught up. 273 00:26:03,014 --> 00:26:06,554 We have M365 co-pilot for folks. 274 00:26:06,554 --> 00:26:08,994 So there's that capability. 275 00:26:08,994 --> 00:26:11,874 I know you're a little bit of a critic. 276 00:26:13,154 --> 00:26:14,414 And that's fine. 277 00:26:14,414 --> 00:26:15,334 It's going to get better. 278 00:26:15,334 --> 00:26:17,581 And I think you said that. 279 00:26:17,581 --> 00:26:26,641 So when you start layering these things, these capabilities together, it becomes a compelling story. 280 00:26:26,881 --> 00:26:33,781 But I don't think it's something we're going to be able to, I wanna say force people into. 281 00:26:34,381 --> 00:26:38,141 But we can encourage them, coach them. 282 00:26:40,822 --> 00:26:42,280 Meet them where they are. 283 00:26:42,398 --> 00:26:42,718 Yeah. 284 00:26:42,718 --> 00:26:45,470 You know, I just realized we keep talking about this chapter we wrote. 285 00:26:45,470 --> 00:26:47,392 didn't name the book. 286 00:26:47,392 --> 00:26:56,009 it's, yeah, yeah, Current and future trends in knowledge management and innovation for legal professionals. 287 00:26:56,009 --> 00:27:04,416 It's quite the mouthful and, Patrick D Domenico pulled this together and it's a, it's a great book and it's an easy read. 288 00:27:04,416 --> 00:27:11,812 So for those of you who want to hear more about this topic, Katrina and I put wrote a chapter that I think turned out pretty good. 289 00:27:12,638 --> 00:27:16,738 Um, so right, exactly. 290 00:27:16,738 --> 00:27:22,778 Well, you know, something along the teams lines that I think is worth talking about in collaboration. 291 00:27:22,778 --> 00:27:35,638 So the presence and the, um, pervasiveness of presence indicators within the M 365 suite is so incredibly cool. 292 00:27:35,638 --> 00:27:40,371 You know, you can be working on a word document and see an icon. 293 00:27:40,371 --> 00:27:53,574 with a presence ring around it with anybody who happens to have the document open and you can click on it and say, Hey, I'm thinking about and start co-authoring right there. 294 00:27:53,574 --> 00:27:57,515 mean, and now I don't know what your plans are on this. 295 00:27:57,515 --> 00:28:04,256 It's, B2B sharing where you can enable shared channels. 296 00:28:04,317 --> 00:28:10,518 So in order to do shared channels in teams today, and I think this is going to 297 00:28:10,952 --> 00:28:12,103 This is not going to change. 298 00:28:12,103 --> 00:28:15,065 kind of has to stay this way, but it could get a little easier. 299 00:28:15,065 --> 00:28:17,187 There's like a 13 step process. 300 00:28:17,187 --> 00:28:29,437 The last time I looked to enable B to be sharing that you basically, have to go in, IT has to do this and they have to go in and you have to basically accept the policy, um, choices 301 00:28:29,437 --> 00:28:34,741 of your counterpart of this other domain, who you're sharing information with. 302 00:28:34,761 --> 00:28:35,782 You accept all that. 303 00:28:35,782 --> 00:28:41,046 And then once you do, you can share channels and then your attorneys can share. 304 00:28:41,314 --> 00:28:43,355 Um, content with them directly. 305 00:28:43,355 --> 00:28:57,441 If you use a tool like ours, you know, every time you upload a document into a extranet site, let's say, and your clients are subscribed to that channel, they can get a 306 00:28:57,441 --> 00:29:00,333 notification in line with all their native teams notifications. 307 00:29:00,333 --> 00:29:03,375 It doesn't muddy up their email box with all of that. 308 00:29:03,375 --> 00:29:06,566 Are y'all thinking about heading that direction? 309 00:29:08,429 --> 00:29:09,990 We've talked about it. 310 00:29:09,990 --> 00:29:13,532 We are not pushing the conversation yet. 311 00:29:13,532 --> 00:29:29,980 Like, let's make sure we're good on the base uh capabilities and depending on like who the client is and how much collaboration we're doing with them. 312 00:29:30,701 --> 00:29:32,862 I think we would explore that. 313 00:29:32,862 --> 00:29:38,030 It is not on my immediate to-do list. 314 00:29:38,030 --> 00:29:54,310 But I have to say, okay, so speaking of to do, was co-authoring or co-editing a document with a colleague and in the comments, right, he assigned me a task, right? 315 00:29:54,310 --> 00:30:02,390 So it showed up in my task list in my to do and I was like, oh my God, I kind of love that. 316 00:30:02,510 --> 00:30:04,070 I am. 317 00:30:04,415 --> 00:30:08,848 the type of person that would put something on a list to cross it off. 318 00:30:09,329 --> 00:30:09,870 Right. 319 00:30:09,870 --> 00:30:17,175 So, so to me getting that type of, of notification, not just somebody mentioned you. 320 00:30:17,716 --> 00:30:18,026 Right. 321 00:30:18,026 --> 00:30:19,978 But this is a task to do. 322 00:30:19,978 --> 00:30:23,741 And then he got the notification that I completed it. 323 00:30:24,322 --> 00:30:33,163 Like that's kind of, mean, I know it seems like, I don't say a weird thing, but absent that. 324 00:30:33,163 --> 00:30:35,678 How many emails back and forth could that have been? 325 00:30:35,678 --> 00:30:38,560 100 % and it's so easy for things to get lost in email. 326 00:30:38,560 --> 00:30:45,205 You know, I mean the way I manage email, I don't know if it's ideal or not, but I keep things unread that are still pending. 327 00:30:45,446 --> 00:30:51,971 And um when I need to follow up on things, I create a task with a date as a reminder. 328 00:30:51,971 --> 00:30:57,466 um But you know, that is a very cool capability. 329 00:30:57,466 --> 00:31:05,522 How about one thing I think is an interesting use case, but I don't know how lawyers are going to feel about it is once you enable 330 00:31:05,522 --> 00:31:10,163 be to be sharing your clients can now ping you on teams. 331 00:31:11,044 --> 00:31:11,844 Right? 332 00:31:11,844 --> 00:31:14,074 That seems good and bad, right? 333 00:31:14,074 --> 00:31:17,225 Like, um, all right, you get a pop up. 334 00:31:17,285 --> 00:31:19,046 How quickly do you respond? 335 00:31:19,046 --> 00:31:25,918 You know, if you're a lawyer and are you going to get, are you going to get heat if you don't respond in a timely manner? 336 00:31:25,918 --> 00:31:27,138 It could be disruptive. 337 00:31:27,138 --> 00:31:27,675 I don't know. 338 00:31:27,675 --> 00:31:33,662 Do you have any thoughts on whether or not this is going to be a feature lawyers want to use with their clients? 339 00:31:33,662 --> 00:31:35,203 I remember this story. 340 00:31:35,203 --> 00:31:50,487 I mean, this is probably a decade at least old that a law, and I want to say it was like an Australian law firm that they had through their website, their public facing website 341 00:31:50,487 --> 00:31:56,489 showed the presence indicator like on their attorney bio pages. 342 00:31:56,629 --> 00:31:57,569 And that was the thing. 343 00:31:57,569 --> 00:32:00,170 was like, do you really want? 344 00:32:01,365 --> 00:32:07,849 to show that somebody is available now because I will also say that 345 00:32:09,995 --> 00:32:14,263 And like as a business professional, kind of like live and die by my calendar. 346 00:32:14,263 --> 00:32:16,136 You're probably the same way. 347 00:32:16,136 --> 00:32:18,639 You just have so many meetings and whatnot. 348 00:32:20,919 --> 00:32:27,965 For many lawyers, mean, not to say that they're not over-meeting as well, they work on things, right? 349 00:32:27,965 --> 00:32:33,120 They're like in blocks of time, right? 350 00:32:33,120 --> 00:32:38,545 Working on something, but they may not have it reflected on their calendar, right? 351 00:32:38,545 --> 00:32:39,385 And... 352 00:32:41,269 --> 00:32:49,673 I think it would be bad to interrupt that flow work just all the time. 353 00:32:49,673 --> 00:32:53,455 mean, it could happen in email, but they've got a deadline. 354 00:32:53,455 --> 00:32:55,216 They can turn off email. 355 00:32:55,876 --> 00:33:02,740 But that persistent teams pinging, I guess you could exit out of team. 356 00:33:02,740 --> 00:33:06,066 But that could be a challenge. 357 00:33:06,066 --> 00:33:10,999 Yeah, it's uh Teams is, uh email is much more asynchronous. 358 00:33:11,583 --> 00:33:14,609 Teams is more synchronous. 359 00:33:15,286 --> 00:33:20,509 The other thing too, if you start, and it goes back to your governance topic, right? 360 00:33:20,509 --> 00:33:31,476 If you're allowing a client, you know, in that way, you probably want to capture those chats, right? 361 00:33:31,898 --> 00:33:36,531 Like internally, if we're just, I mean, it depends on your organization, but. 362 00:33:38,581 --> 00:33:47,027 depending on, like if you're just using chats, you may have a rule to say they expire in 30 days or something like that. 363 00:33:47,027 --> 00:33:55,892 And if you're allowing clients to have that same experience with you, you probably don't want to expire them. 364 00:33:55,913 --> 00:33:57,004 Yeah, that's a good point. 365 00:33:57,004 --> 00:34:03,668 You know, I've, I've heard of much, much, much more aggressive retention policies, like three days. 366 00:34:03,668 --> 00:34:08,271 The longest I've ever heard for a chat is seven days, retention. 367 00:34:08,271 --> 00:34:13,114 And the reason is they want people to post and channels related to matters. 368 00:34:13,114 --> 00:34:17,657 And you know, a chat is, you want to go grab coffee, right? 369 00:34:18,077 --> 00:34:25,554 not, Hey, so and so from such and such client wants to do X, Y, and Z with this matter. 370 00:34:25,554 --> 00:34:28,635 That needs to go in a channel. 371 00:34:29,376 --> 00:34:38,681 maybe it's 14 days, but I presented with a couple of firms at Iltta, I don't know if it was last year the year before, and they discussed their retention policies, and one was 372 00:34:38,681 --> 00:34:40,942 three days because of that reason. 373 00:34:41,877 --> 00:34:43,261 It makes sense. 374 00:34:43,828 --> 00:34:44,648 Yeah. 375 00:34:45,388 --> 00:34:51,271 But you know, maybe, maybe lawyers are going to have to adjust how they work and block time on their calendar. 376 00:34:51,271 --> 00:34:53,562 I know it's a crazy thing to think about, right? 377 00:34:53,562 --> 00:35:07,520 But you know, if you're Coca-Cola and you have, um you know, tens of millions of dollars of legal fee, legal spend with a particular law firm, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna 378 00:35:07,520 --> 00:35:10,761 ask for, I'd like to, I'd like to ping you directly. 379 00:35:10,761 --> 00:35:12,442 And the lawyer is going to say, 380 00:35:12,454 --> 00:35:15,221 Yes, I would think. 381 00:35:16,488 --> 00:35:17,388 Right. 382 00:35:17,689 --> 00:35:18,629 Sorry. 383 00:35:19,069 --> 00:35:20,549 I have a back flip problem. 384 00:35:21,688 --> 00:35:36,016 Um, so in addition to the teams in the, in the more frictionless sharing of information with clients, there's some other benefits that I want to get your thoughts on that, you 385 00:35:36,016 --> 00:35:42,830 know, I see it from a product perspective, but you know, with high Q that is a very ring fenced isolated system. 386 00:35:42,830 --> 00:35:45,401 It's on an Island and you want to push data in and out. 387 00:35:45,401 --> 00:35:50,825 You're pushing it into I sheets, which is like an Excel doc, or 388 00:35:50,825 --> 00:35:51,721 a SharePoint list. 389 00:35:51,721 --> 00:35:53,201 SharePoint list right? 390 00:35:53,201 --> 00:35:54,722 Not a relational database. 391 00:35:54,722 --> 00:36:07,275 There are limitations to it, but not with with um with our solution we deploy in your tenant so you can pull information from any and we already stand up our integration hub 392 00:36:07,275 --> 00:36:08,935 that allows you. 393 00:36:09,415 --> 00:36:17,957 Yeah, exactly, so you can pull information from your PMS, docketing, experience management, LPM system, DMS, PMS. 394 00:36:18,578 --> 00:36:19,198 Anything. 395 00:36:19,198 --> 00:36:20,360 um 396 00:36:20,360 --> 00:36:21,411 Do you guys have plans? 397 00:36:21,411 --> 00:36:29,615 But historically, like all those capabilities are super cool, but most law firms use really it's mostly files. 398 00:36:29,615 --> 00:36:34,618 Are you guys thinking you're going to do more now that it's easily accessible? 399 00:36:34,957 --> 00:36:44,153 So I mean, I think that the files piece is certainly the use case that is the strongest. 400 00:36:44,314 --> 00:36:46,157 I think there are. 401 00:36:48,009 --> 00:36:54,769 ways to better leverage, even if it's just the Microsoft list, right, capability. 402 00:36:54,769 --> 00:36:57,564 I think there is some 403 00:36:59,583 --> 00:37:04,557 to do some true, so we say, we call it collaboration, right? 404 00:37:04,557 --> 00:37:10,021 But a lot of times that just means I'm gonna upload some files so you have access to them. 405 00:37:10,021 --> 00:37:16,375 But I think you could have like the next level of collaboration which includes like co-editing, right? 406 00:37:16,375 --> 00:37:19,333 Let's work on this document at the same time. 407 00:37:19,333 --> 00:37:25,552 I mean, imagine the savings you could have under the right scenario, right? 408 00:37:25,552 --> 00:37:27,605 Of I don't have to, 409 00:37:27,605 --> 00:37:34,584 I have my version, you have yours, and now we've got to exchange and redline and, oh, right? 410 00:37:34,584 --> 00:37:38,619 I mean, that co-editing experience could just save so much time. 411 00:37:38,619 --> 00:37:40,741 uh 412 00:37:42,446 --> 00:37:47,529 And again, I think it depends on what is the relationship. 413 00:37:47,710 --> 00:37:51,732 If Coca-Cola, for example, I used to use big client, right? 414 00:37:52,373 --> 00:38:09,865 If a client like that said, we want to see our billing history or WIP or whatever, if the business says that's appropriate, we now have an easier mechanism to do that. 415 00:38:11,017 --> 00:38:20,962 I think that in the high queue world, and this is just our instance of high queue, we would likely run reports and upload them. 416 00:38:21,683 --> 00:38:34,309 As opposed to doing the data connector to an iSheet or to a SQL database or something like that and presenting it in the site, it would just. 417 00:38:37,043 --> 00:38:45,017 likely be a more manual process, eh but I think that gets to be just a whole lot simpler. 418 00:38:45,017 --> 00:38:47,275 You're just removing so much friction. 419 00:38:47,752 --> 00:38:48,362 Yeah. 420 00:38:48,362 --> 00:38:52,884 And I mean, Haikyuu was designed to that way. 421 00:38:52,884 --> 00:39:08,871 it is a, it's an island and you know, back, you know, they started when the cloud was still like scary and you know, you kind of, you kind of had to, people were, got 422 00:39:08,871 --> 00:39:12,572 uncomfortable if it was too easy to share. 423 00:39:12,572 --> 00:39:12,942 Right. 424 00:39:12,942 --> 00:39:16,764 I feel like we've, I feel like we've come a long way since then though. 425 00:39:16,764 --> 00:39:17,774 And now, 426 00:39:17,960 --> 00:39:20,814 people do understand that it's okay. 427 00:39:20,814 --> 00:39:22,650 The cloud's not going to hurt you. 428 00:39:24,621 --> 00:39:31,052 I mean, I think there was a movement, and maybe it's still in play, of being cloud first. 429 00:39:31,915 --> 00:39:32,841 Right? 430 00:39:32,841 --> 00:39:33,797 And. 431 00:39:36,885 --> 00:39:45,832 I mean, you mentioned earlier, there are still a lot of firms that are largely on-prem, but those numbers have to be dwindling. 432 00:39:45,832 --> 00:39:48,133 um 433 00:39:49,940 --> 00:40:10,817 not that this is my responsibility or remit, but I much prefer being able to think about how we deliver solutions than how do we keep like so many physical devices up and running 434 00:40:10,817 --> 00:40:18,533 and right and having to build you know infrastructure to support things to just be able to jump to 435 00:40:18,997 --> 00:40:20,126 supporting things. 436 00:40:20,126 --> 00:40:21,426 Right. 437 00:40:21,926 --> 00:40:24,666 What about skill sets? 438 00:40:26,126 --> 00:40:39,986 you know, like it's, it seems so of the firms I know who have, made significant high Q investments, many of them have teams who manage that, who have to really understand the 439 00:40:39,986 --> 00:40:41,026 platform. 440 00:40:41,346 --> 00:40:47,582 And, um, with M 365, if you understand M 365 and SharePoint and 441 00:40:47,582 --> 00:40:56,522 If you're a developer, they're fairly commodity skill sets, React JS, you have no little SPFX, but you can build customizations. 442 00:40:56,702 --> 00:41:06,902 How much benefit are you going to get from just having more people who are easier to find, I would think. 443 00:41:07,349 --> 00:41:13,705 say people that are easier to find and also organizations that are able to support you. 444 00:41:13,705 --> 00:41:17,238 Like from a consulting perspective, right? 445 00:41:17,238 --> 00:41:35,461 I the the high Q kind of ecosystem, I think, I mean, I can count on one hand, the consultants that I would go to if I really needed something bespoke out of high Q. 446 00:41:36,797 --> 00:41:37,647 Yeah. 447 00:41:38,388 --> 00:41:39,528 It's on limp. 448 00:41:39,528 --> 00:41:40,568 Yeah. 449 00:41:41,309 --> 00:41:42,029 Right. 450 00:41:42,029 --> 00:41:42,489 Yeah. 451 00:41:42,489 --> 00:41:51,392 There's fewer of them and you know, that means that drives up costs that sometimes can, if they're busy, make things take longer. 452 00:41:51,392 --> 00:42:00,556 Um, but yeah, it definitely gives you more choice when it's a, just more of a commodity skillset. 453 00:42:00,556 --> 00:42:02,577 What about on the AI front? 454 00:42:02,577 --> 00:42:06,608 And I know we only have about three, four minutes here, but like, 455 00:42:06,610 --> 00:42:15,949 You and I have talked about potential use cases with AI in the extranet world, like chat bots, like we deployed. 456 00:42:15,949 --> 00:42:19,202 think, I think I can talk about this one because we did a case study on it. 457 00:42:19,202 --> 00:42:20,142 So it's public. 458 00:42:20,142 --> 00:42:32,234 Um, we had a large IP firm who we built and, uh, we built a chat bot on top of Azure open AI and it crawled and indexed all of their policy documents. 459 00:42:32,234 --> 00:42:33,114 So 460 00:42:33,198 --> 00:42:37,082 expense policy that was in a PDF somewhere in a SharePoint library. 461 00:42:37,082 --> 00:42:42,047 um PTO policy that was on a wiki somewhere. 462 00:42:42,047 --> 00:42:52,938 um It could be, you know, sexual harassment policy or, you know, um ethical gift limit policies that's in all these different places. 463 00:42:52,938 --> 00:42:55,621 And we took Azure AI and crawled and indexed all that. 464 00:42:55,621 --> 00:42:57,360 We put a 465 00:42:57,360 --> 00:43:05,667 I'm sorry, Azure AI search to crawl an index and then Azure open AI and build a bot where you can go in and ask any policy question in the Internet and man, they love it. 466 00:43:05,667 --> 00:43:09,101 It's like where do I go to submit a PTO request? 467 00:43:09,101 --> 00:43:15,516 Well, type it and you answer like are there any client facing scenarios like that that makes sense? 468 00:43:16,285 --> 00:43:19,967 I mean, I think that there can be. 469 00:43:19,967 --> 00:43:36,216 mean, in the instant, in that example, I think there are uh firms, right, if they have consistent advice, right, that they are giving people um that experience, I think it's 470 00:43:36,216 --> 00:43:38,037 huge, right? 471 00:43:39,874 --> 00:43:49,862 If you think about kind of like the evolution of like intranet or whatever, it was maybe you would think about the menu structure and browsing, right, to find information. 472 00:43:49,862 --> 00:43:51,424 And then it was search. 473 00:43:51,424 --> 00:43:53,465 Now it's going to be chat. 474 00:43:54,846 --> 00:43:55,207 Right. 475 00:43:55,207 --> 00:44:00,991 And I think the same thing maybe could be true with extranets. 476 00:44:00,991 --> 00:44:08,457 I mean, the, the browsing is probably less of an issue because it's focused on a topic. 477 00:44:08,471 --> 00:44:18,926 But the interrogation piece, Like, you know, I think you the sky is the limit, right? 478 00:44:18,926 --> 00:44:25,418 Imagine having like a co-pilot agent against a document library. 479 00:44:27,041 --> 00:44:30,110 Right, just to be able to do that. 480 00:44:33,259 --> 00:44:48,425 you know, what did we say about X or, you know, what has been filed about something as opposed to largely being restricted by file name metadata and folder structure. 481 00:44:48,688 --> 00:44:48,998 Yeah. 482 00:44:48,998 --> 00:44:56,273 And I hear a lot of people who are confused talk about, well, we've had natural language search for years. 483 00:44:56,273 --> 00:44:56,523 okay. 484 00:44:56,523 --> 00:44:57,244 Yeah, you have. 485 00:44:57,244 --> 00:44:59,476 And what do you get back with natural language search? 486 00:44:59,476 --> 00:45:02,378 You get back a list of links, right? 487 00:45:02,378 --> 00:45:02,828 Yeah. 488 00:45:02,828 --> 00:45:13,366 And what's different here is this is going to be a perplexity like interface where within documents you get back answers, not just links to the documents where you got to go find 489 00:45:13,366 --> 00:45:13,966 it. 490 00:45:14,103 --> 00:45:18,350 And it's semantic understanding, right? 491 00:45:18,350 --> 00:45:23,964 It's not, I mean, even with natural language search, it's just not that good. 492 00:45:23,964 --> 00:45:24,835 Yeah. 493 00:45:25,079 --> 00:45:25,380 Yeah. 494 00:45:25,380 --> 00:45:26,224 Enterprise search. 495 00:45:26,224 --> 00:45:28,813 And that's a whole, another topic. 496 00:45:29,569 --> 00:45:43,657 So Ted, before I know we're just have a minute or so left, but I do want to point out one thing about the extra nets and in the Microsoft world, and that is site life cycle. 497 00:45:44,578 --> 00:45:48,020 And that's been a pain point. 498 00:45:48,100 --> 00:45:51,582 I think for a while, it's very easy to spin up sites. 499 00:45:51,582 --> 00:45:56,725 It's challenging to spin them down and that's a risk. 500 00:45:57,782 --> 00:45:58,102 Right? 501 00:45:58,102 --> 00:46:03,444 You want to remove people when they haven't been visiting. 502 00:46:04,024 --> 00:46:04,565 Right? 503 00:46:04,565 --> 00:46:11,267 And you want to archive sites as a matter of policy when they haven't been used. 504 00:46:11,687 --> 00:46:27,423 And that's a capability that comes kind of in the Microsoft realm that has been missing, em at least from my vantage point in the high queue environment. 505 00:46:28,621 --> 00:46:39,209 uh Because I think it really is a risk and governance concern and being able to close that gap is important. 506 00:46:39,378 --> 00:46:49,888 Yeah, well, you if you think about their licensing model, you know, does it make sense for them to provide capabilities that would reduce your storage or site footprint? 507 00:46:49,888 --> 00:46:56,915 um You know, I don't seems like there's maybe incentive to not make that so easy. 508 00:46:56,915 --> 00:47:02,520 um But yeah, we have put a lot of effort into that. 509 00:47:02,520 --> 00:47:04,932 We because we deploy in your environment. 510 00:47:05,052 --> 00:47:07,174 You know, we have two licensing models today. 511 00:47:07,174 --> 00:47:08,273 This is probably going to change. 512 00:47:08,273 --> 00:47:13,548 It's still brand new, but we have, can license by sites or just like you guys did, just do it enterprise wide. 513 00:47:13,548 --> 00:47:15,329 And then there are no limitations. 514 00:47:15,329 --> 00:47:27,438 You can, as much storage as Microsoft gives you, which is like, if you're on an E3 or E5, I think it's like one, one terabyte per user or some, something crazy. 515 00:47:27,438 --> 00:47:31,681 Like it, there's a lot of storage out there and when you need to buy more, it's cheap. 516 00:47:31,681 --> 00:47:33,362 Um, 517 00:47:33,490 --> 00:47:37,133 But yeah, we've put a lot of effort into the provisioning and the governance piece of this. 518 00:47:37,133 --> 00:47:41,255 Like you can hover over a document and get a preview when we log it. 519 00:47:41,696 --> 00:47:44,158 So it is extremely detailed. 520 00:47:44,158 --> 00:47:53,025 um we think, you know, that's one area where AI, we have some ideas about how to incorporate AI asking analytics questions. 521 00:47:53,025 --> 00:47:59,922 Like, give me the top five sites that haven't been used in the last 30 days or the top three users who 522 00:47:59,922 --> 00:48:04,563 have downloaded the most content or you can do some really neat stuff on the analytic side. 523 00:48:05,344 --> 00:48:06,264 Yeah. 524 00:48:06,864 --> 00:48:07,324 Yeah. 525 00:48:07,324 --> 00:48:11,565 Um, and cause we log everything in Azure app insights. 526 00:48:11,606 --> 00:48:15,377 So it's really easy to query out, but it's manual. 527 00:48:15,377 --> 00:48:20,738 If you do it through the interface, crawl and index that stuff, throw a bot on top. 528 00:48:20,738 --> 00:48:22,809 You can ask some really neat questions. 529 00:48:23,729 --> 00:48:24,070 Yeah. 530 00:48:24,070 --> 00:48:25,800 All that stuff's coming down the pike. 531 00:48:25,800 --> 00:48:28,255 Well, this has been a great conversation as always. 532 00:48:28,255 --> 00:48:32,102 really appreciate you taking a few minutes. 533 00:48:32,102 --> 00:48:34,285 uh Are you active on LinkedIn? 534 00:48:35,008 --> 00:48:35,750 Yeah. 535 00:48:35,750 --> 00:48:38,524 So folks can find you at Katrina Dittmer. 536 00:48:39,488 --> 00:48:40,414 Indeed. 537 00:48:40,414 --> 00:48:43,616 And that's D-I-T-T-M-E-R on LinkedIn. 538 00:48:43,757 --> 00:48:46,569 And you show your face at events. 539 00:48:46,569 --> 00:48:49,761 I see you in places here and there, right? 540 00:48:49,761 --> 00:48:50,823 I will be at Ulta. 541 00:48:50,823 --> 00:48:53,469 think I'm speaking at a session at Ulta. 542 00:48:53,469 --> 00:48:57,207 So we'll connect then. 543 00:48:57,207 --> 00:48:59,053 Yeah. 544 00:48:59,053 --> 00:49:05,672 Well, thanks for uh spending some time and I'm sure I'll see you before Elta, but worst case I'll see you then. 545 00:49:05,672 --> 00:49:07,944 All right. 546 00:49:07,944 --> 00:49:08,885 Thank you. -->