NetDocuments

Today on Lawnex, I am here live at the NetDocuments Inspire conference in Orlando, Florida, where I've just interviewed Josh Baxter, the CEO of NetDocuments.

This is the first of three interviews I'm going to be recording here and posting over the next couple of weeks.

Josh and I talk about his vision for the company in the age of AI and how document management is evolving into intelligence management.

Now let's get to today's conversation.

Welcome to Law Next.

This is Bob Ambrogi, and I am here live at the NetDocuments Inspired Conference in Orlando, Florida, where I am doing another in what's been a series of interviews I've done here during the conference.

This time, I'm going straight to the top with the CEO, Josh Baxter.

Josh, welcome.

LexisNexis is using SALI.

iManage, NetDocuments, Microsoft in-house, Intel in-house, and all the biggest law firms in the world are all coalescing around the SALI standard only because it's free and open source.

If it were a restrictive license, nobody would adopt it.

Because they would say, well, I don't want to have a liability of Sally suing me if I do something wrong.

So we do get a lot of law firms that ask us that, right? Is there a pre-work to get something as catty work in these agents that can do that kind of work? And maybe the beginning concept might have been, yes, reality right now is less of that because agents have become smarter.

So we have even helped a lot from saying like, hey, you have this system like Box or NetDocuments and all your documents are a mess and nothing is in the right place and things are not tagged correctly.

You can train an agent with what are your naming conventions, how do you want it to label things and structure folders and let it just run on thousands of documents and put everything up to date and in order.

So we can help you on the cleanup.

with your Word, your Excel, your PowerPoint, your Outlook.

Then we've got NetDocuments.

So on the document management side, again, when we selected it and still very confident with it, it is cloud-based.

It's very secure.

We've got a prompt library that people have produced in the past, but also you can add to it and you have a project and you can do the usual sort of Gen AI sort of functionality.

So that's the start of a 10.

Within NetDocuments, there's the ND Assistant, which is getting better and better.

It didn't start off But then I suppose none of these Gen AI tools did.

Instead of simply assisting after a lawyer begins working, AI increasingly determines how work enters the department, how it's categorized, and what happens next.

Looking now at some ILTA Presswall highlights, NetDocuments expanded its IndyMax Studio portfolio to 45 pre-built legal AI applications, adding capabilities for practice areas including family law, estate planning, and corporate governance.

Legal AI is becoming progressively more practice-specific rather than relying on one general purpose assistant.

The more specialized legal AI becomes, the easier it may be for lawyers to translate AI capability into actual workflow value.

Legora is building an integration ecosystem.

Harvey and Legora are moving upstream into legal intake.

And Ilta Press Wall announcements show platforms like NetDocuments, Revia, TurboLaw, and Clara embedding intelligence directly into established legal workflows.

At the same time, Anthropic's decision to restrict internet access during agent testing reminds us that greater autonomy brings greater risk.

You know, you know, I hear a lot of lawyers scared about putting, uh, data on, on other company servers.

Well, at this point, a lot of companies are using NetDocs, uh, and Google Drive, and SharePoint.

We're already putting data on somebody else's servers, and those other servers are already indexing the data 'cause when you search for it, it's coming up.

Um, so, you know, and I think some lawyers should be concerned depending on what you're dealing with.

Mm-hmm

... you know, NetDocument and Google Workplace, and, um, you know, early on in our conversation you also talk about, like, the, um, you know, the hardest part is, like, data.

Um, what does that mean in practice?

Um, when, when we think about our data ecosystem, y- law, law firms traditionally are like you have this traditional or put all of your data in one environment, and control and lock down that one environment, and, and that's what you have.

Relativity is a data intelligence platform.

We just came from Ulticon, where, you know, iManage, and NetDocuments, and whoever else is talking about themselves as the data intelligence platform.

Is this all just marketing hype, or is this a real thing? And what, what do you think of that?

This whole organization, Bob, um, is a real thing.

We're s- you know, maybe we're not an e-discovery company per se anymore.

We're a data company, but it's still basically litigation and e-discovery data that we're talking about here.

Whereas with, uh, say, a NetDocuments or iManage, it's, it's a law firm data.

It's a whole different set of data, and then you've got some of the major AI providers that are now integrating course, uh, ca- case law data and docket data, that sort of thing.

Yeah

... could we actually use this? Like, where are our policies? Like, are they stored in SharePoint? Are they in NetDocuments? Are they in iManage? Like, where are they? Is our AI connected to that? Can I use it? How? Um, it was great to see that excitement building and the, and the thoughts going.

So that's interesting because what, you know, we get to what data you connect to and what information you connect to and all that, and then the question is, well, what data do I have?

Uh-huh.