An article written by Lisa Erickson, VP, Product AI & Cloud Transformation at Aderant
About four months ago, I started my journey at Aderant in my newly-created position of Vice President of Product AI & Cloud Transformation, and the process has been very exciting so far! When I joined the company, my mission was to leverage my 25+ years of experience in the tech industry to drive innovation in the cutting-edge areas of AI and cloud, as my job title suggests. Working with a dedicated product management team, my colleagues and I have been able to accomplish several early goals already. Now, we are assertively tackling our next set of objectives which will propel Aderant further into spearheading the future of legal technology.
Our team’s key goals around AI and cloud successfully manifested in the recent launch of Stridyn, a breakthrough AI-driven cloud platform which embodies the next generation in the Aderant cloud journey. Stridyn seamlessly ties together a law firm’s entire tech stack, whether the firm uses only Aderant solutions or Aderant combined with a variety of providers. Stridyn enables a converged user experience across many different applications and use cases, all underpinned by AI. Stridyn heavily leverages both MADDI, our AI-driven virtual associate which launched in 2023, as well as incorporating next-level analytics capabilities.
Via Stridyn, Aderant coalesces the entire firm – including all the different applications, modules, data and analytics it needs – into one cloud platform with a unified user experience. Stridyn creates a common language to integrate the firm’s applications and forge a common understanding between end-users and the firm. Eliminating disconnects and opacity, the platform effectively improves productivity and improves insights into the firm’s data.
A tangible example of Stridyn’s delivering value through AI is our recent release of askMADDI, an AI-based chatbot which can currently answer “how to” and “what is” questions. At present, askMADDI is in “private preview”, an initial testing phase which only includes select customers. By participating in the preview, Aderant client firms can see first-hand how AI helps them accomplish tasks faster and accelerates the work-to-cash cycle. After this initial private preview stage, access to askMADDI will be offered to more firms and will expand beyond “what is/how to” help to accomplish task automation and more. This next step will be a pivotal point in MADDI’s development.
Also just released in private preview is next-stage monetized Analytics in Stridyn which pulls together data from various sources to enable advance reporting and dashboard capability. Stridyn’s “Analytics”has a modernized look and feel; it increases options for law firms to build and use reports with both preset and customizable report templates and dashboards which surface information for modern standards. The preview version of Analytics includes 100 reports and is integrated into Microsoft’s Power BI besides being available in Stridyn. In the future from an analytics standpoint, we plan to assist our partners with creating customized reports, dashboards and inquiries for specific clients like a development center would.
Another major focus of our product management (PM) team is data. The data set that Aderant applications handle runs the firm’s business, and most of it is very sensitive material – data like accounts receivable, accounts payable, billing, timekeeping data, talent management, case/matter, and the firm’s general ledger. Above all else, this data must be protected from exposure, but also made accessible when needed to authorized parties. When it comes to data security, we must consider confidentiality and sovereignty, i.e. how the data is federated and secured/separated from the other firms’ data. Our team at Aderant is thoughtfully shepherding data segmentation, security, isolation, sovereignty and encryption. This activity is intrinsic to designing a backend system that goes into an end-to-end platform like Stridyn. We must ensure the clients can extract value from that data stored in the platform, but that their data is secure and does not become a liability or risk.
Another important aspect to security that is sometimes forgotten is the availability and cyber-resiliency of the data. If something unexpected happens to the data, how is it recovered? You can have the best-laid architecture, but are you testing that for cyberattacks, recoverability, and what else could go wrong. There’s this concept of blast radius, and it considers if the worst things that can happen such as a security, cyberattack or disaster, what is exposed with that blast radius and how can you recover? This recovery aspect of data security is one of the main things that keeps us up at night – planning for cleanup is just as important as designing the system.
To address these myriad issues, we have an excellent PM team which has been stellar at handling the wide range of challenges and opportunities we have had with AI and cloud. Aderant PM professionals are self-starters who sincerely want to make the right things happen for our clients. We are all learning constantly because AI and cloud are both evolving on a daily basis. Upskilling our current people is a great strategy to preserve their institutional knowledge and client relationships so we can take steps forward.
In addition to enriching the education of our incumbent team, we are adding people who bring specific expertise into the organization. Our team recently welcomed Alok Abhishek as Director of Product Management, Data & AI Services, a new position at Aderant. Alok is super-steeped in data and AI knowledge down to a tactical level. He can actually do coding even though he’s a PM specialist, so he knows how applications work from the ground-up. We look forward to seeing how his knowledge of data and AI will positively impact Aderant and its law firm clients.
It’s truly exciting to see great strides forward in my PM team but the rest of Aderant is also doing really interesting things, too. Our CTO Andy Hoyt has made substantial investments in education and training technologies to provide more resources for all of engineering. Implementing tools like Pluralsight online courses and data-driven insights help the team obtain access to much deeper content knowledge. Andy’s technical team needs to write code to develop our products, but to do that, they need to understand how clients will use the technology and how it must integrate with their other products.
We consider this to be just the beginning of an infinite journey to transform law firm business management through the application of cloud and AI technology products and related services. Aderant is in the right place at the right time to bring immediate value and tremendous potential to law firms with our technology solutions.