An article written by Andy Hoyt, Chief Technology Officer at Aderant
We live and work in exciting times! Aderant launched Stridyn, our new AI-driven cloud platform, at Global Momentum in Nashville, and then introduced it to our EMEA clients in London. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the new platform, but also some confusion about what Stridyn really is, from a technical perspective. Let’s get right down to answering that question so Aderant clients and law firms can understand the benefits of the innovative cloud platform.
What does “platform” mean when it comes to Stridyn?
For Stridyn, the “platform” is a framework of software that is intended to work together in harmony. It’s a set of tools, technology and services that provides the foundational experience for developing, deploying, managing and leveraging tech applications across the law firm. The platform is the base upon which all the firm’s software applications – often a collection of various, different products – can be built, executed, and maintained in a standard, consolidated environment.
A platform makes it easier to swap out individual components to add best-of-breed capabilities. Facebook and Salesforce are examples of familiar, widely-used platforms which are useful resources for developers to build upon, and for end-users to access. Legal software is constantly evolving, and periodically, law firms will certainly reevaluate or even replace a piece of technology to serve the firm better. Historically, this conversion and deployment process has taken months or even years. However, with the Stridyn platform, it’s easy to switch out products as technology changes are made. There is no need to start from scratch or engage in messy, time-consuming migrations and upgrades.
What’s different about Stridyn?
Any law firm that is using one of Aderant’s cloud products is already on Stridyn, but they may not realize it because the platform experience is happening behind the scenes. There is no additional technology for people to learn. Stridyn embraces the fact that a law firm may want to use products from a variety of legal software vendors, including Aderant’s but not limited to those.
Law firms are all slightly different and unique, and they will choose appropriate technologies based on which problems they need to solve. Aderant, though confident in our ability to deliver best-of-breed solutions in each product category we serve, believes the best way to serve our clients is to support their diverse technology decisions. Therefore, we made Stridyn both flexible and versatile to work for clients with various combinations of software. No technology provider – not even Aderant – can solve every problem a law firm faces, so our philosophy is that firms can use their preferred products and our Stridyn platform will tie them all seamlessly together.
A Single Ecosystem with Common Rules and Shared Services
Stridyn delivers foundational capabilities which comprise the business end of running a law firm, including timekeeping, billing, intake, general ledger and more. Then, underneath those fundamentals is a set of common requirements and shared services that Aderant built which includes universal aspects like security.
Typically, in these services, a set of events happen and then data is synchronized and communicated. However, many challenges we see come from using many different products, which leads to repetitive and overlapping functions that waste time and interfere with synchronization.
The Stridyn approach, as an example, is to have a single rules engine that any application – whether Aderant-made or not – can leverage in a common, consistent fashion. There are no more integrations, connectors, or links – the platform provides all the interaction with common and shared services that all software solutions can leverage.
Philosophy on AI – Solve Real Business Problems
The techie in me says that I can build some cool AI stuff, but it if doesn’t solve any business problems, then the AI becomes irrelevant. AI is an accelerant to help solve different problems, and my team is working on evolving our use of the technology to make things better, faster, and sooner.
I’ve seen lots of AI technologies that promise to deliver a base of capabilities, but if it’s going to take 6 or 12 months to get there, that could take too long. One of the benefits of Stridyn is the common services and common data layer across all different aspects of a business of law solution approach. This allows us to marry data from various disparate systems into a single data source. This process yields much better insights so we can take action and improve the user experience across-the-board.
Take Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCGs) for an example of how AI can shine. OCGs pour into a law firm and are very unwieldy to manage, and yet failure to comply with them costs the firm both time and money. With AI, namely our MADDI virtual associate, Aderant can extract all that information from OCG documents better than humans can do alone, and then create rules and communicate them to timekeepers so their billing narratives and codes are compliant. There is a direct success rate associated with this application of AI, measurable in recouped revenues and faster work-to-cash.
Another key to using AI effectively is that it must be simple if you want people to use it. At Global Momentum, we announced askMADDI, a natural language interface which allows people to interact with an expert system by asking it straightforward “what is” or “how to” questions. We have trained askMADDI to provide true value to the law firm based on its own internal data that’s coming from the Stridyn platform. The AI embedded in askMADDI gives law firms a full 360-degree view of their clients. The AI puts the firm’s data at their fingertips which leads to greater transparency and a better experience. By leveraging our underlying MADDI technology, we can provide accelerated solutions and input, insights and analytics on top of it, and automation in a lot of cases by leveraging AI.
Cloud First and Foremost
From a cloud standpoint, Aderant is all about cloud-first product development.
Expert Sierra is the foundation of what we have done with the Stridyn cloud platform. Now, when we think about security or identity and authorization, Sierra is already a part of it – the logging, monitoring and notifications are happening constantly, but clients hopefully never have to see those because Sierra is secure and reliable. With Stridyn as a framework underneath, adding other applications to connect with Sierra is straightforward, having positive impact of new capabilities with very low or zero negative effects for our clients. Aderant is continuing to build out cloud and AI capabilities into the Stridyn platform. We recently announced a private preview of our General Ledger (GL) in the cloud, and more new releases are planned for the near future.
Conclusion
As a tech geek, it is easy for me to get excited about Stridyn, MADDI, Sierra and our other initiatives. The best part, though, is that I see Aderant law firm clients getting excited about it, too, especially when they realize the transformative value of the capabilities they can use now.
The Momentum user conferences gave me and my team an opportunity to present these concepts to clients, but also provided the opportunity for us to listen and learn how they can be more useful and intuitive. Working together in close collaboration with our customers, we are accomplishing amazing things, and this is just the beginning!