Article written by Alok Abhishek and Chris Sheader
A New Era of Innovation in Legal Tech
The legal industry stands at a transformative crossroads. As regulatory complexity intensifies and client expectations continue to rise, law firms are under increasing pressure to strengthen financial resilience, boost productivity, supercharge decision making, ensure compliance, mitigate regulatory risks, and deliver exceptional client value at unprecedented speed. Firm leaders across finance, legal practice, human resources, and technology face a converging set of urgent and strategically important challenges. Amid this disruption, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) offers a transformative opportunity not only to reimagine operational efficiency and client service but to reshape how firms navigate and solve these challenges fundamentally.
At Aderant, our vision for AI is centered around empowering professionals by equipping them with superpower of AI to work smarter, make better decisions, and gain strategic advantage. Our AI strategy is anchored in two core pillars: a commitment to responsible, human centric design and a relentless focus on delivering productive, outcome driven innovation.
The Foundation: Design Principles
Our vision is to build AI that acts as a true force multiplier for law firms: driving profitability, accelerating operational efficiency, fortifying compliance, and enabling smarter, faster decisions. Guided by our deep commitment to security, ethical responsibility, and continuous innovation, we empower firms to embrace the future confidently.
At the core of our design philosophy are two guiding principles that shape every aspect of our AI development: Productive AI and Responsible AI. These pillars are not just conceptual; they are practical standards we apply to ensure our technology delivers measurable value while upholding the trust our customers place in us.
Productive AI is about more than automation. It’s about building AI that actively drives outcomes, improving how legal professionals work, make decisions, and serve their clients. From accelerating time entry and enhancing financial forecasting to answering complex operational queries in real time, our focus is on creating AI that delivers tangible efficiency gains and strategic advantage across the business of law.
Equally essential is our commitment to Responsible AI, the principle that powerful technology must also be principled. Trust and transparency aren’t optional for law firms that manage sensitive information, uphold client confidentiality, and operate under stringent ethical obligations. That’s why we’ve embedded guardrails, data governance, data privacy, data security, and ethical safeguards into every layer of our AI stack, from data usage and model design to deployment and feedback.
Together, these two principles ensure that our AI solutions are transformative and trustworthy, built to perform, built to protect, and built for the LegalTech domain.
Productive AI: MADDI and askMADDI
Our AI vision comes to life through MADDI, Stridyn platform’s AI services. MADDI powers full spectrum AI capabilities spanning both classical machine learning and Generative AI including askMADDI, Aderant’s AI-powered virtual associate. MADDI’s architecture is composable, modular, and agentic by design, allowing us to build scalable, role aware, and context sensitive AI services that integrate deeply into legal workflows. Designed and engineered from the ground up specifically for the LegalTech domain, MADDI is a domain tuned AI services tailored to the unique needs, language, complexities, and requirements of law firms.
askMADDI, powered by MADDI, is not simply a wrapper around a large language model. It is a purposefully designed virtual associate that combines the reasoning power of generative AI with the precision and governance required by law firms. Whether providing data driven insights, guiding workflows, or surfacing knowledge, askMADDI functions as a trusted virtual associate, always on, always responsive, and always willing to empower users with power of AI and amplify their productivity via seamless user experience. We’re excited to introduce a set of transformative new capabilities of askMADDI that deliver immediate and meaningful value to our customers.
Natural Language to Query, a breakthrough in data accessibility that empowers users to ask business questions in plain English and receive structured, secure, and contextually relevant answers, all while honoring role-based access, ethical walls, and privacy by design. This capability unlocks on-demand business intelligence and analytics without requiring technical expertise, making insights truly accessible across the firm. At the core of this capability is a powerful idea, make insight effortless. Many law firms struggle with fragmented systems and data silos, leading to inconsistent reporting and slow access to critical metrics. Leaders often wait days for manually compiled reports, limiting agility and decision-making. askMADDI eliminates these bottlenecks by allowing users to ask questions in plain English, no SQL, no schema knowledge, no technical friction. It handles the complexity behind the scenes, delivering clear, actionable answers in real time. Whether auditing transactions, reconciling accounts, analyzing performance, or tracking time, askMADDI puts vital insights at your fingertips, naturally, intuitively, and instantly.
Complementing this is Product Help and Troubleshooting capability within askMADDI, which provides real time, in product guidance exactly when and where users need it. Whether exploring new functionality, resolving issues, or navigating complex workflows, askMADDI delivers clear, step-by-step support tailored to each user’s role and context. askMADDI also redefines how users learn the product and access support. Available 24/7, it provides conversational, context-aware guidance without the need to search documentation, browse help articles, or log support tickets. Drawing from curated knowledge, expert-authored content, and historical support data, askMADDI delivers step-by-step answers tailored to your role and workflow. From exploring new functionality to troubleshooting issues or learning best practices, askMADDI offers personalized, on-demand assistance. Continuously evolving with new knowledge, it becomes smarter over time ensuring every user has a knowledgeable, responsive, and always-improving virtual product expert by their side.
In addition to these new experiences, we’ve also expanded our AI capabilities across the Work-to-Cash solutions. Onyx’s askMADDI Terms Assistant automates Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCG) compliance, reducing risk. In iTimeKeep we have enhanced Ready-to-Review Time Entry suggest compliant narratives and billing codes helping firms accelerate revenue realization with greater accuracy and ease.
Responsible AI by Design
At Aderant, responsible AI is not an afterthought, it’s a foundational principle that informs every layer of our MADDI services architecture, from data privacy, user role based access control, and model use to user experience and governance. Our commitment to privacy and security begins with stringent data governance protocols. We never use client confidential, sensitive, or personally identifiable data for model training, and all data is governed by strict access controls, encryption, and ethical wall enforcement. Reliability and accuracy are upheld through continuous evaluation, prompt refinement, and domain tuned retrieval pipelines designed specifically for the legal industry. Every AI response generated through askMADDI is traceable, verifiable, and contextual because in legal practice, precision and trust are paramount.
Equally important are the values of transparency, accountability, fairness, and human centered design. Users have visibility into references and grounding of askMADDI’s response, with built-in guardrails and role based access control that surface only authorized and relevant information. askMADDI which is built using MADDI AI services is governed by ethical standards of the legal profession and the diverse realities of the people who practice within it. Our goal is to build MAADI that is principled, powerful, and aligned to the unique demands of law firms.
This philosophy is deeply aligned with our strategic partnership with Microsoft. In Dan Armistead’s (Director, Data & AI Specialist) words: “At Microsoft, we believe the most impactful AI solutions are those built responsibly, with deep domain expertise and customer trust at their core. Aderant’s integration of the Azure OpenAI service exemplifies this approach, combining the power of Aderant’s legal technology leadership with Azure OpenAI’s frontier models to deliver meaningful, secure, and human-centered innovation to law firms around the world. On behalf of Microsoft, we are very grateful for the innovative culture that Aderant brings to the table. Both companies view this as a strategic partnership built on trust, responsible AI, privacy, and security above all else to deliver value to Aderant clients.”
Together with Microsoft, we are shaping the future of AI in LegalTech, responsibly, securely, and with the needs of legal professionals at the center of everything we build.
Looking Ahead: Continuous Innovation
This is only the beginning. Our roadmap includes next-generation capabilities such as agentic automation, predictive decision support, anomaly detection, and proactive analytics designed to surface the right insights at the right time, making intelligence more accessible, actionable, and aligned with user intent, while always keeping professionals in control. As we continue to expand the AI services delivered through MADDI and evolve askMADDI into an even more powerful virtual associate, our commitment to productive and responsible AI remains steadfast.
At Aderant, we don’t build AI just to keep pace with innovation, we build it to shape the future of LegalTech. Because when AI is crafted with care, governed with integrity, and designed to amplify human expertise, it doesn’t just support law firms. It transforms them, empowering professionals, elevating outcomes, and redefining what’s possible.