Robert Ambrogi Blog
In his keynote speech opening LEX Summit in Salt Lake City, Filevine founder and CEO Ryan Anderson emphasized platforms as the future of technology for law firms, criticizing the legal technology landscape as a fragmented and inefficient array of point solutions, and promising that Filevine will deliver firms a better way by bringing together everything they need in a single platform.
He shared he story of a potential customer, the practice management leader at an Am Law 200 law firm, who, during a product demo of Filevine, declared it the “single pane of glass” that every lawyer wants for managing all aspects of their work.
Drawing an analogy to Steve Jobs’ introduction of the iPhone – which combined a phone, an MP3 player and an internet connection device in a single product – Anderson said the legal market is ripe for a unified platform that integrates the three core workflows of legal practice – robust matter management, document management, and timekeeping.
But so far, he said, no product has truly done that. “Very few companies are even good at one of these things – at case management, document management, time and billing – almost nobody can get one of these right. … No company has ever been good at two. It’s never happened. I’ve never seen it.”
Filevine’s commitment to its customers, he said, is to be the best in the world at integrating all three of those core workflows into a single, seamless platform.
“We will do it – it will take time, but we will do it. And once it’s done, we will look back on the early 2020s, maybe the mid-2020s, as the last time you looked at point solutions – disjointed, unconnected, disconnected point solutions – to do your job as a lawyer.”
Anderson said that as a student of the tech industry, and of the SaaS market in particular, he come to believe that as markets get bigger, they tend to produce one winner, one market leader who captures most of the market value. For case management, he believes Filevine will be that winner.
“We believe the market has spoken and the market demands one seamless platform,” he said. “Fileline will be the platform solution for legal.”
Later today at LEX Summit, the company will unveil a number of new features. But Anderson vowed that all of those features will be delivered to customers at no extra cost above what they are currently paying.
Anderson told the assembled customers that he considered his company’s relationship with them to be special and unique.
“There really is no partnership quite like that of a law firm and a case management system. It sounds silly, but you all interact with Filevine hundreds of times a day, each user. Your firms likely interact with us thousands, if not tens of thousands, of times. And there are some firms out there who interact with us 100,000 times every single day. So this relationship is a special relationship.”
Before he wrapped up, Anderson previewed one new product feature that he said was inspired by customer feedback, particularly from one of the company’s earliest customers. The feature allows users to customize their dashboards with up to 100 “vitals,” or key metrics, tailored to their specific roles within the firm.
This enhancement reflects Filevine’s focus on delivering solutions that meet the unique needs of each user, Anderson said.