Robert Ambrogi Blog
At its second-annual Kaleidoscope customer conference in Las Vegas today, 8am announced new generative AI features, a new Claude MCP connector, and new financial products, including a law firm loan program with quick approval and funding.
Although 8am is the parent company of three law practice management platforms – MyCase, CasePEER and DocketWise – as well as the payments technology LawPay, the AI products announced today are available only within MyCase.
The company also announced two financial products: 8am Smart Spend Intelligence, an enhancement to its Smart Spend product that helps categorize transactions to cases, and 8am Capital, a law firm financing program available within LawPay.
The company made all of these announcements as part of what it is calling 8am Showcase, a new series of product releases that will continue beyond today.
The releases also follow 8am’s naming of a new chief product officer, Tanya Hendricks, who joined the company in August. She succeeded Leslie Witt, who had joined the company jsut a few months before last year’s inaugural Kaleidoscope conference, and who I interviewed there for my LawNext podcast.
A New MCP Connector
With Anthropic’s launch of Claude for Legal last May and now OpenAI’s launch of Astra for Law last week, legal tech vendors are enabling their customers to take advantage of the power of these large language models by developing MCP connectors, which allow a user to work in Claude or ChatGPT and access data and capabilities within the vendor’s product.
Now MyCase joins that trend, with the launch of an MCP connector for Claude. 8am says it is the first Claude MCP connector built specifically for legal practice management.
The connector supports 73 different actions across cases, clients, documents, billing and intake, the company says. Legal professionals can, for example, request case summaries, download documents to use in Claude, surface outstanding invoices, and more.
“MyCase MCP turns the lengthy administrative time spent navigating tabs, searching for information, and running reports in 8am MyCase into a simple conversation in Claude,” the company says.
In a preview briefing ahead of today’s announcement, Joshua Carter, principal product manager, AI, at 8am, told me that the MCP was specifically developed to provide users with the ability to synthesize and find information with MyCase and then use that information with the other Claude tools available to them.
“MyCase is a system of record for the practice of law, and we need to be able to give our customers access to that data however they want,” Carter said.
Since preliminarily launching the MCP without any formal announcement a month ago, more than 60 firms have already been using it, and the majority of those are firms of five or fewer.
One example of how firms are using it that Carter shared is to have Claude build a case dashboard, showing all the case notes, events, tasks, time entries, documents, and other fields.
Another example is to use Clause to develop a productivity or profitability report, to show a firm’s profitability or its ROI on certain practice areas.
8am IQ Firm Agent
8am also today announced two additions to its 8am IQ suite of AI tools and assistants. The first of these, 8am IQ Firm Agent, allows a user to ask questions across the firm’s entire set of MyCase data.
MyCase already has a feature, 8am IQ Case Assistant, which is an agent that allows users to ask questions and perform actions across all the case and financial data relating to a specific matter, such as to check on the status, get an update on financials, or send the client a message.
Firm Agent extends that functionality across all the firm’s MyCase account, allowing users to get information and take actions across all cases, financials and documents.
For example, firm leaders could receive data about their most profitable practice area or realization rate, while attorneys and paralegals could pull a daily morning brief and get a status check across every one of their matters.
While the Case Assistant is, as noted, already available within the MyCase platform, the new Firm Agent is still only a prototype.
Carter said he expects to have the first customers using it in beta by mid-October, with the product slated to go live for all customers sometime in December.
Interestingly, Carter said that virtually everything that customers will be able to do using Firm Agent, can also be done already via the MCP connector.
“The interface doesn’t matter to us,” he said. “How our firms decide to interact with their data is really up to them and their preferences and expertise.”
He noted, however, that results could differ, because MyCase’s native AI features run on OpenAI’s GPT models on the back end, while the MCP uses Claude. Also, results via the MCP would lack the citation links to documents and sources within MyCase that the Firm Agent will include.
Customers may also be restricted in the data they can access via Claude by their MyCase subscription tier.
8am IQ Draft
Also announced today is 8am IQ Draft, a feature that uses AI to create document templates, either from scratch or using your existing documents.
IQ Draft not only creates the template, but it also then automatically populates it with details drawn from the case data in MyCase.
When you ask it to draft a document, it asks a series of questions to understand what the document is about and what it should look like. If you want to use an existing document, you can instruct it to base the new document on that existing one.
Once IQ Draft generates the document, it loads it into a web editor within MyCase, so the user can edit and format the document directly within the platform.
“It creates this AI-human collaboration workspace within MyCase that allows you to use AI to get 80% to a finished product, and then you get to go through, review, and take it that final 20% to completion,” Carter said.
IQ Draft will also be rolled out along the same timeline as Firm Agent, with a beta next month and access and availability to all customers in December.
8am Smart Spend Intelligence
On the financial side, 8am introduced Smart Spend Intelligence, an enhancement to its Smart Spend product designed to help firms capture more of the expenses that should be billed to clients.
With this new feature, when a user is categorizing a transaction, Smart Spend suggests the most likely case based on recent activity. Also, a new dashboard shows how much spend is linked to cases by month and year-to-date.
The bottom line, the company says, is fewer unreimbursed expenses and a clearer view of the money Smart Spend is bringing back into the firm.
8am Capital
Last but not least today, 8am introduced 8am Capital, a new program that offers law firms the ability to obtain funding from directly within LawPay.
The program is similar to Clio Capital, which Clio launched earlier this year to provide capital for its law firm customers.
Eligibility is based on a firm’s payment history rather than just on its application or credit history alone. The program uses that history to pre-qualify a firm.
The funding, which is provided by third-party provider Fundbox, arrives in as little as one to two business days.
The program offers flexible repayment based on a percentage of LawPay payments, with a weekly minimum. Repayment lengths can range from 13-40 weeks based on the size of the loan and other factors.
“Through 8am Capital, firms can invest in growth, from hiring and marketing to expanding office space and supporting day-to-day cash flow, all without the complexity of traditional lending,” 8am said.
Disclosure: My son Matt Ambrogi is an AI engineer at 8am and works directly on the AI products described above.