Intapp is today (18 March) formally launching its consolidated cloud-based OnePlace for Marketing platform, bringing together within one UI the capabilities of DealCloud, gwabbit and OnePlace. The platform includes native integration with Intapp’s risk and compliance and practice management products and will see the Palo Alto- headquartered company begin heavily focusing on customers who buy into the commercial benefits of its ‘out of the box’ full suite capability in a launch that Intapp says marks a “new era.”
OnePlace was built on Salesforce but the newly unveiled combined platform, as we predicted when OnePlace was acquired in May 2019, will be powered by DealCloud and not Salesforce, meaning that OnePlace CRM customers must ultimately transition off Salesforce.
Intapp acquired DealCloud in November 2018. At the time it was a CRM provider for the investment banking sector and Intapp has spent the time since the acquisition reconfiguring the platform to make it legal specific as well as adding functionality from gwabbit and OnePlace, which pull together CRM, relationships, and experience management.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Intapp’s marketing & BD practice in EMEA, Gareth Thomas said: “There are half a dozen basic functions that every CRM needs but legal marketing teams can be quite different so we spent the first couple of months looking at what we had in Salesforce, what we could do in DealCloud, and by the end of September we had a list of everything we needed in DealCloud that wasn’t already there.” He adds: “It wasn’t a huge list and included smarter ways to work than in Salesforce, where we had to compromise either because of the limitations of the product or because as an ISV you don’t have access to everything in the product suite.”
For firms that have invested in Salesforce, transitioning away could prove expensive and counter to strategy but twenty-two firms including Armstrong Teasdale, Hodgson Ross, Plesner and Winstead have already signed on to deploy OnePlace for Marketing in the coming weeks. Thomas said: “We said they don’t have to move straight away and we are building a roadmap for them to move.” Intapp hopes that within the next month it will have all the big UK firms signed.
Customers of the entire Intapp professional services platform will be able to draw in data and analytics from across each of the three product suites. Thomas said: “If you want to find out who your experts in drone law are people might not know and the narrative in time entries is the best place to work that out. If someone says they are a drone law expert but haven’t billed on it for five years are they really an expert?”
It is also possible to look at the frequency and responsiveness of emails and the marketing solution scrapes information from Outlook to keep contact information up to date. Customers can apply data from conflicts to analyse marketing opportunities and Thomas said: “We’ve taken the whole conflict process so you can decide if a new opportunity is worth pursuing. You can run conflict scores on your invite list for an event and say ‘let’s not invite these people or invite them in wave three or four, so that marketing can be more effective.”
Legal teams can analyse the amount of work done across practice areas for big clients, so for example if you are looking at Microsoft you can easily look at the work done in M&A, IP and employment or across regions.
Applying actionable AI across the professional services platform means that Intapp can now extract client terms and enforce them on other systems. Thomas said; “If you can’t bill associate time it means that if an associate tries to bill time we can stop it so there is no dispute over time, causing delay.” Intapp needs to be aware of and avoid mission creep: Intapp does not have its own practice management system and if an associate has been asked to do a task, it is almost certainly the PMS that should stop it being billed rather than the associate be prevented from entering the time on which they get paid.
Intapp will continue to integrate with the major back end document and practice management systems and Thomas said: “What we have is the first consumer grade UI for the professional services industry. Rather than looking at doing accounting or document management where there would obviously be compromises we’ve become the best in class in terms of risk, relationships, CRM and experience and we’re taking all of these different best in class products and put them all together in one single lifecycle platform all available in the cloud.”
The intention is for all new Intapp business to be pushed to the cloud, particularly in light of the cost of maintaining and developing dual on premises and cloud products, and customers will be incentivised to do so. Thomas said: “When clients come around to upgrading, we are encouraging them to upgrade to the cloud. Things we’re doing with some of our biggest conflict clients include, if you go to conflicts in the cloud, that will include our conflicts AI module as part of the migration plan. We are doing commercial things to encourage them but if a big magic circle firm wants to upgrade on-premises, we will support that, we’re not end of lifeing anything.”
While customers may continue to be customers of just one or two Intapp products Thomas said: “It’s going to be more commercially viable to commit to more. The benefit to using more is we can give them the out of the box integration – if they are using Carpe Diem time and Intapp Experience it will be more complicated than that. All of these integrations we are starting to provide out of the box.”
Intapp for Marketing is fully mobile and Thomas says: “There is no compromise, you have full functionality, so if you are at a conference and someone says ‘do you have a lawyer in your firm that specialises in oil and gas in Kenya’ you can answer there and then.”
He says: “We’re the only vendor to unify this and we’re able to help firms set goals and win more business.” Yes, this is the launch of the new marketing platform but make no mistake of the scale of Intapp’s ambitions. Thomas says: “It’s easier to work with firms that understand and buy into the entire platform.”