You’ll have noticed over the last year and a half that Box has been making a serious push into the legal sector, becoming highly visible at conferences and creating a dedicated Box for Legal page on its website. But media interviews with large law firm customers as to how and why they are using Box have been few and far between.
It may be a revelation to some that Am Law Top 50 law firm Cooley has for as long as two years been using Box for its external client file sharing. It is creating deal rooms for each client so they can co-author documents and find all their matter material in one place. The deal rooms integrate with iManage, which is the firm’s document management system and system of record, meaning deal room documents can also easily be archived when a matter is complete. Cooley is also now looking at the new customisable portals, Box Hubs, for which it is a beta customer.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Cooley’s associate director of knowledge services, Tara Daisy, took us
back to the beginning of Cooley’s relationship with Box, recalling: “We were using ‘legal tech’ for our client external file sharing platform and external collaboration tools, and it was getting to a point where we realised; ‘This isn’t working for us anymore.’
“As with a lot of other law firms, we’ve gone down this path of, ‘OK, we’re going to use the thing that the law firms use because we’re a law firm, and that’s what we’re supposed to do.’ And then over the past three or four years, we’ve really started to examine ‘why?’ Who’s the boss of us that said we had to continue to use this thing as everyone else is doing it? And so, when we set out to evaluate the marketplace on what our options were, we really took an open lens and said, ‘OK, let’s look at everything.’”
Cooley, which is well known for its innovative technology practice, undertook what Daisy describes as a “massive evaluation project” led by then director of security and information governance, Mike
Santos, who in May this year became the California-headquartered law firm’s chief security and technology officer. It was Cooley’s first venture into a cloud product, and Daisy recalls: “In speaking with Mike he is always going to be firm first and lead with client needs at the forefront with an eye on risk and compliance. In reviewing what Box has to offer in terms of security, it was easy to get comfortable with the product after reviewing the high scores on our risk assessments and multilevel approach to security. We went through this whole exercise and for us at the end, it was a very clear decision to say ‘OK, well this checks all the boxes security wise and we’re meeting our clients where they are: all of our clients are already here using Box. It’s seamless with our clients and it’s one less thing that they have to go and figure out how to use.’”
Since the initial roll out, Daisy says that Cooley has expanded its Box usage firmwide. “We started out with a smaller subset and adoption has been great and Box has been a really good partner for us, which has led us to explore a lot more options with them,” she says. “We try and look at what they’re doing to be part of early betas and with David [Wang, chief innovation officer] coming on board, our goal here at the firm is to build the law firm of the future and that doesn’t necessarily mean with legal tech.”
Daisy says that Box has made life easier for Cooley’s information governance team, commenting: “Our prior tool had five terabytes of data just languishing out there and we thought, ‘OK, we should have done something about that,’ so this gives us a really flexible way to manage all that information.”
User adoption has been good and Daisy told us: “Giving people tech that’s easy to use has been a really big advantage in terms of driving adoption. Having rolled out a lot of different products here at Cooley, we’re always saying ‘Please come use our new thing, I swear it’s going to make your life better.’ Box gives you a consulting team to help you with adoption and rolling things out but we didn’t have to utilise them because as soon as people heard what we were doing they said, ‘Can I have the thing, I want that now.’ We were kind of beating people off with a stick saying, ‘We’re not ready! You have to wait.’ It’s been a great tech success story particularly because here at Cooley all our clients are tech startups and we’re not dazzled by anything because we’re very tech forward. Rob [Kerr, former CIO] used to say that people shouldn’t have to think about tech, it should just work. And this worked; we didn’t have to think about it. It’s not a struggle. People are using it. It just blended into the ecosystem.”
In terms of the roadmap now, in September Box announced the general availability of customisable portals Box Hubs, which Cooley has been involved in as a beta customer. Daisy says: “That’s something we’re looking at. We had a go here at Cooley around five or six years ago building something similar to Box Hubs on our own because our clients were asking for these portal spaces. So as a client I want my own space where all my Cooley stuff is. But ultimately it wasn’t successful because it was another place people had to go. So one thing we’re exploring is creating a space that will be a one stop shop for clients.”
The other thing that Cooley is looking at is Box’s use of AI for analytics and pulling out deal data after the event. Box last year unveiled Box AI, which integrates ChatGPT with the Box Content Cloud, and in March this year announced a new integration with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Daisy says that Cooley is taking a measured approach to AI “so we don’t end up with 15 different tools” but says of Box’s AI offering: “One of the things that I was really impressed about is the flexibility of it. So your average non-programmer can come in and adjust things, are you kidding me? That’s a game changer.”
It will be interesting to keep track of further developments now that Wang is on board and Daisy says: “In terms of plans for the future, we’re really doubling down on getting away from ‘legaltech’ and trying to be more creative,” adding, “Box does a nice job with lots of integrations and what differentiates them is that they are saying ‘Come partner with us to make things easier for people in clearing lots of pathways.’”