Aderant kicked off its London user conference yesterday (15 October) with a keynote from president and CEO Chris Cartrett, who outlined the company’s strategic priorities for the year ahead, with a strong emphasis on improving the client experience.
Speaking at Aderant Momentum, which this year was in a new location in central London, Cartrett opened with an update on business milestones for 2025, including six different law firms leaving their current vendor for Aderant Expert. The company is growing and has around 46 job openings, Cartrett said.
In terms of applications, the emphasis is very much on the Aderant platform being able to automate the entire work to cash cycle: Expert/Sierra takes care of practice and financial management; Onyx for OCG and compliance management; iTimekeep for time tracking; BillBlast for billing management; Milana for docketing and calendaring; Handshake for knowledge management; and vi for people and resource management.
The focus is on reducing the manual touch points until there are no touch points. “Our goal is truly to automate the entire platform,” Cartrett said. “We know there is so much leakage and lack of realisation that slow down receivables at the end.”
Aderant this year acquired Hercules AI, which will be integrated into the ecosystem to help automate time capture and OCG compliance – Hercules is able to suggest alternative time narratives in order to prevent delays and write offs. It will also strengthen Aderant’s AI assistant MADDI.
Other product news includes more investment in cloud platform Stridyn to improve the user interface and 234% growth in cloud-hosted solution Expert Sierra over the last 28 months (there are now 232 Sierra clients globally).
Cartrett said that supporting customer integrations and APIs is a key priority, commenting: “We’re not going to mess with the performance of your other suppliers and platforms. This is core to our success.” Am Law 100 law firm Holland & Knight had over 200 integrations and Cartrett said: “They came over as they came.”
Some customers have run into billing issues with 8.2.4 and Cartrett said: “We want to own our mistakes.” The team has created a billing mind map to eliminate the problems, including enhanced code understanding, improved debugging, streamlined refactoring, increased code quality and faster feature development.
Earlier this year Aderant release a new cloud accounts receivable and general ledger and key to both is that you can have chatbot askMaddi fully integrated. “If you want dashboards we’ll support that, but asking questions in the way you do with ChatGPT is the way forward,” Cartrett said. “You can just ask anything and turn it into a report.”
In terms of process improvements over the past year, Cartrett said that there has been a heavy focus on removing silos within the organisation. “The product suite has expanded but we still operated in silos,” he said. “The leadership team has worked out which processes we need to streamline.”
There has been a focus on reorganising teams internally. Josiah Chaves was appointed as chief client officer in April this year to help lead and guide the restructure, with Cartrett observing in his keynote: “Our mission statement is to create a borderless experience across our solutions. What you care about is solving a problem, not what department someone reports to.” Aderant has reorganised around client outcomes instead.
Anyone who works in a sizeable organisation knows how difficult it can be to deliver on the ambition to create a borderless experience. Speaking to Legal IT Insider after his keynote, Cartrett explained that there has been significant investment in cross training of employees but also in internal systems and software in order to help create this borderless experience. “There has been some restructuring but this is about us being more intentional in how our users experience Aderant,” he said.
Aderant wrapped up the first session of the morning with customer awards handed out by Chaves, who said: “I love seeing you be successful, so this is the most exciting thing I get to do.”
The awards are as follows:
Newcomer of the year – This firm went live on Expert late last year in “a super complex project with innovations around UX and process control requiring deep collaboration” – Hengeller Mueller;
Innovator of the year – This firm moved to Expert Sierra but also had a massive project with sharedo (now part of Clio) involving a huge amount of work to integrate and build workflows from back office to front office. They went live on Sierra and sharedo around the same time, in a project described by Chaves as “tremendously successful” – Horwich Farrelly
Better together award – This firm moved to Sierra after a project involving close collaboration with Aderant, with Chaves reminiscing about a member of the team keeping everyone caffeinated – Simkins
Firm of the year- The firm has been an Aderant client for a long time but went live on Sierra earlier this year. They were one of the first in the UK to go live on BillBlast. Aderant worked with them on building an integration with Ariba, which Chaves says will benefit everyone that uses it going forward – Freeths.
