Aderant this week hosted its Global Momentum conference in Nashville, where the biggest announcement was the launch of its AI-driven cloud platform Stridyn. Stridyn provides dashboard access to data from across all of Aderant’s applications and has been designed to revolutionise the user experience. We asked Cole, Scott & Kissane’s chief information and security officer Jason Thomas for his feedback on Momentum.
Jason what’s your biggest takeaway from the conference?
The biggest takeaway is Stridyn. It’s interesting because one of the things I have a back and forth with my team on, and the thing that smaller firms face in general, is that you’re very accustomed to having an all-in-one solution. If you’re under, say, 300 people, and they’re typically working on a platform like a ProLaw, for example, where you have one interface for your accounting and for your document management and time entry too, the idea is you never leave the one interface. But as you get bigger and as you get into the larger law firm space, what tends to happen is those all-in-one solutions don’t really cut the mustard. Quite frankly I don’t think those platforms are really built for large law.
What you end up doing as you get larger is to look at larger platforms. First it’s what your practice management is going to look like. So, right now, it’s either going to be Aderant or Elite. Then what about document management and obviously you’re going to go with an iManage or NetDocuments. And then what are we doing for time entry and with Aderant your options are Expert Time or iTimeKeep, so that’s platform four. And what if you need eBilling? OK, well, then Billblast, that’s platform five. What about recruiting, what about payments, what about expense systems, what about matter management?
Before you know it, you’re sitting on 15 to 20 different applications, with people clicking back and forth between them, and most of them don’t talk to each other or you have to build integrations, so you have to pay to customize and build integrations. It’s not like you can necessarily always buy integrations out-of-the-box. So you’re going to hire developers, and now you have all these systems and all these integrations trying to make everybody talk to each other, and nightly exports and imports.
One of the things that we looked at was, now that we’re going live on Litify next month, potentially making Salesforce, which is what Litify is based on, our front end for most of our activities. Maybe we just build a workflow within Salesforce so that our people never have to leave the Salesforce screen to do a conflict check, or expenses. We still have all these other programs, but all the user sees is the one interface.
That in my mind is exactly what Stridyn is doing. They’re taking everything and saying, ‘Look, let’s say you have a suite of Aderant products. They may or may not talk to each other, but now you’ve got one dashboard, one interface where the finance department has access to their things within the screen.’
Obviously, if you use all Aderant products it’ll be easier, but my understanding is that in the future there will be an API we can tap into.
Even just having the four or five Aderant products under one belt is huge. So yes, Stridyn is my biggest takeaway.
How are they achieving it from a back end perspective?
From what I can see, what they’re doing is now that they have MADDI, their AI platform, and they’re going to leverage MADDI to tap into each platform of theirs, ingest the data, and then present it into that one Stridyn interface. They’ll have MADDI go and look at all the Expert data, at iTimeKeep and BillBlast and then use that to create the dashboard.
My take is this will be the new interface for everything. So depending on what modules you own, it gets integrated into the dashboard.
What was the customer reaction to Stridyn?
People were pretty excited about that all-in-one type feel, within the dashboards, within the browser. I think that’s been a long time coming.