Neil Cameron, lead analyst, Legal IT Insider
iManage closes its flagship user conference with a platform repositioning that its CEO has compared, in scale, to the move to cloud. The substance, and the politics around it, deserve attention from anyone responsible for AI strategy in a knowledge-intensive firm.
Neil Araujo set the tone in the 14 April pre-conference exclusive carried in these pages: the announcement at ConnectLive would, he said, be “as significant as the launch of iManage Cloud.” The conference itself, held this week at the Hilton Chicago and rolling into London on 9-10 June, has now put substance behind the claim. For two days, several hundred CIOs, knowledge leaders and innovation heads have been walked through what iManage is calling the next evolution of its platform – a repositioning of the document management system from a system that stores knowledge to one that actively surfaces, governs and brokers it for AI.
The framing matters. Legal IT Insider’s own tracking of the US Top 100 puts iManage at roughly three quarters of the largest US firms by revenue, with a similar share of the UK Top 100; iManage’s own figures, released yesterday, claim 79% of the Am Law 100 and 83% of a defined “Top Global 100. When a vendor of that footprint chooses to re-architect its proposition rather than simply layer features onto it, the legal technology stack as a whole moves with it. That is the story of ConnectLive 2026, and it is also the reason this conference is worth a closer look than the run of vendor user events.
A platform conference, not a feature conference
The set-piece of Day 1 was the keynote from Araujo and Shawn Misquitta, EVP and product lead, in which the company laid out a “context fabric” – an inference layer above governed firm data designed to give AI tools and agents permission-aware access to matter context, work product and institutional knowledge. The Day 2 announcement on 20 May confirmed the direction: new AI-specific controls for how AI is applied across clients and matters, expanded monitoring of agent activity, multi-region search, native OCR, and a notable expansion of the iManage MCP Server first announced on 14 May. There is, in addition, a formal placement of iManage inside Anthropic’s partner ecosystem and Claude store, giving Claude a governed route into the iManage corpus without bulk exports.
The session tracks made the strategic ambition explicit: Platform Foundations and Governance; Knowledge and AI in Practice; and AI and the Agentic Journey. The last of these is where the conference’s real news sits. The roadmap items presented under that banner – ethical-wall-aware agents, agent activity in Threat Manager, granular client- and matter-level AI restrictions in Security Policy Manager – collectively describe a posture in which the DMS becomes the governance plane for whatever AI systems a firm chooses to plug into it.
What it means in context
Two observations are worth making at this stage, both of which will be developed more fully in the forthcoming Legal IT Insider GenAI report.
First, iManage is not alone in this repositioning. NetDocuments’ own MCP announcement on 12 May, Aderant’s Momentum Global launch the same week, and Anthropic’s Claude for Legal release a few weeks earlier are all moves on the same chessboard. At ConnectLive Day 2, Harvey announced a new adoption and governance control plane, and on stage announced a knowledge management partnership – all pointing in a directly comparable direction. Read together, the past six weeks have produced a structural change in how the legal AI stack is being assembled, with several large vendors now competing to own the governed surface through which firms operationalise AI.
Second, the architecture has political consequences. A context fabric that brokers permission-aware access from any AI tool to any firm corpus is, by design, a move to make the DMS the point of control. Whether firms accept that placement, or whether they prefer the governance layer to sit elsewhere – in the AI orchestration platform, in a separate governance product, or in the practice management system – is now a live strategic question. Legal IT Insider’s GenAI report will return to it, so make sure you sign up in advance here.
Who was in the room
ConnectLive draws a different audience from LegalWeek or CLOC. The room is heavier on infrastructure, security and knowledge management leadership than on practice innovation. That changes what gets said in the breakouts. The conversations that mattered most this week were not about feature parity with competing AI tools but about how firms thread AI governance through their existing security, records and ethical-wall regimes – a question the major US and UK firms are now answering under direct client pressure.
It is fair to say that the broader magic circle and Am Law cohort represented in Chicago is no longer in early-adopter mode. AI is now being procured, governed and supervised inside legal technology operations as a regular part of the function. The platform announcements at ConnectLive land in that environment, not in an experimental one. That alone tells you why iManage has chosen this moment to move.
What we are saving for the report
There is more to be said – about the specific design of the context fabric, the implications for cross-vendor governance, the Harvey announcements alongside iManage’s, and the harder questions about where validation and audit sit when an agent acts across multiple systems on a firm’s behalf. Those questions are the substance of the forthcoming Legal IT Insider GenAI report on the governance gap, which will appear in the coming weeks. For now, it is enough to record that ConnectLive 2026 has moved the conversation a long way forward, and that the legal technology stack looks materially different leaving Chicago than it did arriving.
