Conference Report: ConnectLive17

So much was crammed into two days at last week’s #ConnectLive17, it’s hard to know where to start. 

Since iManage took its destiny into its own hands 2 years ago with the management buy-out, the pace of development has been unrelenting. Just in the last 12 months we have witnessed the iManage Cloud, Work 10, iManage Control Center, Policy Manager and Threat Manager, and now the RAVN acquisition and all that will come from that.

At ConnectLive17 we heard about AI and analytics, records management, cybersecurity, external and internal security threats, file sharing and collaboration technologies, challenges faced by corporate legal, mobile device management, GDPR, and much more. Speakers were engaging and informed, as well as focussed on practical strategies, and delegates were enthused and energised.

Momentum is building across the legal technology sector as a whole; interest is spreading outwards from the core IT function, and increasingly, delegates at industry events include C-level executives engaged in defining strategy and direction, looking to understand how technological advances can impact and improve their core business.

iManage is moving on from being ‘just’ a foundation. Document and email management, always regarded as essential but not particularly exciting, contains all the information and data needed for the new era of analytics and data science, and the team at iManage (and RAVN) clearly understand this and are actively thinking about ways to add value for customers. And it’s not just in legal, iManage is extending its reach across all sectors.

“The legal industry is in flux. The iManage community sits in the centre orchestrating that change,” stated iManage CEO Neil Araujo in the keynote. This sounded like a bold claim, but by the end I think we were all convinced of its veracity. Exciting times ahead.