Robert Ambrogi Blog
When Chris Cartrett took over two years ago as CEO of Aderant, a provider of business management software to larger law firms, he promised to “take aggressive steps to further the company’s cloud-first strategy throughout its broad suite of solutions.”
At Aderant’s Global Momentum user conference today in Nashville, he announced a major step in advancing that strategy, with the launch of Stridyn, an AI-driven cloud platform that brings together all of Aderant’s cloud products in one place in order to best harness the full potential of cloud and AI technology.
“We built Stridyn with the understanding that law firms want a frictionless cloud experience centered around reliability, security, and efficiency,” Cartrett said. “Stridyn will accelerate productivity for law firms and represent a standard for operational excellence across the business of law.”
In advance of today’s announcement, Cartrett sat down with me for an exclusive LawNext podcast interview to talk about this news and for a broader conversation about the company and the legal industry.
Listen to the interview using this player or wherever you listen to LawNext.
Facilitating Interconnectivity
Cartrett also recently previewed Stridyn at a briefing for the news media, where he was joined by Doug Matthews, chief product officer, and Andy Hoyt, chief technology officer.
For customers, a key benefit of Stridyn is that it will enhance the user experience by facilitating interconnectivity among Aderant’s applications and streamlining workflows.
“This is a little bit different than a product release,” Cartrett said. “This is something that we’re doing that’s really to enhance every product that we already have in the marketplace and then to really provide value to our clients that we think is pretty significant.”
That portfolio of products spans the gamut of practice and business management functions, including practice management, time entry and billing compliance, bill delivery, knowledge management, litigation management, and people management.
To learn more about Aderant’s product line, go to the LawNext Legal Technology Directory and search Aderant.
“In my personal view, the name is about representing the fact that we feel like this is taking great strides in delivering on the things that we’ve always wanted to be able to do for our clients, but then also setting our company up in a way that allows us to, with greater speed, deliver value to our clients,” Cartrett said.
Unlocking New Value
Expanding on that, Matthews, the chief product officer, said that the ability to pull together Aderant’s wide portfolio of products on a single platform will unlock significant new value for customers.
“For example, if you think about our HR capabilities integrated with our negotiation tools and our financial business management tools, we’ll be able to deliver solutions that ensure that firms have the right attorney on the right matter with the right profitability,” Matthews said. “That’s a pretty hard problem for our firms to solve today.”
On top of that, Stridyn’s modern SaaS experience will enable Aderant to deliver new capabilities to its customers much more quickly and with an experience that allows them to work from anywheere on any device, he said.
Aderant’s core practice management product has both an on-premises version, Expert, and a cloud version, Expert Sierra, with many existing customers and most new customers using the cloud version.
The new cloud platform will also enable Aderant to expand the capabilities of the AI virtual assistant it launched last year, MADDI, across its product suite. Stridyn will now power all Aderant cloud applications with built-in AI capabilities delivered through MADDI.
“All of this platform will be built utilizing advanced capabilities and every tool, every application in the portfolio,will have access to them, such as MADDI, our AI,” Matthews said. “That intelligence will be available in every module, in every application that sits on the platform.”
A further benefit to customers is that all the applications running on Stridyn will be able to access information and perform analytics via standard interfaces like reports and dashboards and also through a natural language processing interface for asking questions about matters and data.
From Products to Capabilities
CTO Hoyt says this integration on a single platform has the potential to transform the concept of products into one of capabilities.
“Fundamentally, this platform is really the framework of software that is intended and designed to work together and really it’s in harmony, all working seamlessly together,” Hoyt said. “So it’s really that set of software and a surrounding ecosystem of resources.”
For customers, Hoyt said, the value in that is not about the technology itself, but about the connections is makes among the portfolio of capabilities. “This is about coordinating how multiple products really work together.”
According to Aderant, the rollout of Stridyn to law firms will be seamless for them and will not require migrating data or setting up new systems.
Rather, Aderant will begin delivering new capabilities and firms will be able to adopt them as they wish.
“You take the capabilities as they’re delivered, when you want them,” Hoyt said. “It fully is that integration into their existing systems, so there are no long setups and other aspects around that. You’ll just be able to continuously turn on new capabilities in a very easy and seamless fashion.”
In fact, Stridyn is already a part of Aderant’s products, Matthews added, and what is launching today is more the user experience around that technology, including new reporting and analytics capabilities.
New Modules Built on Stridyn
At today’s conference, Aderant also announced a number of new modules and enhancements, all built on Stridyn, with more to roll out over the next years. Those announced today are:
- A/R automation with AI-powered matching of cash receipts to invoices.
- Client terms review workflow with redlining and version history in Onyx, its AI platform for compliance with outside counsel guidelines.
- Matter reconciliation and email billing automation in BillBlast.
- A new modern UI and AI-driven compliance in iTimekeep.
- Centralized analytics and AI support via askMADDI, for Expert Sierra in preview mode.
- A comprehensive system for managing lawyer skills, availability and staffing in viResourceAllocation.
There is no direct cost to customers to get the benefits of Stridyn, as it is technology that will underlie all Aderant products. However, as the company develops new modules for specific functions, these will be add-ons that customers can buy.
Matthews, the chief product officer, said that the launch of Stridyn has the potential to transform law firms’ business operations, thanks to a modern and mobile experience backed by AI.
“With the launch of Stridyn, law firms now have access to simple to use, highly efficient cloud technology bolstered by powerful MADDI AI capabilities,” Matthews said.
“This is our latest stride forward to drive innovation across the industry. In the coming months we expect to deliver many more significant advancements that enable law firms to be even more compliant while controlling cost and improving profitability.”