Robert Ambrogi Blog
Two weeks after the company formerly known as AffiniPay unveiled its rebranding as 8am, it convened its inaugural Kaleidoscope customer conference in Austin today, where its chief product officer, Leslie Witt, took to the stage to deliver a keynote address in which she announced key platform integrations, new AI-powered tools, and expanded financial services offerings.
Witt, who joined the company in May, announced that three core 8am products — LawPay, MyCase and SmartSpend — will now be fully integrated on a single technology platform. The unified platform will be rolled out to existing LawPay customers over the coming months, maintaining familiar functionality while adding features like time tracking and invoicing capabilities.
“This platform moment allows these amazing pieces to come together like a kaleidoscope into a more coherent and wonderful whole,” Witt said, saying the integration will bring seamless connectivity between payment processing, practice management and financial tools.
AI “Chat with Cases” Beta
Witt also previewed the launch of the company’s generative AI initiative, 8AM IQ. It will introduce a “Chat with Cases” feature currently in beta testing for MyCase customers. She said that the tool has been trained specifically to avoid hallucination while providing:
- Natural language search capabilities across case histories.
- Document scanning and synthesis across multiple files.
- Case summarization features.
- Query responses about case details (family members, names, etc.)
Witt emphasized that the AI system includes human oversight and has been designed for high accuracy from the outset, following a “human in the loop” approach.
8am is also deploying AI to automatically extract data from legal documents, particularly targeting immigration cases to start.
The feature, now live in both the immigration plugin for MyCase and the DocketWise immigration platform, is designed to extract information from common forms and populate submissible documents with lawyer oversight.
Future AI Development
Witt outlined the company’s plans to expand AI capabilities into financial management, including:
- Automated accounts receivable reminders.
- Cash flow predictions based on firm history.
- Payroll feasibility analysis.
- Actionable financial insights.
Witt noted that customer feedback indicated the highest comfort level with AI adoption in financial analysis applications.
Other New Integrations and Capabilities
In her keynote, Witt also announced other new integrations and capabilities.
Among these is a new integration with the NetDocuments document management system. This was done, she said, in response to customer demand for best-in-class document management tools as firms scale.
Witt said the company plans to launch customizable reporting features in the coming weeks. These will allow firms to:
- Apply custom filters to reports.
- Add different conventions to standard forms.
- Export data with greater control.
- Access more granular financial reporting.
In another enhancement, 8am is implementing OCR technology across its platform, which will enable search and processing of uploaded image files.
Witt revealed that approximately 30% of documents stored in MyCase, CasePeer and DocketWise — some 38 million documents — are images containing unsearchable text.
The OCR implementation, rolling out over the next quarter, will make these documents fully searchable and accessible to AI tools.
Expansion of Financial Services
Last year, the company rolled out the beta of SmartSpend, which marries a business credit card for law firms to software that directly channels client-related expenses into the associated matters and invoices within the MyCase law practice management platform.
Now, Witt said, SmartSpend is out of beta and live for customers. She said that customers that participated in the beta indicated time savings of up to 20 hours per week through SmartSpend’s automated receipt capture and invoice mapping.
Witt also announced 8am Capital, a short-term lending service launching early next year. The service leverages transaction data insights to provide low-cost loans to legal professionals, addressing the challenges small firms sometimes face with traditional banking relationships and credit access.
These product announcements, Witt said, support 8am’s rebranding strategy, positioning the company beyond its payment processing origins as a comprehensive suite of practice management and business operations tools.
It is the company’s mission, Witt said, to “power a world where professionals thrive” through integrated technology solutions.