We might say this every year, but ILTACon 2022 was the best one yet. Our team made meaningful connections, participated in insightful sessions, and shared the Litify Llama love with more attendees than ever before. Seriously, at nearly 3,000 attendees, it was a sold-out show and the third largest ILTACon ever!

We heard non-stop talk about integrative platforms, centralized solutions, the need for collaboration in the cloud, and how all this is the future of legaltech. Legal tech blogger Bob Ambrogi summarized these key themes over on LawNext.com — and we couldn’t agree more with his insights! In fact, Litify has been taking that approach since we were founded back in 2016.

Here’s what the industry discussed at ILTACon, and how the combined power of Litify and Salesforce has already been forging a new future for legal:

1. “Platform Fatigue”

Firms are burnt out, and frustrated by, the fatigue of swivel-chairing between systems. Part of this is fatigue caused by having to continually switch between different windows, apps, data sources, screens, and programs over the course of a working day, as Ambrogi points out.

Another part of platform fatigue, however, is the endless evaluation and implementation of one-trick platforms that never seem to work as promised. Why else are lawyers and organizations constantly switching between these systems? We’ve seen from our own work with 300+ teams that the legal tech stack is often a frankenstein-ed combination of older platforms that are missing features, newer platforms that try to compensate for them, systems that don’t integrate, and data that’s just been along for the ride.

2. “Platformization”

If platform fatigue is the problem, then one answer — we say the answer! — is platformization, writes Ambrogi. Think of platformization as a technology ecosystem, offering multiple applications within a single platform, he says.

“I wrote about platformization in legal tech as far back as my 2018 post, The 20 Most Important Legal Technology Developments of 2018, where I cited CRM company Salesforce as the classic example, launching its AppExchange and opening its platform to third-party developers,” Bob Ambrogi, LawNext.

Platformization of the legal industry is the main concept behind Litify. We saw what other markets were using to run their businesses — Salesforce — and decided to make it speak the language of legal to bring the same platform technology to law firms. With Litify, firms can break down their technology and business silos to power better processes, insights, and collaboration.

We saw this theme emerge in our own conversations throughout ILTACON. In fact, Litify President & COO Ari Treuhaft joined a panel on vetting legal technology startups:

3. “Interoperability”

As Ambrogi defines it: “Interoperability allows different products, apps or systems to communicate with each other, most typically to share data in a seamless manner. The most common way of achieving interoperability is through application programming interfaces, or APIs, which is software that allows one application to speak to another.”

The flexibility of our solution helps you get more value out of your tech stack by providing a single platform from which you can manage the entire client lifecycle. With thousands of integrations available in the app store, plus the ability to build custom integrations with any software that has an open API, Litify gives you nearly unlimited opportunities to consolidate tools and streamline processes.

Litify President & COO Ari Treuhaft joined the LawNext podcast to share more about how being built on top of Salesforce puts us in a unique category of legaltech. The same flexibility that allows for interoperability also enables us to serve the entire legal ecosystem — from law firms and corporate legal teams to government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

4. “Automation”

All too often, lawyers and their teams are swiveling between various technologies in order to get lower-end, repetitive tasks done, instead of focusing on higher-value work like engaging with clients or determining case strategy.

With Litify, firms are streamlining and automating matter and tasks management, document generation, timekeeping, and reporting. In fact, our timekeeping & billing solution enables key automations, such as:

• Billing rules that enforce guidelines at the firm, client, or matter level
• Prompts that remind users to submit time when generating standard documents
• Users are also prompted to enter time when saving documents to a matter from Outlook
• Tracking the time your firm has spent on a matter against the billable hours — right from within that matter

From just this example, you can see how automation can help reduce some of these minute, repetitive tasks to not only provide a better employee experience, but also to improve firm performance as your team is able to refocus their time toward more impactful activities. Further, automation reduces the risk for human error in these manual tasks and replaces it with consistent, repeatable practices.

“…But when putting together a new workflow or process you have to consider the people who will actually be executing the work. It is imperative that you choose a tool that is flexible enough to accommodate the different functions and people who will be using it. That is how you drive success,” said Litify VP of Strategy & Innovation Dov Slansky in his own ILTACON panel about legal workflow automation.

5. “Partnerships”

As the concepts of platformization and interoperability become mainstream in the legal industry, technology companies are better enticed and equipped to expand their network of partners. As solutions enable open APIs and integrations, they also enable this community of partnership, service, and data-sharing.

While the power of Litify and Salesforce allows for far more native functionality, we also have a strong network of technology, implementation, and consulting partners. For example, we’ve built and released our own time & billing and within the Litify platform. But we’ve also built integrations with NetDocuments, iManage, Aderant, Accounting Seed, Outlook, and more to further extend the abilities of our solution.

Through functionality and partnerships like these, we ensure you always have a single source of truth for your data and client relationships.

Litify: The future of legal is here

In 2016, Litify took legal by storm when we brought the industry the same technology that top companies were already using to run their businesses and made it speak the legal language. Earlier this year, we were named a “soonicorn” — or soon-to-be unicorn, when a technology company is valued at $1 billion or more — by Tracxn Emerging Startups.

As platformization continues to become mainstream across these conversations, we’re looking ahead to the next seven years to understand how Fortune 500 companies are capitalizing on data and analytics, providing a better client experience through tech, and how adjacent markets are adapting to change.

Schedule time with our team today to learn more about how we’re helping law firms manage the entire client lifecycle in a single solution.