AI Responsibly with ndMAX
Después de años de avance (y un año de quedarse en casa y aprender a hacer una masa madre exquisita), la tecnología finalmente se ha filtrado en todos los aspectos de nuestras vidas. Nunca antes la tecnología había sido tan clave para el éxito o la desaparición de una empresa y la satisfacción de sus empleados.
El cofundador y director de tecnología (CTO) de NetDocuments, Alvin Tedjamulia, entiende esto íntimamente y recientemente se sentó con la directora de Publicaciones y Prensa de ILTA, Beth Anne Stuebe, para una entrevista que detalla cómo fue construir una nueva industria tecnológica a partir de desde cero, viendo cómo se convierte en el software fundamental para bufetes de abogados y equipos legales, el impacto de la pandemia global y lo que depara el futuro para NetDocuments.
The transcript below is an abridgment of the original interview. Click here to listen to the full discussion.
Beth Anne: Let's talk a little bit about cloud and what [NetDocuments is] doing that's innovative and different and why our ILTA members should know?
Alvin: In our prior life as SoftSolutions, we had a very successful document management service that really spread across all of the big law firms and even some of the medium-sized law firms. Then, after we came back from being acquired by WordPerfect and Novell, we said, look—we now need to create a different iteration of the cloud. That was an amazing thought at that point because the world was not ready.
Back then, AOL browsers were still being distributed by CD, and modems were still being used to connect to the cloud . People were saying, are you crazy? But we knew that in order to bring a new vision of technology to market—one where we can collaborate across law firms, have a truly distributed infrastructure where documents can be accessed anywhere from any device, and have a true security framework that deals with subpoenas, nationstate attacks, and ransomware effectively—we eventually needed to have only a single platform. We predicted that eventually the cloud would catch up with all of those type of things and then, it paid off! You know, today, the justification is not why cloud, but why not cloud?
Beth Anne: Well, there goes the question I was going to ask, but why would someone not want to move to the cloud? Even as ILTA's Publisher, I understand the cloud technology is safe, effective, and cost effective more than anything else. Why wouldn't someone want to move?
Alvin: You know, people have multiple fears…perhaps because they have not yet studied all of the benefits. The perceived concept of loss of control, and the concerns of security or just tradition. You know, the idea of, ‘I've been in here with this current technology for so long, do I really want to move?’ But that’s disappearing. There are overwhelming, proven case studies that demonstrate this is the go-to solution.
Entonces, quería hablarte, Beth Anne, un poco sobre un hecho muy interesante que vi cuando estábamos visitando a uno de nuestros clientes en Alsacia, Francia, en la ciudad de Estrasburgo.
Mientras estaba allí, me sorprendió la belleza de ese lugar y el campo. Me fascinó mucho el hecho de que encima de los tejados, en las catedrales, en las casas, en los postes… vi este nido. ¡Más tarde descubrí que eran de cigüeñas!
And these storks keep coming back over and over and over again, and they rebuild their nest each year...picking right up from where they left off the year before. They just keep adding and adding and adding until they have these huge platforms ready to welcome their next generation. And when I look at that, I said, oh, that is so similar to what NetDocuments has been doing. We’ve created a platform that is being continually built year after year, and is able to add new technologies that are critical to the evolving world of legal work. And that's really the big goal that we have in building the NetDocuments platform. It’s no longer a tool for just our DMS. It’s the salesforce.com for the legal industry.
Beth Anne: I really like that you guys have stolen all of NetDocuments’ technology from birds. I think that that is 100% the way to go and I love that you guys keep building on that. But if you're taking the idea from there, where are you going to go next? I assume that a certain point that the storks will have had such an incredibly large nest that they have to move on because whatever's holding it up won't be able to support it. So, what kind of support are you going to be able to offer next?
Alvin: You know, we started with the concept of organizing documents and protecting documents. Now we're migrating into the concept of planning based on your documents and delivering contents to your clients and learning from your documents. We're going to expand in all of those areas. And the best part is that these applications and solutions are built inherently into the platform. Today the platform is fully compliant with ISO's, HIPAA, and FedRAMP. Each time we have added a new type of compliance certificate, everyone of our law firms has inherited it automatically, without any effort on their part. They just get it because they're plugged into the same platform.
Cada nuevo conjunto de tecnologías que presentamos es heredado automáticamente por todos, al igual que el instinto migratorio se hereda automáticamente en las cigüeñas. Cada herramienta futura hereda toda la solidez, toda la seguridad, toda la disponibilidad global que proporciona la plataforma NetDocuments.
Beth Anne: I love the idea that you guys have taken so much from nature and nurtured it if you will, into a completely usable platform where people have the option of that continued iteration. I'd love to know what you guys are going to do next and what you're going to show us at ILTACON 2021.
Alvin: Yeah, it is. You know, it has been really gratifying for me to see the migration that is coming to NetDocuments. Sometimes you need to really take a hard look to see if it is better to switch than just remain on the same app and migrate because after you perform this effort, the view from the top that you can see is absolutely amazing. The rewards absolutely justify the effort.
So for that reason, we are going to expand the solution set that exists with NetDocuments. And I'm not going to be very specific because we're going to make more announcements later, but we are going to go into more specific legal practices and provide solutions specifically for those practice areas. Maybe the litigation department or the transactional group, so that you can see that, Wow, the platform is not generically managing the contents, but it's helping us actually practice law more effectively within our areas. You will also see work that we're doing with a tremendously successful partners that we have- some of the biggest technology partners in the industry - to almost eliminate the blended or disjointed view for us to do something in Application A and something in Application B.
Alvin: You will also see other efforts and solutions around easily capturing the documents that you filed in court—really taking advantage of our expanded, dynamic profiling capabilities.
Lo que estamos viendo es toda la práctica de la abogacía y hacer las cosas normales del día a día que haces mucho más fáciles. La gestión de documentos es el núcleo central de lo que hace un bufete de abogados. Pero hay otras aplicaciones centrales que el sistema de registros necesita para crear transiciones fluidas para que un abogado ejerza su área específica de derecho de manera efectiva. Así que eso es lo que verá en ILTACON: la capacidad de la plataforma NetDocuments expandiéndose a todas esas áreas múltiples.
Beth Anne: You guys really do have a great, innovative set coming out and we're looking forward to seeing you ILTACON. Alvin, you've touched on so much today. There's a lot for people to digest. What would you like to leave us with as your closing idea about NetDocuments moving into the future?
Alvin: The whole goal of our platform is to create simplicity. The legal space is vast, but we'd like to just make it simple at the end for the users. Simple to adopt, simple to use, simple to just do your day-to-day operations. And that requires a very complex and robust platform that is simultaneously invisible in your process. You know, I've always been saying, NetDocuments is the invisible document management system, because we are there wherever you go and you may not even know it. If you're on your mobile device, in Outlook, in your app, on the web…you know, it's all invisible. It's just there working behind the scenes. And now we're expanding more into other areas that are significant for the productivity of the everyday lawyer. Simplicity and invisibility—that's the concept and that's the goal of the NetDocuments platform. Why? Because we want to make life easy for the end user.
El trabajo legal está evolucionando a un ritmo más rápido que nunca, y la tecnología es la clave para el éxito continuo de los abogados (y de sus firmas). En NetDocuments, estamos orgullosos de ofrecer una plataforma que apoya a los abogados en cada etapa de su proceso para que puedan centrarse en los resultados en lugar de en los documentos.
Join us at ILTACON in August and our annual user conference, Inspire, in November to get an inside look at what we’re building to match your legal team with the increasing pace of business.
