The Filevine user conference, LEXSummit2024 kicked off recently in Salt Lake City with a keynote presentation by its CEO, Ryan Anderson. Anderson offered up his view of where the company in specific, and perhaps legal tech, in general, should be going.
Anderson called to mind Steve Jobs and the iPhone introduction in 2007 as a map for the future. Anderson played a video of Job’s introduction of the iPhone. As most of you may remember, Jobs described iPhone as a device that combined three things—the iPod, a cell phone, and an internet communicator—into one. The genius of Jobs and the iPhone, said Anderson, was not that Apple created something entirely new. The genius was seeing the synergy of having a device do three things that three different devices previously did. This combination opened up the potential for innumerable new and different things because it gave customers something they needed and wanted. Given where we are today with the iPhone, the value of that insight seems pretty clear.
Anderson’s pointed out that similarly, legal tech vendors in the case management should be looking to do the same thing. Anderson envisions a platform that would combine case management, document management and time, billing and payments services into one. A platform that’s easy to use. Anderson recognized the headaches law firms face when trying to deal with three different providers to provide the tools to accomplish these three tasks. But Anderson says the reason no one has combined these functions into one product is that the combination is formidable. Combining the three functions into a single platform that works well is even more challenging. What law firms want and, in fact, are demanding is something that is simple and just works. That’s even harder still. Filevine has the ambition to be
