LexisNexis VP Jesse Alexander’s Advice to IT Professionals and Legal Tech Companies
Today, we conclude the two-part Q&A with thought leader Jesse Alexander, VP for LexisNexis Managed Technology Services. Below, Jesse provides advice to legal tech companies about the issues their products must address if they expect to see widespread adoption. MetaJure recently announced that it is now available on the LexisNexis cloud, one of the most secure platforms in the legal tech space.
- MetaJure: What advice do you have for legal professionals and IT when it comes to evaluating next gen, smart tools that are appearing in the legal market? What do they need to know to help them manage expectations and risks?
- Jesse.: IT professionals have a lot on their plate. It is essential for firms to adopt technologies that ease that burden so that IT teams can focus on important and critical projects that provide their expertise. The more that can be automated the better. All that being said, technology always requires early adopters. So while leadership and IT should be working to bring everyone to a common technology standard, make sure that a forward-leaning minority of approximately 10% are allowed to investigate and use the newest technologies. While they will find lots of bugs, they’ll also find the next generation tools designed to make supporting the rule of law easier, faster and cheaper.
- MetaJure: In the DMS space, why is there so much resistance to letting computers read, index, and apply smart tags when this technology is widely accepted in other areas of our lives?
- Jesse: The resistance to auto-classification of discoverable items is based on the fact that the metadata and content scraped by OCR is inexact. IT professionals in law firms do everything from straightforward IT functions to eDiscovery and litigation support and security management. Their roles are high stakes and the possibility of failing to locate a critical document could be devastating. Having said that, if a firm starts with document and email management, such as MetaJure, it can begin to build trust and confidence in next generation smart applications.
- MetaJure: Do you think IT professionals need to think differently about these new solutions?
- Jesse: The more refined technology becomes, the more trust IT professionals will have in tools. Applications such as MetaJure that are able to ingest and retrieve critical documents are incredibly important. This kind of technology which provides ease of use, low barriers to entry, and accuracy is more essential now than ever before.
- MetaJure: How do you think legal technology companies can help the IT professionals inside law firms understand new approaches and overcome reluctance to new technologies?
- Jesse: The more legal technology companies can help provide tools and services to improve document and email management, as well as litigation product efficacy, the greater their ability to effect adoption.
By combining the efficiency of MetaJure’s automated DMS with the security of LexisNexis’s powerful cloud, customers get world class document management performance in a trusted environment – whether they choose behind their firewall or in the cloud. Contact MetaJure for more information at www.metajure.com or 206-535-7030.
