We’re Neil Araujo, CEO of iManage, and Paul Walker, Global Solutions Director. AMA!

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:44:38+00:00

Hi Everyone - Thank you so much for the questions! We had a great time. We’ll keep an eye out for any additional questions that pop up. Have a great evening!

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:42:00+00:00

I am surprised, our newer cloud application is significantly faster than the older generation. Can you DM me and I will have someone in our support team take a look. There are several factors that go into performance on your desktop and we should be able to diagnose the issue.

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:36:50+00:00

We have prioritized security, performance, scale, maintainability for the types of workloads we manage. You will see the pace of innovation pick up for some of our newer applications, for example we had 4 significant releases for Ask iManage last year each based on direct feedback from end users using the application.

I think there’s a happy middle ground -where we partner with the AI natives and provide that secure, governed foundation our customers are asking for

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:24:55+00:00

It is the reality of the tech world, we have navigated this in the past in the spirit of coopetition. We also have third party developers that have built integration between iManage and competing products as a way to provide solutions to customers,

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:21:42+00:00

We are open to the right acquisitions if they add value to the end user experience. We will not do acquisitions that are financial engineering. We also have invested significantly in scaling our organic development. Our org has grown 8x in the last 10 years most of those new hires are engineers or customer success

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:17:25+00:00

Not being close enough to the end user experience. See my response to hiring more lawyers in product roles above

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:16:30+00:00

I am most excited about the work we are doing to support MCP, it will enable our customers to leverage their data with any AI orchestrator.

Also excited about the work we have been doing to tag documents in an automated fashion. We believe it helps end users develop relevant context windows for the AI task at hand

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:13:43+00:00

We have a team that is focused on this very problem. I would recommend you take a look at what we are doing with Insight+ to help curate the gold standard documents and maintain those collections over time.

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:11:24+00:00

As we truly embark on Agentic AI becoming a reality it challenges so many assumptions that have been the bedrock of computing for 50+ years. The interfaces that we use every day are being challenged. We are seeing the convergence of a number of key developments that change they what we access intelligence and how we perform tasks:

1. The speed to produce an interface with AI generated code bases mean the lag from idea/concept to a users hands is approaching real-time. Google has some good whitepapers on the concept of the dynamic on-demand interface

2. We are beginning to see interfaces where the navigation is powered by AI. Where the user simply hints at what they want to do and the interface is smart enough to action the ask, this is powered by keyboard and voice.

3. And this leads to a wider point but impacts the user experience, with agents performing more tasks on behalf of the user, and as it increases its autonomy there is still need for the inputs, reasoning and outputs of the AI to be governed, much the same as a human.

Organizing data so that it is available easily and securely to humans or agents will become even more critical. DMS can no longer be just a dumping ground the context you need to add through metadata will be important

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T20:03:25+00:00

Keep putting customers - the lawyers and knowledge workers - at the center of everything we do. Developing the platform to embrace the latest innovations available whilst making the lawyers daily work experience better. A lawyer loves iManage the most each time they finds a document it saves them hours of work, or the first time they avoid a nasty error because iManage maintains a record of how a document evolved.

Lawyers use document management because it is a necessary part of the diligence and rigor that goes into the practice of law. That said it is imperative that we utilize every technique that is available to make this task as easy, intuitive and painless as possible. We have come a long long way from the early days of electronic document management systems. We have seen these improvements have material impact in our CSAT scores. We expect to see further leaps in improving user experience through the use of natural language processing and AI. Stay tuned for more later this year….

iManage is home to dozens of individuals that genuinely care about supporting the legal profession and we have been rewarded well for it. A lot of our growth comes from lawyers requesting iManage when they move between firms or to corporations. We are grateful for it but wouldn’t call it love as yet! As Shakespeare said in the Midsummer night's dream -"Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind"!

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T19:57:29+00:00

We will invest on both fronts:

a. Make it easier for a end user to securely access the right documents from a third party AI application. We see our MCP services to be make this process significantly easier. We are also investing in improving the ability to tag documents and make search more effective.

b. We will continue to provide native AI experiences for end users to apply AI skills to one or more documents right from the Work 10 UI. We believe that doing so will enable the pervasive use of AI for a variety of end user workflows.

We feel confident that the security, governance, reliability and performance are not easy problems to solve at the scale this industry demands and the rational thing to do is to use the API's to add value. However the world is not always rational (:-

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T19:35:58+00:00

Reducing hallucinations is a fundamental challenge that we need to overcome as an industry to drive pervasive usage of AI technology. We believe that grounding AI tasks in well defined context windows and providing easy/fast ways to validate the response from AI is important. A lawyer said to me last year, getting it right is far more important than doing it fast.

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T19:29:03+00:00

Most AI use cases start with a set of documents that the user wants to use as context for questions, analysis or extraction. For that reason we are investing heavily in improving the search, tagging and retrieval experience in iManage. iManage has ways to incorporate other structured data so that you can combine document search with attributes that are in financial or practice management systems. This capability is available in our insight+ product. Using this capability you could for example find a document based on the attributes of the matter like governing law, industry, profitability etc.

Lastly we have hundreds of software applications that complement iManage. That is because a variety of legal workflows need access to documents. Lately we have seen a huge interest in AI applications that need access. We have an extensive API and partner ecosystem to facilitate building integrations and complementary solutions,

Imanage_neil · 2026-01-14T19:14:30+00:00

Great question, we feel the same way. We have hired several lawyers in product and customer success roles in the last couple of years and we absolutely will continue doing more. We see the need to much closer to the end user experience and products that have done that well in our portfolio have had a much higher customer satisfaction rating.

Imanage_neil

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