AI Responsibly with ndMAX
There's a lot to reflect on and celebrate in 2023 — product enhancements that have helped improve processes and workflows and reduce friction, new innovations, celebrating customer successes, and more.
As we near the end of 2023, I wanted to pause to reflect on what has been an extraordinary year for our customers, partners, team members, and the legal market broadly.
Although it has been a year filled with rapid change, our mission continues to be focused and unchanging, which is to help legal professionals do their best work.
This mission is at the forefront of our daily efforts large and small. And delivering on our purpose is grounded in our core values that we win together through:
Often when I meet with customers and partners, I hear that part of what differentiates us is that we are great to do business with — that our people are amazing.
I truly enjoy hearing this feedback. I think this feeling comes from a combination of NetDocuments’ commitment to always putting our customers first and our unwavering focus on core principles that have become deeply embedded in our DNA.
Let’s explore some of this year’s examples of great outcomes for our customers because of team members staying true to our purpose and values.
When I think about our core value of exploring new things and what that makes possible for our customers, the first thing that comes to mind is generative AI. Our product teams have been testing and preparing for the day that AI became a viable option for legal professionals for many years.
Our product team has been monitoring, testing, and evaluating artificial intelligence for our products for many years. On the whole, our belief has been that artificial intelligence in the legal industry was both too narrow and often failed to deliver on its promises. Most of these technologies weren’t mature enough for us to deliver on our commitment to deliver trustworthy and reliable solutions. Where we found solutions that worked, we brought them into our product, like predictive filing in ndMail.
Over these last several years we have conducted hundreds of customer interviews about their needs and concerns, while thinking about how we could use artificial intelligence to deliver on those needs. Because we had remained so close to the market, we were able to move fast but responsibly as generative AI became broadly available and clearly had the potential to solve a wide range of issues for the legal industry. Key to that opportunity is that we had built a platform that was extensible, met regulatory and governance requirements, and had workflow capabilities matching those of the legal professional.
The team had also built the expertise necessary to select the best generative AI provider for our customers in Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI. They developed a strong partnership and credibility with Microsoft to ensure we could get the exemptions we knew were needed for our customers to be able to leverage AI responsibly. As Kim Konotchick, General Manager of Azure Mid-Market Data & AI at Microsoft, stated about ndMAX: "It is the prototype of what we encourage — which is leveraging our groundbreaking AI technology with a purpose-built, responsible AI solution that industry experts can best bring to market for their customers."
Our team’s commitment to passionate hard work led to the creation of the amazing PatternBuilder MAX solution that was live and in production globally quickly delivering on both productivity and quality gains to keep our customers at the forefront of this new wave of possibilities.
I’d also like to call out some exciting numbers. Hundreds of customers have generated significant value from our no-code automation tool, PatternBuilder. Over the past year, these customers have built thousands of apps, generating tens of thousands of documents and data table connections. The launch of PatternBuilder MAX in October has allowed our customers to unlock even more use cases, where we’ve observed an incredibly short ramp-up period for customers already familiar with PatternBuilder.
Passionate hard work brought about another exciting development for NetDocuments customers this year: the advent of M365 add-ins within the Microsoft Office Suite of applications. The NetDocuments M365 add-ins are replacing the traditional VSTO COM add-ins that were the bridge to provide open, save, attach, and other critical functions between NetDocuments and Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
M365 add-ins have a number of advantages:
Our ndMail add-in has been available for some time and includes a couple of our customer favorites for managing emails: AI-enhanced predictive filing and Outlook Folder Mapping to a NetDocuments workspace. And our Word add-in was launched a few months ago and is already enabling PatternBuilder MAX apps to run alongside document content within Word.
We continue to explore new things with our partners at Microsoft to ensure we’re delivering on our mission to enable legal professionals to do their best work.
As more organizations are switching to cloud-based document management, they are increasingly choosing NetDocuments for things like:
This year, three customers per day switched to NetDocuments from other platforms (although more current numbers reflect an increase to 4+ per day). And we are excited to welcome more than 1,000 new customers this year, representing more than 33,000 users.
Some recent firms to join us include:
We are proud of all of the amazing legal professionals we get to support every day. Each of them is making a difference for their clients, their organizations, and their constituents.
I want to extend our full team’s appreciation that you’ve chosen us to work with. We endeavor to be your best partner, provide value, and help you achieve your goals for many years to come.
We thank everyone who joined us this year at Inspire — our annual user conference. We had a great time with you in Texas, London, and Sydney. We look forward to another set of amazing events in 2024.
I’d like to extend another congratulations to our 2023 Inspire customer award winners:
These events and successes, and our ability to support our customers at the highest level, would not be possible without our amazing partner ecosystem. We win together and are fortunate to have partners that share our core values and passion for serving you.
We’re immensely grateful for all of the successes our customers, partners, employees, and organization experienced in 2023. And things are going to keep getting better — we can feel it. Expect “wow” advancements in AI-powered solutions, “I can’t believe it can” functionality in M365, even more customer input and advisory, clearer pathways to leveraging add-on tools already within NetDocuments, a user conference you won’t want to miss, and so much more.
As we close out the year, from everyone at NetDocuments, we wish you all good health and happiness in 2024 and beyond.
Josh Baxter
CEO
