Law firms and legal departments need a legal operations platforms that allow adaptability and individuality within an overall system and parameters. And firm management needs the ability to assess what’s being done, and its profitability, and compare the business lines of a firm and legal department. Litify believes the future is cloud based platforms that provide this kind of adaptability and flexibility.
Litify, an end-to-end legal ops platform for law firms and legal departments, recently announced a partnership with The Noble Law. The Noble Law is a women-owned plaintiffs’ employment law firm. It was founded on principles of diversity, empathy, equity, integrity, inclusion, and innovation. Litify will provide the firm with a view of their clients, cases, and staff at all levels.According to Laura Noble, founder and managing partner of The Noble Law, “Having data at our fingertips allows us to move quickly and thoroughly respond to our client’s needs and help them navigate what is typically a very stressful process,… Litify’s cloud-based technology will empower our staff to collaborate with clients more efficiently while enabling data-driven decisions to support successful outcomes.” The firm plans to use the Litify platform to centralize workflows and case information.
Built on Salesforce and using cloud technology, Litify claims to streamline and automate matter and task management, document generation, timekeeping, billing, and client communications. It also hopes to provide data-driven insights to law firms, in-house legal departments, and government agencies. It is an integrated platform for client relationship management, document and case management, internal and external communication.
The announcement caught my eye, given the type of work The Noble Law does and its culture. It’s also noteworthy since Litify seems to be gaining traction in its effort to specialize in legal ops and create a new category in the legal tech market. Litify is on a hot streak. It has tripled in size and now has some 200 employees and some 300 clients. In 2019 it received a $50 Series A investment of capital.
I talked to Litify’s COO, Ari Treuhaft, recently about Litify. We also talked about his legal tech journey, which is interesting.
I first chatted with Treuhaft about 3 years ago when I did an article on litigation analytics. At the time, he was Head of Product of the national plaintiffs’ law firm, Morgan and Morgan. He was responsible for moving Morgan to Litify on a firmwide basis, no small feat given the firm’s size and the notorious independent streak most lawyers have. The result of his Herculean effort was a more standard way of doing things for the firm.
After this implementation, he began to get calls from other firms seeking his advice on how to do something similar. This work led in late 2019 to his move full time to Liftify.
Treuhaft had some interesting observations about Litify, the legal market, and where things are going (or should be).
Treuhaft confirmed that Litify employs a platform, cloud-based approach that’s designed to drive data-based decisions. It’s primarily intended, he says, for operational based organizations.
The trend now is that law firms to starting to think like all other businesses
More recently, Litify has been targeting both law firms and organizations to facilitate operational thinking. The kind of thinking most other businesses have been using for some time. According to Treuhaft, “the trend now is that law firms to starting to think like all other businesses.” This is also evidenced by firms hiring COOs’ and looking at how to connect various internal systems.
The idea of Litifiy, says Treuhaft, is to provide an adaptable platform to be used by law firms with different business models: contingency fee firms to hourly billing firms, for example. He says the platform is designed to be flexible. It can thus accommodate different, individual ways of doing things that special snowflake lawyers pride themselves on.
Treuhaft observed that the legal business in the U.S. is incredibly unstructured. Lawyers and legal professionals expect and demand the discretion to run matters the way they want. But firm management needs an overall system to understand what lawyers are doing and manage the business. Says Treuhaft, a lot of legal tech is limited because it will only do certain things: it has a limited addressable market. What’s really needed, according to Treuhaft, is a platform that can be used for all different types of matters and business. Says Treuhaft, “you have to give practice groups what then need and at the same time give managing partners the transparency necessary to run a business.”
I have no idea if Litify delivers on this concept, but it’s a good one. While many law firms are similar, they all have different individual lawyers working within them who, either by necessity or hubris, have different ways of practicing and doing things. And law firms have different client mixes with different needs and goals. So the idea that one size fits all just doesn’t work.
Firms and in-house legal will more and more move away from legacy, on-prem systems and to cloud-based platforms that allow adaptability and transparency to the user
Treuhaft is right: firms need legal operations platforms that allow adaptability and individuality within an overall system and parameters. And firm management needs the ability to assess what’s being done, and its profitability, and compare the business lines of a firm. Measuring workflow efficiency and internal productivity across multiple providers and products is pretty hard. Its almost impossible without some sort of analytic data-driven tools.
Litify is looking to market the product across the ecosystem so that in-house departments and their law firms will both use it. This would allow them both to be better focused on workflow and how to do things better.
The future? He thinks firms and in-house legal will more and more move away from legacy, on-prem systems and to cloud-based platforms that allow adaptability and transparency to the user.
I think he’s right.