By Gabrielle Hernandez, Via Legaltech News
Neota Logic and HighQ Partnership Reveals Lessons About Collaboration In Legal Tech
The two companies’ integrated set of tools may show a growing trend of collaborative technology ventures in the legal community.
The recent platform partnership between enterprise automation software company Neota Logic and content management and collaboration group HighQ in many ways foreshadows what may be a wave of collaborations across the legal technology community.
The two companies have joined forces to introduce a set of Smart Advisor tools that use a joint platform to allow users to utilize the products in tandem.
“We decided to do an integration to enable HighQ customers to build applications using the Neota Logic platform, and the Neota Logic customers to use the HighQ platform to store their data,” said Michael Mills, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Neota Logic.
For the two companies, a pairing of services was intuitive, Mills noted. “We have complementary tools and complementary markets.”
Because the legal technology community is still fairly small, Mills said that collaboration comes fairly naturally. Many of the primary players in legal technology know each other well, and can see ways that products can complement one another to serve law firms and legal departments.
Both Neota Logic and HighQ have designed their products to capitalize on integrating the assets of competing technology.
“That kind of collaboration is built into our approach to problem solving and software,” Mills said, adding that Neota Logic’s platform was optimized to make use of other technology, even complex computational tools like Wolfram Alpha.
Mills explained that legal technology needs are broad and diverse enough today that a comprehensive solution for firms and departments requires lots of different but complementary technology implements operating at once.
“Our software was designed from the beginning to integrate other technology because we recognized that no one technology is going to solve every legal or compliance problem,” Mills said.
“The most interesting legal and compliance problems need a combination of tools. The Neota Logic platform was designed to be the integration that pulls those things together,” he added.
According to Mills, Neota Logic has also begun various collaboration projects that integrate services from HighQ along with contract analysis platforms like Kira Systems and RAVN Systems.
Despite the computational complexity that law firms and legal departments can get from integrating multiple different platforms, Mills says that legal technology collaborations need user front-end access that gives the product “easy to use but understandable interface to very powerful technology underneath.”
Especially given that many of the biggest producers of technology assisted review in e-discovery and contract management have been in business for the last decade or so, bolstering technological capabilities while still making products user accessible has been a balancing act for Mills and Neota Logic’s integrated projects.
“The trick has been not only to persuade law firms that these tools are economical, but also to make those tools easy enough to use that people will understand them, use them and trust them. That’s been very much a focus in setting the direction for our product,” Mills said. “Every version gets a little better.”
Read more here – http://www.legaltechnews.com/id=1202760446400/Neota-Logic-and-HighQ-Partnership-Reveals-Lessons-About-Collaboration-In-Legal-Tech#ixzz4C9mLQbcA