Legal AI & Operating Intelligence: Filevine

Filevine is an AI-native legal operations platform that unifies case data, documents, workflows, and teams into a single source of truth, empowering legal professionals with intelligent, context-aware insights. Powered by its Legal Operating Intelligence System (LOIS), Filevine helps law firms, enterprises, and government agencies automate work, verify facts, streamline legal processes, and drive better outcomes through agentic AI.

In this episode, we speak with Keegan Chapman, the Chief Growth Officer of Filevine, a legal technology company. The discussion centers around Filevine’s transition from a case management platform to a comprehensive legal AI platform. Keegan explains how Filevine integrates AI into every aspect of legal workflows, emphasizing the importance of context and data to provide better outcomes for legal professionals. The conversation highlights the challenges and opportunities of using AI in the legal industry, focusing on trust, reliability, and the orchestration of AI to enhance efficiency and decision-making. Keegan also shares insights into Filevine’s strategy for serving a diverse range of clients, from small firms to large government agencies, and the importance of security and customization in their platform.

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Transcript

0:04

Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge podcast. I'm your host, Bo Hamilton. Now, every industry has a moment where the technology stops being nice to have and starts reshaping how the work actually gets done. For the legal industry, that moment is happening right now. A company called Filevine has been building legal technology for over a decade. They started as a case management platform, and more recently, they've been making a pretty aggressive push into AI, unveiling something called the Legal Operating Intelligence System at their annual conference last fall. And the business results have been pretty hard to ignore, I would say. A $400 million raise out of $3 billion valuation and AI products that actually now generate more revenue than the traditional software platform. So whether you think that's a sign of where all of this legal tech is headed or just one company's bet, it's definitely worth paying attention to. Now, our guest today is Kegan Chapman, Filevine's chief growth officer. She got her start at Groupon during the pre-IPO days, eventually ran her own go-to-market consulting practice, and actually came to Filevine first as a client before joining full-time. So she's really the person figuring out how you sell AI into a profession that's built entirely around managing risk. So I've got a bunch of questions to ask her, everything from what this legal operating intelligence thing actually means in practice to how you get lawyers to trust AI when the stakes are so darn high. So a lot of questions to ask her. I want to get right into it. Keegan, welcome to the podcast. Glad you could join us. Bo, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat more about this and just what we've been seeing in the industry. Absolutely. So let's um let's start uh at the top for anyone tuning in who hasn't really maybe crossed paths with Filevine. How would you describe the company today? And maybe you can talk about, you know, how is the company focus, uh, how is their focus evolved as this legal tech has shifted towards AI? Yeah, absolutely. So Filevine's been around a while. Um, really, as you mentioned before, we started as a core infrastructure because over a decade ago, that's what the industry was looking for, right? A great place to house all of their information in one singular source to help their law firm or legal practice um work more efficiently or work together. Um that really got emphasized through the pandemic as well when everyone needed one place to go for information. But as most will know over the last few um years here, it's not about just having insights and information. It's about being able to have the right outcomes and help your teams work faster or work smarter or um, you know, be able to see details that maybe a human who's burnt out or has too much work uh could miss, right? So what we have done is made a drastic shift over the last couple of years into being a full legal AI platform. So no one will ever see File Line without some uh type of AI throughout the workflow. But what we've done is we have leveraged our history, our context, our ontology to help surface those insights that ultimately become outcomes for those legal professionals. So maybe that's drafting a document, maybe that's moving a case forward, maybe that is bringing everyone together to review an NDA together. So what we're doing is make making sure that we're taking all of the context we have, which is really different than what you're hearing in the industry, where often people are just uploading a document and looking for a summary. And we're actually saying, how do we help leverage AI or how do we leverage AI to give that lawyer the outcome that they're looking for? Okay, it's really exciting. Yeah, I it's it's a lot of it's like automating some of the everyday workflows, but then I imagine also taking action on users' behalf in some cases where it makes sense, uh, right. And obviously doing that carefully and and in a manner that the uh like a lawyer professional can actually trust and and validate. Um one thing I've noticed in this space, of course, is is every software company is really is is pivoting towards AI and incorporating a lot of features and um you know calling themselves an AI company and um maybe even coming out with their own sort of operating system of sorts. Um it's becoming one of those phrases that um can mean everything or you know, nothing depending on who's saying it, right? Um so so maybe you could talk about what does AI operating system actually mean for Filevine? Um and is it more than just like adding more features? That's a really good question, Bo. So we sat down around a table a couple of years ago and said, how are we gonna approach this in what we think is the right way, right? How can we make sure that we're helping and serving the client base that we've been serving for so many years now in a way that they're gonna expect as this AI era evolves, right? And, you know, I think everyone first started with, let's put AI somewhere and see, you know, how people are adopting it, where it's helping, where it's hurting. But having a bunch of point solutions is one of the original value props that we were trying to destroy with Filevine originally, saying, hey, you can bring everything into one place. You don't have to pay 25 vendors, you work in one intelligent place together. So as we started to think about the core differentiators of how Filevine is going to market as an AI company, we realized we have a legal operating intelligence system. It's not just legal AI, it's not just an operating system. We're taking both the data and ontology plus layering in AI at the right points in time to help actually those firms or those legal professionals operate more strongly. So instead of saying over here we have a drafting AI, over here we have a scheduling AI, over here we have, you know, a review AI. We said, why don't we input AI into each step of the flow for any legal professional using it so that they can still be the star, right? We want to make sure that the humans are in the loop doing the right work, but that they are leveraging AI in a way that will actually help them move faster, get better insights, all within the place they're already working. Gotcha. Okay. I love that philosophy. Yeah, because you're not just like sprinkling the features into your, you know, uh the software platform you've had for the last decade or so. It's like you're actually sort of rethinking it and rewriting it from the ground up around this, a lot of these AI um, you know, frameworks, right? We've actually completely been rewriting our code, though. So like I get I get pretty excited about this because it's one thing to say, I want to come into Filevine and I want to put my tasks in, or I want to upload this document, or I want to make sure my email is connected in, or I want to use the API to pull in some data from this court software or whatever it might be. That's that's really cool and good, but it's still all in this place where a human needs to review it, update it, manually put everything in. We've now leveraged AI on both sides where it's like, how can we make sure that data flows in more easily and more automated? And then how do you leverage that data? Literally sits on top of the platform so that you're not weaving through pages and pages of intake and instead you're actually looking at the case in an overview in a proactive manner versus saying, I need to upload this document and then go find this thing. It should already know. Yeah, that's that's that's that's great. It's it makes me um just think of of where things are going. I mean, obviously we we we know that people are are focusing, companies are focusing in on AI and incorporating a lot of features. And actually, uh a lot of them, like I was saying earlier, have been AI, like they're an AI native company now. You know, they they they they lead with the fact that they are an AI company. Um, but I actually haven't heard a lot of companies like talk about the operating system side of things, and that kind of frames it in a new position of um just sort of where things are going. My mind, I my my class example as a ex smartphone reviewer, um, thinking about where things are going on that front, it's like the next big shift, I think, is going to be this AI operating system where our phones are, you know, we have like one sort of chatbot that we connect that connects to all of our favorite apps and it's all integrated through one sort of interface. Um, and that's kind of the sounds like the system you guys are kind of uh moving towards with the the in the legal profession and industry. Um and so without getting too redundant with some of the points you mentioned, I'm curious like, is there a particular problem um in the market that led Filevine to build this operating system in the first place? Yeah, so um I I think I've even experienced this as a consumer, and I always try and look at what's my experience sounds like similar to when you were reviewing uh smartphones or or something else in your life. AI is coming in and affecting people's day-to-day from every angle, right? We're not selling something that only fits in legal, right, or only fits in healthcare or whatever it might be. Um, and so people are expecting a certain kind of experience, right? If they've tested Chat GPT or they've tested Claude in their life, or they've they're on their Google phone and they're using Gemini. And they're starting to say, wait, wait, wait, AI could be really helpful for me with the right information, right? And every person has experienced where they didn't give enough information to the AI, right? They said the question wrong, or they didn't upload the document they wanted to reference, or they didn't have the right um language that they used and it connected it to the wrong use of a word, right? And so the way we think about it is how can we eliminate those pieces and actually provide the full picture to the person using it? So let's say you are using even another native legal AI kind of bolt-on tool that probably felt really easy to implement with your team, but you still need to go find the documents you need, hope you can download the emails that it was referencing. Maybe you remembered to pull the text messages out of your phone. And then you also wanted to make sure it's linked to some kind of case law that you found across a different application. Will you miss one of those pieces? And it could be the difference between winning and losing a case, right? Or winning or losing an argument. So what we've tried to do is say, okay, we don't want you to have to think that hard every time you want to leverage AI for something. Let's create a place, whether that's through API connections or leveraging the core file vine infrastructure to pull everything that could possibly be related to that moment so that when you go ask a question, it's not missing that client portal message from that client in the middle of the night when they were freaking out that they forgot to send you an image from whatever it was they were talking about. And so I think that's the real difference in the power. Is it a heavier lift to think about all of the things going in up front? Sure. But when you think about it, if it's all there already, every time your staff uses it and you've created the right AI policies to have the right data there, they aren't coming and saying, I'm writing this document in a vacuum with the three documents I thought of today. They're saying I'm writing an entire um outline or in in some cases like a demand letter. And I have every single piece of the puzzle there to make sure that it is actually representing the right situation. Well, I so I think the next natural follow-up I have um after that that wonderful explanation of the platform is something that I think probably a lot of legal um lawyers are listening to and wondering themselves right now is is the trust question. Because you know, a marketing team can can experiment with AI, let's say, and the stakes are pretty low, but but if a lawyer files something based on on something that's uh it's you know bad source data, bad uh there's there's bad output. Um and then the the stakes are completely different. So how do you design AI that that lawyers can actually rely on and trust? Oh, it's such a good question. So I was sitting at dinner with an amazing attorney. We did a really cool retreat where we brought together attorneys from across the US and just got their input on kind of where they're using AI, where they're trusting AI, um areas where they wish they could apply AI, but they haven't quite figured it out. And I'm sitting at dinner with this attorney and she says to me, Oh my gosh, you won't believe what this associate put across my plate the other day. And I, you know, as somebody that's really busy and wants to keep running, I looked at it quickly and was like, okay, good, has the site, uh, the sources, has the case data I need. I'm gonna send this off. And then she had a moment because she's been practicing law for 20 years, and she said, that case citation looks weird. Something's off about that. And she went to go check where all that information was coming from. And it was made up. They had put it into some generalized tool that was not uh legal specific, that didn't have the guardrails that we believe should be in place. And they had to go back to that associate and said, like, where'd you get this information? Well, a lot of these younger attorneys and associates have been using AI from the day they started a law firm. They trust it so much more than those senior managing partners, attorneys who have had to sometimes look through books to cite things, right? And so I tell that because it was so, so clear of a story where it can go wrong. And so that kind of emphasizes where I think it can go right, which and how we do it is we have source-sided, data-sided information in everything we do. So let's say we go in and we ask Lois and we say, Lois, pull out all of these scenarios in this document. There will be a source-sided linked place and highlighted spot directly in that document where you can go read it instead of just assuming that it worked. Internally, we can also have them choose, I only want to use my information in my one case. I want to use information from all my cases that um across my file vine that I have access to. So we have permissioning in place as well to make sure, oh, you couldn't see things you're not working on, or I couldn't see things I'm not working on, right? And then we have options to go to the greater sources. Maybe it's a um case citation or case law um application or going to Google to see different information that might be there, but it's gonna tell you where it found it so that you're not going back and wondering if it's real or not. So I think that's part of it. But the last thing is it's just making sure that these legal professionals have some kind of AI policy, right? I mean, that's in any industry, and making sure that their folks know what to use and if it has the right security clearance. So the last advice I would give, which is really for anyone working on anything sensitive, and given I work on things before they are ever live in the market, I need an AI software that has a zero retention policy, right? So everyone should be reading their agreements and making sure that nothing is going and training their model. Next thing we know, Bo, we think of some amazing thing in the market and I talk about it into my AI platform. And next thing you know, it's it's feeding the go-to-market strategies for anyone else in the market, right? So Yeah, because I mean a lot of the the um you know, chat discussions you have with like let's say Chat GPT, I mean, they're at least in the early days, those were being leaked out. They were on an open, you know, people can can look for the the URL and and get access to what people were talking about. And um, so it's it's a very you know serious issue when you when you're working from uh a company side of things uh with proprietary confidential information. Um but then the the I mean just the some of the use cases, the horror stories with with AI, um lawyers using AI and s and citing fabricated cases. I mean, I remember all those those headlines. Um it's uh I think we all a lot of us knew that would happen eventually. There would always be examples. Um, but seeing it, you know, again and again um from a lot of these professionals that you think would, you know, would have the knowledge to to not to not go down that path. But it's just easy for everyone to do. I think you you we we already I find myself outsourcing a lot of my um you know workflow and and critical thinking skills to AI. And it's kind of like on one hand it's useful, but on the other hand, it makes me wonder, you know, I I don't want to rely on it too much. So there's like the balance. Um but I think what you were saying with having the platform lowest to review the context and bring forward a lot of the options for um like the the professionals using it. Um I think ultimately it helps them be the decision maker. Um and again, it's just a good reminder to always always just review, review, review. Don't you know take some of the outputs as you know the end all be all. This is the the word of word of God type of thing. It's easy to do that too, Bo with AI, especially like some of our AI. I was interviewing a different customer and they were saying they had to compare one demand letter to that AI wrote to the one they wrote because it sounded so similar to them in the way we built it. And she was like, this is a slippery slope, right? Because if it sounds just as good as me, your mind starts to trust it almost too much, right? Because we're all humans. We're trying to think, how can we get more done faster? You know, even when you're in the billable hour, there's a lot of admin work that if it could be simplified, you could spend a lot more time with your client or working on your case strategy. And so the the two areas where we've seen humans almost want to trust the AI, but like it's really important that they're thinking about how are they elevating themselves as the expert and leveraging that data is kind of in those case loss situations, in those drafting situations, um, in those contract review situations and making sure that they are validating what's happening, even when it sounds just like them. Yeah. It's it's getting better and better. It's scary. Yeah. Um so okay, we covered the reliability side, I think. Um, but but one of the other things that stood out to me when researching uh the platform is just that it's not a tool you ask, you know, a basic uh question and get an answer from. It's it's deciding, like you were saying, the the what kind of task it's looking at and and routing it to the right place. It's it's like it's it's a lot more complex than just uh um sort of combing through uh you know company documentation and pulling up various policies and whatnot. Like we can do a lot of that, but it's it's uh it's also kind of taking action on your behalf and and giving you all these kind of scenarios um based on what it is you're trying to unravel. So um how important is that orchestration layer to making AI useful in the legal work? Yeah, it's a great question. I think a lot of people approach AI for the first time and they think, what's this one thing it can do for me? Right. And I think that's where a lot of AI companies are. That's they they provide that one point solution, that one outcome that someone's going to look for. Um, at Filevine, we kind of have this motto that we're gonna actually build the really hard things that no one wants to build, um, and not always the easy things. And one of the areas where we've done that, and I think it illustrates this quite well, is we've really focused on how can we serve the litigator, not just the transactional attorney. We can obviously help any type of attorney in any type of space, but to take the litigator, who it's so often such a human component on how they are going to go about that case, how are they gonna win, how they're gonna head to trial, what they're doing in that deposition? Those are much harder problems to solve with AI. And so we we took that hard flow that's very human integrated and said, okay, how can we make sure that we're not only drafting just one motion or discovery questions or deposition prop. Like, how can we pull everything together so that AI is that kind of right hand riding along with you in everything you're doing, either proactively or reactively. So it's not so the way we kind of think about it is like Lois is not just searching and saying, here's a document, right? Or um, I'll draft this one thing. We're trying the way we've built Lois is that it thinks alongside of you. So it might pull together deadlines so that you know exactly when all these things are due. It may surface certain documents at certain points in time because it knows you're in that phase of the case. It may help you build your strategy, right? Because it has all of the context from everything that has come into one place. It may schedule a task for your paralegal to go review something because you flagged it as you were reviewing that case strategy. Um, we have AI in deposition tools that fit with inside Lois. So it's sitting alongside of you and surfacing inconsistencies, risks, ways that the deposition is going against the documents that you've already stored and reviewed to prepare for that. So what we're trying to do is say, okay, we understand you are the expert. You are so good at what you do. But imagine if there was someone there with you making sure that you didn't have happy years, which anyone in sales or marketing or or any kind of uh position knows that we can hear what we want to hear, and that you're getting the right things at the right time, so that when you are in that moment, which often is a once-in-a-lifetime moment to find that answer you need, it's right there with you and you can be successful. So that orchestration layer is taking it so much farther from that one moment in time and instead tying AI through every second, every moment, whether you're on the road, whether you're in a deposition room, whether you're in a courtroom, and pulling everything together. That's a great explanation. And it just goes to goes to show the how how many different problems you guys are are focused on on and areas you're you're working on helping in regards to the different task uh professionals are working on there. Um you mentioned that it's you're focusing a lot on the litigator side of things. Um is that kind of the where you're noticing legal teams. Feel a lot of the the most pain right now? Is that kind of the main the main priority? I think there's less options for them today, to be honest. Like it's a harder thing to solve, right? Because there's a lot of human thinking involved. I mean, one area I was thinking about, I mean, people watch suits, I'm sure. You can take any legal drama that you maybe watch. And um often, and this was just an example. I was talking to this great litigator who's been using um like our the depositions portion of our Lois software. And he said, he will send in a more junior attorney, right? Which happens, right? We have to divide the work, especially on these massive cases. It's not like, oh, you are going to handle every single thing. You would burn out in a minute with how long some of these goes, how in depth some of these are, how many thousands of documents are being reviewed, how many depositions are happening. And he was like, it's amazing. I can prep using Lois with my more junior attorney. I can prepare the questions, I can prepare what to look out for. The AI is then running and essentially coaching my uh junior attorney while in the room. So I don't actually have to sit there. And then he can play back the clips, give feedback to that attorney and make them better moving forward, right? All with the use of Lois. And it's like all of a sudden, this magnificent attorney can now clone himself in a way and make sure that he can do all of the things the best way possible. In the past, what that looked like is hey, get out there, do a good job in that deposition, make sure you get them to say this, and hopefully that'll get us what we need to do, or like the outcome that we need, right? And it's like now we can actually almost guarantee that by giving them the right coaching pre, during, and post because of it. That's a that's incredible. It's like the the ripple effect from this software is is just mind-boggling to think about. And and every, I mean, I hear a lot of these examples in all these different industries and hearing about um what this is doing for the lawyers and and litigators using this platform. I mean, um again, the rip the ripple effect is is astounding to think about. Um I I also want to think what what fascinates me too is how you're able to cater the platform across a wide customer base, right? Um, because you've got I imagine you've got small firms, you got massive in-house teams, you're working with government agencies, you got prosecutors, public defenders. I mean, the list goes on, and there's all these different environments that you have to kind of cater to. And then usually when a platform tries to be everything to everyone, it kind of ends up being watered down, kind of mediocre for a lot of them. So I'm curious like, how do you build one platform just flexible enough for all these different clients without, without watering it down? Yeah. This strategy started really early. So when case management platforms originally came out, a lot of them built templates and asked the attorneys to fit into what they think the perfect flow for whatever that kind of practice of law is. And so what happened is you saw a lot of siloing or a lot of um softwares that could kind of serve only the SMB market or only the enterprise market or whatever it might be. File Bang took a little bit different approach, which I think is a big reason why we've been able to apply AI in the way we have. And we said, no, we want to make this customizable and configurable from the start. You don't fit into our platform. We build a platform that fits into the way that you've been Uber successful as a legal professional. What that allowed us to do is create all of these different modules at the core, um, different API integrations for those that have other softwares that need to come in based on whatever area they're in. And we found a way to orchestrate that all together as one core system of record or data source. Well, when you have that, then you can lay your AI on top and serve anyone. So we serve, you're right. We can serve your one-person attorney shop that just or legal shop that just opened. We could serve your in-house counsel. I mean, we have amazing in-house counsel groups putting, you know, 10,000 contracts across their teams in any given year. We have government agencies. Um, we have, you know, state and local departments, we have enterprise firms that have six or seven, maybe 15 different practice areas. And we work with them to make sure that those core, that core infrastructure underlying looks like something that can pull in everything they need for the context to then serve the AI. The AI can then, because of the way we built the vectorization model and the way we've brought legal language in, can then work within those spaces based on the data it's provided. And so um, not easy, right? But we're once again doing the harder thing. It's a lot easier to have a template. Um, but that's kind of the core piece. The second thing we did, Bo, from the very beginning is took security very seriously. So we have enterprise level, some people say like bank grade, government grade security, all the way down to the, you know, smaller mom and pop legal shop that's serving people in their local community, that's super important and never would have even thought about that. We apply it everywhere and anywhere to make sure that they are anything they are putting in that system, which often happens to be quite a bit of very sensitive data, um, is safe regardless of how they're using it, serving it up, and working with their team. And so I think that's also allowed us to expand into this government space and this corporate space where there's really high stake matters. Um, and we need to make sure that they feel that every bit of information that is going into the system is gonna be safe. And then if they're gonna use AI on top of it, it's gonna stay safe. Well, again, I think that's uh it kind of goes back to you really thought about the problems from the beginning and you rewrote the platform from the ground up around the the scale problem and and how AI is gonna help uh help tackle some of these um these problems and offer solutions. And I think that a lot of the you know, software platforms in in this industry or other industries that are just sprinkling in the AI features on top of kind of their uh current platform, um, they're gonna have to come to that that point where they're gonna have to start rethinking fundamentally. And the fact that you guys have already rewrote the platform, um it it just you guys are at a definitely a much bigger advantage, right? Because you don't have to um go through that arduous process, which is uh you know, easier said than done. It takes, I imagine it it took a it took quite some, you know, it's a lot of uh long nights um getting all that code updated and and incorporating all the features you want to to incorporate. And I'm sure you got a long laundry list of other things you want to add to. Yeah, the the AI team, machine learning team, engineering teams, they are phenomenal. I mean, Bo, they are pushing code. It feels like every minute these days. It used to feel like every day. But, you know, stuff can happen faster when you leverage the right tools in-house as well and you have the right experts in-house to guide these conversations. And I think um you've you've probably seen we've had a few acquisitions over the last year as well. And some of the reasons we acquire is obviously they have a great tech, but then also there's been amazing talent that has come from those acquisitions to help bring us forward in what we're building, helping us think farther. We have a full legal futurist team that purely looks at what they think will be needed in the next three to five years, and we try and start building it now so that that way our software always stays kind of a step ahead for the people we're serving who are serving so many great people in the world too. So I want to flag this uh the stat that I came across that because I think it connects to everything we've been talking about up until this point, but it's it's um comes from Reuters. Reuters reported that FileVite is now making more money from its AI products than from the traditional software platform. And that caught my attention because you know, we're not talking about uh a startup that launched as an AI company. That is, you know, a shift that has happened. There's been so much talk about all this capital being thrown into AI to build out data centers and software platforms and all the money that companies are allocating, you know, to AI, hoping that it pays off, um, but still years away from it actually paying off and actually you know generating a revenue that backs up their investment. But it sounds like it's already starting to pay off with with you guys and with Filefind, which I think is is very exciting. Um I think it goes without saying, but like, does that signal just where legal tech is is heading, you know? It's interesting. Like I it's not just a milestone, right? I think the whole world's heading in this direction. And if you don't, you know, uh but pull in a personal anecdote, but my dad always says, like, if you the biggest fear we should all have in the world is becoming irrelevant. And with the rise of AI, you can become irrelevant with a blink of an eye, right? And so the way we I think about it, the way our team thinks about it is this is a signal that the no one no longer wants just insights, right? They want better outcomes. They are willing to leverage what's right for them to get that in that context to have those better outcomes is the most important part. And so I think that's like the first core of it is like everyone's going this way. You can either fight it and say, we believe that the old way is still the same way. I think about this when we were we were trying to get people to go on the cloud with Filevine many, many years ago and people still wanted on-prem solutions, right? Like we we did era one. Now we're in this new one. But the other thing is too, is um, people are willing to pay where where they can get the outcomes, right? And so what happens is you provide the right solutions and you're a trusted source, right? Like law firms, legal professionals have been trusting Filevine for a really long time. So we get the opportunity to show them how we think it should be done. And luckily, we personally have a ton of context, right? We didn't just pop up two years ago and say, we're gonna solve the legal AI problem. We've been solving legal problems for so many years, and now we get to solve it in a new way. That's a fun challenge to have. So what happens is you're trusted, you have great products, those products can serve those people very quickly, and they start to see the outcomes out of the gates. Like it's kind of a no-brainer at that point. Yeah, well, I love that that quote that your dad provided. And um, it just makes me think too of you know, again, it's like we hear this this frequently, but it's AI is not gonna take your job. It's someone who's who's utilizing AI is gonna take your job. And the same is goes is true with with companies and organizations, the companies that adopt these these new tools and uh you know work to incorporate them in a way that you know ultimately maximizes the valuable outputs. Um, that's that's really they're the ones that are gonna be uh you know successful and set themselves up uh from the the failures out there, the companies that don't um adopt and kind of stay stagnant. Um so I want to get to a I want to go a little bit more big picture um and just maybe we could talk about where all this is going. I mean, I know we've AI is is all the focus right now. Um we've heard a lot about agentic AI and and making and help having these tools actually act upon, act on the the user's request and carry out tasks for them. Um where is it all headed? I mean, in the next like six to 12 months, what's what are some of your um you know main sort of checklist of of things you'd like to incorporate into the platform? Yeah, I think the people that determine this are our customers and the users of AI, which is always really fun. So we I notice that people will come into the platform or even come to Filevine. Uh we have lots of new potential clients that come in and say, I just want an AI solution. I don't want a ton of change management. I want to be able to try it today. And then I'll think about like the bigger picture, right? So it all starts somewhere, right? It's the way I've described it to my team is no one wants to change their entire persona and wardrobe right out of the gates always, right? They want to maybe try on a new shirt, see how it made them feel. Uh, and then from there, they may kind of invest more heavily into kind of how that's going to help them. So we've created a way for people to come in and be using Lois within a day, right? Like they can upload a document, they can see the baseline of what a really good, highly secure, legal specific AI can do for them. And that's kind of like step one. What happens 99% of the time, Bow is they say, is there a better way to get everything in here so it can start thinking with me? Right. And so that's when people start to say, let's leverage all of the power of Filevine. They end up wanting to make sure that all of their tasks are there, their emails are rolling in, their documents are there. So the customer then determines, okay, now I want it to be able to think with me. Well, I think where it's going next, Bo, is can it think before me? Because I have everything there. So some of the questions customers have said to us are if I came in and, you know, I sign into Lois in the morning, could Lois automatically surface everything I probably should have thought of last night so that I can start my day stronger? Or, hey, is there a way that I can proactively have certain things, agents pulling and doing certain things in the background? So when I get to that point, it's already served up and ready for me. Um, are there ways for it to be more in the moment with me versus where AI started, which was a lot of time like post um action analysis or summary, et cetera? And so that's kind of where we're headed, Bo. I mean, the list is endless. This this AI capabilities and what agents you can build. I mean, we could think of everything in the world, but I think that's like kind of phase three, which is how are we making sure we're serving up those things proactively versus making the AI only a reactive like source of truth for folks once they've done something else? Yeah, absolutely. Be more proactive, less reactive. Um, I think the the visual I think of when uh in that answer is is when you, you know, I think listeners, when you interact with your chatbot of choice, your customer facing chatbot, chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, you name it, you know, when you get an output from your request, let's say it's like tracking a, I don't know, the price of Bitcoin or something, it's like it'll generate a lot of times it'll generate a follow-up question, be like, well, if if this is helpful, if if it's helpful, I could also generate a dashboard so you could just go to this webpage and see this. Um, or I could, you know, send you text alerts when it gets, you know, above a certain port or whatever. It's like questions that it tries to predict your next question and your next attack. And a lot of times, like, you know, you don't have, I wouldn't have thought of that necessarily, or at least I would have thought of it later, but it's kind of start starting to um you know get inside my head and start thinking about useful next steps. And so if you apply that to what you guys are tackling, I could see how that would be, you know, that would be the next big um, you know, proactive move. Um so it makes a lot of sense. I'm just excited to I'm gonna have to we'll have to have you back, you know, in the in the coming, you know, months or couple of years just to see like what what kind of changes because I'm things are moving so fast that it's it's really difficult to say exactly where things will be. I was gonna say, Bo, you could have me back in probably two weeks at the rate we're going, and I could tell you something new that we thought of because of an amazing customer story. I mean, we're really lucky. Our customers have been so along on this journey with us. I mean, I was out, flew out to California and got to meet with one that I mean, he used AI in a massive case. And on one side of the courtroom, there was 18 of them, 18 people flipping through binders, freaking out, googling things, trying to figure out what their case strategy was. And he was on a team of three with Lois, and he won. Okay. Like there's just so cool, such cool stories that when you actually get in with them and you can start to figure out why they leveraged it, when they trusted it, how it was helpful, where we could improve the product. We do a ton of that because we believe that the people on the front lines are the ones that are gonna help us build exactly what they need. Um, we have ideas, but usually those ideas are really solidified by those experiences that those attorneys and legal professionals share with us. I love that. Yeah, I love hearing the concrete examples uh to help kind of you know paint a picture of the solutions. That's awesome. Okay, well, I want to pivot slightly and just shift gears to get into some rapid fire uh leadership stuff before we wrap up. Um now, Keegan, I know every every leader um I talk to has that one thing they wish the market understood, the thing that you'd like maybe shout from the rooftops if you could. Um so if a prospect is listening to this right now and they they can only take away one thing about Filevine or maybe the industry as a whole, what would you want them to know? Yeah, um, I think it is that your AI is only as smart as the information you give it. That's how it lives today, right? And so when you're evaluating which AI partner to go with, think about where are they getting their information? How are they making sure it's in the right place so that when you're ready to ask those questions, look for those insights, create those outcomes, that it's coming off of data that you trust and you know is going to provide you the best possible answer. Now you're in a space with a lot of noise, of course, a lot of companies making big promises right now. Uh, what's something your competitors are getting wrong that you're determined to do differently? I think right now in the industry, many of the other solutions are trying to solve one or two problems. Um, I was talking to a potential prospect that was using another AI solution in the market. And they said, you know, they came in and they told me they could solve for this. So I was really excited because that was the problem I had that day. Now, after months of trying to use the software, I realized that the carpet isn't running from wall to wall. I have spaces and gaps that aren't helping me actually become more efficient or drive a better business process around AI. And so I think that's kind of where many are missing the mark is they're coming out and they're promising a lot. They're solving one quick problem. But once those software or once that AI is being implemented, the users are realizing it wasn't just one point in time they needed to fix. They needed to think about how they can leverage AI across their entire workflow to ensure that they're getting the right answers and that people can be more efficient or do better work or whatever it might be mean for their organization. I love that. All right, great answer. Um, all right. Well, last uh question, last really substantive question. Um, and it's gonna be a little bit more personal. Uh, so apologies, I will throw you on the spot. But um, you know, leading through a period like this is challenging. Um, it's it's moving so fast. Well, it's a lot of these AI advances, of course. Um, the expectations, they keep climbing. How do you stay motivated and just keep your team motivated during these tough stretches, these long nights, and and all these, you know, you have to communicate with everybody, keep everyone in the loop. What are you what are you doing to just keep everyone in the right headspace? I think it's a matter of taking challenges and looking at them as opportunities. What a cool time for all of us to be creating, figuring things out, building new um software AI. I mean, I think about I lucked out. I got to work for Groupon when it was the fastest growing company in the world, right? Let me tell you, though, it was not always the most motivating feeling. It was not always not, it was almost always stressful. It was always almost challenged just to help people understand what we were trying to build because there was nothing like it, right? And so I take that at my core and I think about okay, how does that apply to what we're doing right now? And it's like, we have an opportunity to change the way people work. We have the opportunity to provide them with tools to actually serve these people who need help better than ever before, right? The attorneys we are serving, they made a promise that they will use the right tools, the right resources, the right access to help serve their client in the best way possible to provide them the best outcome in whatever that case looks like, whatever side of the courtroom they're sitting on, it does not matter. And I think if we can get our heads out of sometimes all the tasks it takes, all of the stressful conversation, all of the high confront feedback, all of the moments where you might feel like you're doing it wrong, and then think of this instead as an opportunity where it's like we get to make this up. We get to leverage our customers' experiences and build something that's never been built before. So anytime we get like too tactical, and in marketing and sales, that's easy to do, right? It's like, I need to make calls, or I need to write this one pager, or I need to make sure the website's up to date, or I'm gonna post an ad online. It's like, okay, we got to think bigger than that. Like what we are selling and what we are offering to the market is going to change the way they serve their clients and honestly change the justice system if we do it right, because we're gonna help people get better outcomes, which is a pretty powerful moment if you can get your head out of this stuff is hard today. Yeah, yeah. I oh man, that's such a great answer. And I love the big picture focus. And, you know, I think the the the daily tasks, they are important. I mean, you gotta, you know, you gotta grind and and and stick it through to get uh to accomplish those big picture tasks. But um, you know, at the same time, you it I could see it absolutely helping you by by keeping your eye on the prize and not getting overwhelmed in the you know in the with in the present with all the the the to-dos that are keep, you know, have a long list of of actionable items. So But one time I had sorry, it just made me think of this. I had a leader early on in my career say to me, you know, when you look back on what you were doing, is it what it says on your resume? Or what's actually more important could be what's the story you want to tell. And anyone that is working in AI right now is going to have a kick-ass story to tell, right? It's like, think about 10 years down the road, Bo, like, I don't even know what's possible. You don't know what's possible. I mean, we were joking, even in three weeks, this is gonna look different. Who has the honor of getting to work in that space and say, this is what I learned, this is what I created. And now, whenever whatever takes over AI in the next 10 or 15 years, we get to go apply that again and then be at the forefront of whatever the next generation of technology is. I mean, we're in like a very exciting place to work. Totally. Yeah. I mean, another uh quote I thought about too is is like, when you're when you're born, you know, you look like your your parents. When you die, you look like your decisions, right? I think I love, I love uh you just made me think of this. I appreciate the uh that. But I've been thinking a lot about that and just um, you know, yeah, look at the big picture, look at the the the ripple effect of your decisions, how you're who you're influencing. I mean, that's one of the many reasons why I love, you know, talking with people like yourself and just um hearing about your insights and um delivering this conversation to our listeners, you know, and having the ripple effect that it that your information um has on them. So um is there a link um listeners can visit to learn more about Filevine or get in contact with your team, or maybe a resource you you'd recommend they explore, anything at all? I mean, the best place to send them always is our website. We have everything and anything you could ever want to know about the core infrastructure of Filevine, as well as all of the AI we've built throughout, the new agents coming and how we can help serve anyone in the legal industry, regardless of if you're at a firm, you're in-house, or at a government agency. We will have great people to talk you through kind of what the right solution is, or help you think through how to evaluate AI for your practice or your business so that you can make a really informed decision, whether that's us or not. Um, but our hope is we can help people pick the right things and be successful and get the outcomes that they want. Amazing. All right. Keegan, thank you again so much. Thanks for this conversation and for breaking this all uh down with us. I appreciate it. Awesome. Thank you, Buh. All right, thank you all for listening to the SourceForge podcast. I am your host, Bo Hamilton. 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