{"id":135645,"date":"2025-10-22T17:30:51","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T01:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/10\/22\/will-netdocuments-were-not-a-rock-band-approach-to-legal-ai-sustain-it\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T17:30:51","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T01:30:51","slug":"will-netdocuments-were-not-a-rock-band-approach-to-legal-ai-sustain-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/10\/22\/will-netdocuments-were-not-a-rock-band-approach-to-legal-ai-sustain-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Will NetDocuments\u2019 \u2018We\u2019re Not A Rock Band\u2019 Approach To Legal AI Sustain It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the season of seemingly never-ending user conferences, the NetDocuments Inspire<\/a> conference took place this week in Scottsdale, Arizona. NetDocuments<\/a> is one of the leading document management service providers and is finding its way in the AI landscape. I came to its conference frankly wondering whether its laser product focus and credibility could sustain it long term in the era of consolidation of functions and offerings. I still don\u2019t know the answer.<\/p>\n

The Opening Keynote<\/strong><\/p>\n

The opening keynote was primarily given by Josh Baxter<\/a>, NetDocuments CEO, along with Dan Hauck<\/a>, its Chief Product Officer.<\/p>\n

In the era of bombastic, over-the-top keynotes by C-suite legal tech bros leaping about the stage, Baxter\u2019s approach was refreshing. He was understated and spoke in a calm, credible voice. As Baxter put it when I met with him separately, \u201cWe\u2019re not a rock band.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baxter reflects the company well. NetDocuments has always quietly delivered a workman-like document management system. It doesn\u2019t overpromise, and it usually overdelivers. I think that\u2019s why it is used by so many law firms. Its team can walk into a room of skeptical lawyers and let the products sell themselves. Too often, legal tech vendors forget that at the end of the day, they are selling to lawyers who are trained to be skeptical and can spot bullshit a mile away.<\/p>\n

An Apology<\/strong><\/p>\n

Baxter\u2019s opening remarks reflected this approach and the company\u2019s attitude. He didn\u2019t start by touting NetDocuments successes; he started by taking responsibility for an outage last week that affected NetDocuments customers. You have to understand how that played. Baxter was talking to a room full of mostly IT people. He understood that when systems from outside vendors fail, angry lawyers who know little about technical issues flood IT personnel with demands to get it up and running immediately. Who gets the blame and takes the beating? The IT folks. I talked to some of them afterwards about the outage who confirmed that was exactly how it played out.<\/p>\n

Baxter put that event up front and didn\u2019t sugarcoat it.<\/p>\n

The Announcement of AI Profile<\/strong><\/p>\n

The product announcement portion of the keynote primarily focused on a new tool called AI Profile. AI Profile is designed to run in the background (it\u2019s no coincidence that many of NetDocuments tools run in the background doing nuts-and-bolts work day after day that the user rarely notices). It\u2019s designed to use metadata to automatically profile the critical information about a document, so that users can drill down and get the information they need. This enables users to precisely search for and find particular documents on particular issues.<\/p>\n

Ahh metadata, I haven\u2019t heard that term much lately. The problem with metadata has always been that inputting good metadata into any system takes time. Lawyers and legal professionals aren\u2019t and won\u2019t spend the time to input critical metadata about documents.<\/p>\n

When they are done working with a document, they\u2019re done. And it shouldn\u2019t be surprising that this is the case: most NetDocuments customers bill by the hour. Inputting metadata isn\u2019t billable. \u00a0<\/p>\n

The second problem? Lawyers by nature are independent. Which means 10 lawyers can produce the same document and call it 10 different things. And they are all convinced they are right.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And as one of the placards outside the session rooms put it, \u201cLawyers didn\u2019t go to law school to fill out metadata fields.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s metadata that reveal the guts of a document: its type, its unique characteristics, and what it does. So, it\u2019s valuable and NetDocuments seems to have found a way to automate its collection.<\/p>\n

How Does It Work and What Does It Do?<\/strong><\/p>\n

NetDocuments has created a prebuilt taxonomy and document attributes to profile various documents based on working with experts in legal taxonomy and data extraction. (The taxonomy can also be customized to meet particular firm needs.) AI Profile will look at a document and fill in the information about it based on the prebuilt profile. This can be done quickly across millions of documents.<\/p>\n

Hauck gave an example of the preparation of a cell phone tower lease agreement in Arizona. With profiling, I can access all the leases for cell phone towers in Arizona the firm has done and then access the key unique clauses.<\/p>\n

And by having AI tools run on profiled documents, you reduce response inaccuracies.<\/p>\n

In short, according to Hauck, \u201cmetadata dramatically improves the search capabilities of AI. We are doing things with semantic search and AI search to be able to carve out results that are profoundly impactful.\u201d It overlays \u201cfoundational GenAI capabilities into NetDocuments.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Isn\u2019t This Old School?<\/strong><\/p>\n

But Hauck posed the question that was running through my mind, especially after attending some recent user conferences: \u201cIsn\u2019t this old school? Aren\u2019t there amazing tools that already can handle unstructured data?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hauck says, no, there aren\u2019t a lot of tools that can do that, at least quickly. With AI Profile, \u201cYou can formulate a generic search and then use complex metadata to look for something specific like a certain kind of agreement of a certain deal value.\u201d You can do things like determining how many times a lawyer has done a certain task, which is valuable for things like RFPs and bringing the right expertise to the table. Without profiling, Hauck says AI tools can\u2019t do that accurately and quickly.<\/p>\n

Using the filtered metadata is also important for security: it would enable users to find and ensure the protection of documents containing, say, personally identifiable information or personal health records and place those documents in secure folders.<\/p>\n

NetDocuments\u2019 Future<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if AI Profile will do what Baxter and Hauck say it will. I don\u2019t know if other companies that offer AI tools that work on internal and external data can intrude on the document management space and take over that function. I don\u2019t know if someday NetDocuments will be acquired by a company that offers AI tools for external data to catch up with competition. Or if NetDocuments might become the acquirer.<\/p>\n

But what I can tell you is that tech companies that are laser focused on one thing typically do it well because of that focus. NetDocuments isn\u2019t trying to take over the legal tech world. As Baxter put it, \u201cWe\u2019re not going to deliver every capability from the business of law to the practice of law.\u201d<\/p>\n

What it is doing is trying to solve frustration points in document retention and management. It\u2019s trying to help lawyers and legal professionals use their documents and internal content in new and valuable ways. Hauck told me NetDocuments wants \u201cto give them the ability to access content at the right moment in the right way. With AI capabilities that are built into the experience,\u201d instead of being the experience like others seem to want to do. Baxter added, \u201cWe believe there is still this world where meeting users where they are is valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, I can\u2019t answer whether NetDocuments can remain a player by offering a document management product, as comprehensive as it is, especially when we may be approaching the era of tech Walmarts. But its credibility and history of offering good products makes it a valued and trusted partner to many law firms.<\/p>\n

And that fact alone may sustain it for the time being, even as other vendors promise products that can do more across various disciplines.<\/p>\n

\n

Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes\u00a0TechLaw Crossroads<\/a>, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The post Will NetDocuments\u2019 \u2018We\u2019re Not A Rock Band\u2019 Approach To Legal AI Sustain It?<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the season of seemingly never-ending user conferences, the NetDocuments Inspire<\/a> conference took place this week in Scottsdale, Arizona. NetDocuments<\/a> is one of the leading document management service providers and is finding its way in the AI landscape. I came to its conference frankly wondering whether its laser product focus and credibility could sustain it long term in the era of consolidation of functions and offerings. I still don\u2019t know the answer.<\/p>\n

The Opening Keynote<\/strong><\/p>\n

The opening keynote was primarily given by Josh Baxter<\/a>, NetDocuments CEO, along with Dan Hauck<\/a>, its Chief Product Officer.<\/p>\n

In the era of bombastic, over-the-top keynotes by C-suite legal tech bros leaping about the stage, Baxter\u2019s approach was refreshing. He was understated and spoke in a calm, credible voice. As Baxter put it when I met with him separately, \u201cWe\u2019re not a rock band.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baxter reflects the company well. NetDocuments has always quietly delivered a workman-like document management system. It doesn\u2019t overpromise, and it usually overdelivers. I think that\u2019s why it is used by so many law firms. Its team can walk into a room of skeptical lawyers and let the products sell themselves. Too often, legal tech vendors forget that at the end of the day, they are selling to lawyers who are trained to be skeptical and can spot bullshit a mile away.<\/p>\n

An Apology<\/strong><\/p>\n

Baxter\u2019s opening remarks reflected this approach and the company\u2019s attitude. He didn\u2019t start by touting NetDocuments successes; he started by taking responsibility for an outage last week that affected NetDocuments customers. You have to understand how that played. Baxter was talking to a room full of mostly IT people. He understood that when systems from outside vendors fail, angry lawyers who know little about technical issues flood IT personnel with demands to get it up and running immediately. Who gets the blame and takes the beating? The IT folks. I talked to some of them afterwards about the outage who confirmed that was exactly how it played out.<\/p>\n

Baxter put that event up front and didn\u2019t sugarcoat it.<\/p>\n

The Announcement of AI Profile<\/strong><\/p>\n

The product announcement portion of the keynote primarily focused on a new tool called AI Profile. AI Profile is designed to run in the background (it\u2019s no coincidence that many of NetDocuments tools run in the background doing nuts-and-bolts work day after day that the user rarely notices). It\u2019s designed to use metadata to automatically profile the critical information about a document, so that users can drill down and get the information they need. This enables users to precisely search for and find particular documents on particular issues.<\/p>\n

Ahh metadata, I haven\u2019t heard that term much lately. The problem with metadata has always been that inputting good metadata into any system takes time. Lawyers and legal professionals aren\u2019t and won\u2019t spend the time to input critical metadata about documents.<\/p>\n

When they are done working with a document, they\u2019re done. And it shouldn\u2019t be surprising that this is the case: most NetDocuments customers bill by the hour. Inputting metadata isn\u2019t billable. \u00a0<\/p>\n

The second problem? Lawyers by nature are independent. Which means 10 lawyers can produce the same document and call it 10 different things. And they are all convinced they are right.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And as one of the placards outside the session rooms put it, \u201cLawyers didn\u2019t go to law school to fill out metadata fields.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s metadata that reveal the guts of a document: its type, its unique characteristics, and what it does. So, it\u2019s valuable and NetDocuments seems to have found a way to automate its collection.<\/p>\n

How Does It Work and What Does It Do?<\/strong><\/p>\n

NetDocuments has created a prebuilt taxonomy and document attributes to profile various documents based on working with experts in legal taxonomy and data extraction. (The taxonomy can also be customized to meet particular firm needs.) AI Profile will look at a document and fill in the information about it based on the prebuilt profile. This can be done quickly across millions of documents.<\/p>\n

Hauck gave an example of the preparation of a cell phone tower lease agreement in Arizona. With profiling, I can access all the leases for cell phone towers in Arizona the firm has done and then access the key unique clauses.<\/p>\n

And by having AI tools run on profiled documents, you reduce response inaccuracies.<\/p>\n

In short, according to Hauck, \u201cmetadata dramatically improves the search capabilities of AI. We are doing things with semantic search and AI search to be able to carve out results that are profoundly impactful.\u201d It overlays \u201cfoundational GenAI capabilities into NetDocuments.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Isn\u2019t This Old School?<\/strong><\/p>\n

But Hauck posed the question that was running through my mind, especially after attending some recent user conferences: \u201cIsn\u2019t this old school? Aren\u2019t there amazing tools that already can handle unstructured data?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hauck says, no, there aren\u2019t a lot of tools that can do that, at least quickly. With AI Profile, \u201cYou can formulate a generic search and then use complex metadata to look for something specific like a certain kind of agreement of a certain deal value.\u201d You can do things like determining how many times a lawyer has done a certain task, which is valuable for things like RFPs and bringing the right expertise to the table. Without profiling, Hauck says AI tools can\u2019t do that accurately and quickly.<\/p>\n

Using the filtered metadata is also important for security: it would enable users to find and ensure the protection of documents containing, say, personally identifiable information or personal health records and place those documents in secure folders.<\/p>\n

NetDocuments\u2019 Future<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if AI Profile will do what Baxter and Hauck say it will. I don\u2019t know if other companies that offer AI tools that work on internal and external data can intrude on the document management space and take over that function. I don\u2019t know if someday NetDocuments will be acquired by a company that offers AI tools for external data to catch up with competition. Or if NetDocuments might become the acquirer.<\/p>\n

But what I can tell you is that tech companies that are laser focused on one thing typically do it well because of that focus. NetDocuments isn\u2019t trying to take over the legal tech world. As Baxter put it, \u201cWe\u2019re not going to deliver every capability from the business of law to the practice of law.\u201d<\/p>\n

What it is doing is trying to solve frustration points in document retention and management. It\u2019s trying to help lawyers and legal professionals use their documents and internal content in new and valuable ways. Hauck told me NetDocuments wants \u201cto give them the ability to access content at the right moment in the right way. With AI capabilities that are built into the experience,\u201d instead of being the experience like others seem to want to do. Baxter added, \u201cWe believe there is still this world where meeting users where they are is valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, I can\u2019t answer whether NetDocuments can remain a player by offering a document management product, as comprehensive as it is, especially when we may be approaching the era of tech Walmarts. But its credibility and history of offering good products makes it a valued and trusted partner to many law firms.<\/p>\n

And that fact alone may sustain it for the time being, even as other vendors promise products that can do more across various disciplines.<\/p>\n

\n

Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes\u00a0TechLaw Crossroads<\/a>, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The post Will NetDocuments\u2019 \u2018We\u2019re Not A Rock Band\u2019 Approach To Legal AI Sustain It?<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the season of seemingly never-ending user conferences, the NetDocuments Inspire conference took place this week in Scottsdale, Arizona. NetDocuments is one of the leading document management service providers and is finding its way in the AI landscape. I came to its conference frankly wondering whether its laser product focus and credibility could sustain it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}