{"id":163498,"date":"2026-09-24T14:41:26","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T22:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/09\/24\/8am-kaleidoscope-and-changes-will-8am-stay-focused\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T14:41:26","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T22:41:26","slug":"8am-kaleidoscope-and-changes-will-8am-stay-focused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/09\/24\/8am-kaleidoscope-and-changes-will-8am-stay-focused\/","title":{"rendered":"8am, Kaleidoscope, And Changes: Will 8am Stay Focused?"},"content":{"rendered":"

8am\u2019s second Kaleidoscope<\/a> vendor conference kicked off this week in Las Vegas. Las Vegas. There are worse places to contemplate the dangers of success.<\/p>\n

8am<\/a> (formerly AffiniPay) brings together several legal technology platforms, including the practice management providers MyCase<\/a>, CasePeer<\/a>, and DocketWise<\/a>. It also includes the legal-payments platform, LawPay<\/a>. All of these are designed to do the back-office tasks that law firms have to do if they want to be profitable.<\/p>\n

So far, 8am has been pretty singularly focused on providing practice management tools to small and midsize firms. The big question is whether it will stay that way.<\/p>\n

If this conference is any indication, it has grown pretty big, pretty fast. Last year, the conference was held in Austin, where the company is based. This year it\u2019s Vegas, baby. And the location is the fancy Encore at the Wynn Las Vegas resort located on the Strip.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Beach Club<\/strong><\/p>\n

The conference kicked off with a bang with a party at the Encore Beach Club, a spectacular semi-outdoor venue in the resort. Pools. Palm trees.<\/p>\n

And the crowd. Young. Beautiful. It felt less like a legal tech party and more like a Hollywood premiere. Then at the opening keynote, we were told that the state with the most representatives at the conference was California. Hmm.<\/p>\n

8am Is a Player<\/strong><\/p>\n

8am gives every indication of having become a player in the practice management and payments fields which heretofore have been dominated by Clio. 8am now sponsors an NFL team, the Buccaneers. It has brought in new leadership. Earlier this year, Jeff Hughes replaced Dru Armstrong, who led the company for nearly five years, as CEO.<\/p>\n

In his keynote at the conference, Hughes admitted he had no legal tech experience before his 8am role. He also told us his background was in software for small businesses. One thing is for sure: he knows growth. In his last CEO gig, he navigated more than 20 acquisitions and increased its revenue sixfold.<\/p>\n

Shortly after Hughes arrived, Tanya Hendricks became 8am\u2019s new Chief Product Officer. She was a senior executive in the company Hughes recently ran. The Chief Revenue Officer and Chief People Officer have also recently changed. That\u2019s a lot of people in important chairs. And the reasons for these changes remain a bit of a mystery. Welcome to Vegas.<\/p>\n

The 8am I\u2019ve Known<\/strong><\/p>\n

A couple of things have always stood out about 8am. First, as a company, it\u2019s one of the most hospitable vendors there is. Its people are to a person helpful, approachable, and friendly. And I get the sense they are that way not just with the press but with customers and everyone else. It feels cultural.<\/p>\n

The second matters more. It has, for the most part, seemed to stay focused on the practice management and payment part of the legal business. The unsexy back-office stuff. Billing and collections, cash flow. Turning a firm\u2019s unstructured data into structured data. Getting a firm paid promptly for fees and reimbursable expenses. The kinds of things that individually appear not to matter much. But taken as a whole, they have a tremendous impact on a firm\u2019s financial picture and on the well-being of its members.<\/p>\n

And the thing about 8am\u2019s customers is that most don\u2019t have the resources to hire a staff to do these tasks. So, the tasks either don\u2019t get done at all or are done by lawyers. Either way, the result is less revenue and less profit for firms that are often operating on thin cash flow margins. And unlike its big brother, Clio, 8am has thus far stayed true to its mission. It hasn\u2019t tried to move upmarket. It hasn\u2019t bought its way into the more substantive legal research market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also telling that at its conference, 8am sponsors what it calls 8am Cares. It\u2019s a program to allow attendees to donate to Dress for Success, which provides used professional clothing to women seeking jobs who can\u2019t afford them. 8am did something similar last year.<\/p>\n

That tells you a lot about the 8am I\u2019ve known.<\/p>\n

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

Hughes seemed in his opening keynote to go out of his way to confirm 8am\u2019s commitment to practice management and payments. It\u2019s about focus, he said, and he told us 8am will continue to focus on doing five things really well. It\u2019s not trying to be all things to all people. He told us that while 8am will certainly be developing new products, it will never forget the need to make what it has better. And for the most part, these themes were reflected in Hendricks\u2019s portion of the keynote.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s reassuring since a lot of legal tech can\u2019t seem to resist the urge to become a platform for everything.<\/p>\n

The Recent Releases<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hendricks first talked about what she described as either recent releases or enhancements to existing tools.<\/p>\n

IQ Case Assistant<\/strong>\u00a0has been expanded. It now allows users to ask virtually any question about any of the firm\u2019s cases and can also be used to draft messages and communications. It also contains a prompt library and, of course, respects role-based permissions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

IQ Discovery Assistant<\/strong>\u00a0goes hand in hand with Case Assistant. It attacks a frustrating problem: making unstructured data structured so that it\u2019s searchable. Hendricks claimed that 8am has OCRed some 20 million pages into MyCase and will continue to do so. Again, a problem that is often swept under the rug but can bedevil AI tools. 8am saw it. Addressed it.<\/p>\n

The payment announcements also trended practical. Next Day Payment,<\/strong> for example,<\/strong>\u00a0guarantees next-day deposits of fees collected to enable better cash flow. 8am\u2019s Quick Charge allows clients to pay on the spot, even before they are invoiced. And in a savvy nod to 8am\u2019s client base, 8am added an Apple Pay option. Finally, 8am has a Pay Later tool. This tool again reflects 8am\u2019s clients\u2019 customer mix: it allows clients to pay over time while the law firm gets paid immediately.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s New<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hendricks then turned her attention to what she called the new product announcements of the day.<\/p>\n

IQ Draft<\/strong>\u00a0promises to produce comprehensive first drafts of all sorts of documents. It can create templates, pull information in from MyCase, and even draft documents in the firm\u2019s voice, she told us. It will be released in October.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hendricks also announced what 8am is calling\u00a0IQ Firm Agent<\/strong>. It can deliver things like firm-wide business updates. It allows firm personnel to ask questions and get answers to almost anything about what is going on with firm finances and in cases its lawyers are handling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the big announcement on the practice management side seemed to be\u00a0MyCase MCP.\u00a0<\/strong>According to Hendricks, it is the first MCP (that\u2019s Model Context Protocol, if you haven\u2019t been keeping up with all the AI rage) application for practice management. It can provide the same kinds of answers as Firm Agent but from Claude for those who spend most of their day there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the new releases don\u2019t ignore the financial side.\u00a0Smart Spend Intelligence,<\/strong> while\u00a0previously released, has been enhanced. It\u2019s added a dashboard, automated expense tracking, and reconciliation. And a tool for capturing expenses on the go and paying filing fees with a virtual card. It\u2019s increased the ceiling for capturing reimbursable expenses and increased the spend limit on the virtual credit card.<\/p>\n

Finally, perhaps most significant for its customers, Hendricks mentioned\u00a08am Capital.\u00a0<\/strong>It allows 8am customers to prequalify for a loan based on information contained in the firm\u2019s data. Repayment of this loan can be a percentage of the firm\u2019s incoming payments over time.<\/p>\n

All good tools if they work as promised. But what\u2019s striking is how 8am took a long, hard look at the pain points of its customers, even small ones, and tried to address them one by one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For example, I can tell you that cash flow, even for very big firms, can kill them. I once dreamed of starting my own firm until I realized that expenses started day one. Rent. People. Technology. But revenues don\u2019t start until someone decides to pay you.<\/p>\n

And revenue lags even more if matters aren\u2019t promptly billed and collected. Firms can quickly find themselves underwater, especially when many of these administrative tasks are left to the lawyers. Lawyers who also happen to have clients to serve.<\/p>\n

But What Could Possibly Go Wrong?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a moment in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown<\/em>\u00a0where Dylan wonders whether Joan Baez\u2019s songs are a little too pretty.<\/p>\n

I kept thinking about that at the conference. The glitz in Las Vegas, the friendly faces, the NFL sponsorship. And the recent addition of wholesale new C-suite players in critical positions. All made me wonder if 8am could get too pretty. And maybe try to move into more markets and fields.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And you gotta question when the executives in two critical C-suite positions come from a company that aggressively sought acquisitions and big revenue increases. Will they adopt the same approach? Try to lure more venture capital and private equity? Try to become a bigger player like Harvey, Legora, and Clio? Could it go public? If it does all or even some of that, 8am could be hard to stay solely committed to practice management tools for smaller firms and solos.<\/p>\n

The new product announcements also gave me some pause. Much of what was announced seemed to be enhancements more than something new and innovative. Even the way MyCase MCP was described felt like 8am might have looked around and thought, \u201cJesus Christ, everybody has an MCP. We better get one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certainly, enhancements matter. But trying to make them something more, particularly in light of all the leadership changes, raises some questions. \u00a0Especially for a company that has distinguished itself by largely ignoring legal tech hype in an industry producing hype at industrial scale.<\/p>\n

For now, though, 8am is still doing something few vendors are doing. Keeping AI in perspective and using it to create real tools to solve real problems. Not for anybody and everybody. But for its customers. 8am gets it.<\/p>\n

Hughes is right about one thing: it\u2019s all about focus. Let\u2019s hope 8am keeps it.<\/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.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

The post 8am, Kaleidoscope, And Changes: Will 8am Stay Focused?<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t(Photo via 8am)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

8am\u2019s second Kaleidoscope<\/a> vendor conference kicked off this week in Las Vegas. Las Vegas. There are worse places to contemplate the dangers of success.<\/p>\n

8am<\/a> (formerly AffiniPay) brings together several legal technology platforms, including the practice management providers MyCase<\/a>, CasePeer<\/a>, and DocketWise<\/a>. It also includes the legal-payments platform, LawPay<\/a>. All of these are designed to do the back-office tasks that law firms have to do if they want to be profitable.<\/p>\n

So far, 8am has been pretty singularly focused on providing practice management tools to small and midsize firms. The big question is whether it will stay that way.<\/p>\n

If this conference is any indication, it has grown pretty big, pretty fast. Last year, the conference was held in Austin, where the company is based. This year it\u2019s Vegas, baby. And the location is the fancy Encore at the Wynn Las Vegas resort located on the Strip.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Beach Club<\/strong><\/p>\n

The conference kicked off with a bang with a party at the Encore Beach Club, a spectacular semi-outdoor venue in the resort. Pools. Palm trees.<\/p>\n

And the crowd. Young. Beautiful. It felt less like a legal tech party and more like a Hollywood premiere. Then at the opening keynote, we were told that the state with the most representatives at the conference was California. Hmm.<\/p>\n

8am Is a Player<\/strong><\/p>\n

8am gives every indication of having become a player in the practice management and payments fields which heretofore have been dominated by Clio. 8am now sponsors an NFL team, the Buccaneers. It has brought in new leadership. Earlier this year, Jeff Hughes replaced Dru Armstrong, who led the company for nearly five years, as CEO.<\/p>\n

In his keynote at the conference, Hughes admitted he had no legal tech experience before his 8am role. He also told us his background was in software for small businesses. One thing is for sure: he knows growth. In his last CEO gig, he navigated more than 20 acquisitions and increased its revenue sixfold.<\/p>\n

Shortly after Hughes arrived, Tanya Hendricks became 8am\u2019s new Chief Product Officer. She was a senior executive in the company Hughes recently ran. The Chief Revenue Officer and Chief People Officer have also recently changed. That\u2019s a lot of people in important chairs. And the reasons for these changes remain a bit of a mystery. Welcome to Vegas.<\/p>\n

The 8am I\u2019ve Known<\/strong><\/p>\n

A couple of things have always stood out about 8am. First, as a company, it\u2019s one of the most hospitable vendors there is. Its people are to a person helpful, approachable, and friendly. And I get the sense they are that way not just with the press but with customers and everyone else. It feels cultural.<\/p>\n

The second matters more. It has, for the most part, seemed to stay focused on the practice management and payment part of the legal business. The unsexy back-office stuff. Billing and collections, cash flow. Turning a firm\u2019s unstructured data into structured data. Getting a firm paid promptly for fees and reimbursable expenses. The kinds of things that individually appear not to matter much. But taken as a whole, they have a tremendous impact on a firm\u2019s financial picture and on the well-being of its members.<\/p>\n

And the thing about 8am\u2019s customers is that most don\u2019t have the resources to hire a staff to do these tasks. So, the tasks either don\u2019t get done at all or are done by lawyers. Either way, the result is less revenue and less profit for firms that are often operating on thin cash flow margins. And unlike its big brother, Clio, 8am has thus far stayed true to its mission. It hasn\u2019t tried to move upmarket. It hasn\u2019t bought its way into the more substantive legal research market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also telling that at its conference, 8am sponsors what it calls 8am Cares. It\u2019s a program to allow attendees to donate to Dress for Success, which provides used professional clothing to women seeking jobs who can\u2019t afford them. 8am did something similar last year.<\/p>\n

That tells you a lot about the 8am I\u2019ve known.<\/p>\n

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

Hughes seemed in his opening keynote to go out of his way to confirm 8am\u2019s commitment to practice management and payments. It\u2019s about focus, he said, and he told us 8am will continue to focus on doing five things really well. It\u2019s not trying to be all things to all people. He told us that while 8am will certainly be developing new products, it will never forget the need to make what it has better. And for the most part, these themes were reflected in Hendricks\u2019s portion of the keynote.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s reassuring since a lot of legal tech can\u2019t seem to resist the urge to become a platform for everything.<\/p>\n

The Recent Releases<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hendricks first talked about what she described as either recent releases or enhancements to existing tools.<\/p>\n

IQ Case Assistant<\/strong>\u00a0has been expanded. It now allows users to ask virtually any question about any of the firm\u2019s cases and can also be used to draft messages and communications. It also contains a prompt library and, of course, respects role-based permissions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

IQ Discovery Assistant<\/strong>\u00a0goes hand in hand with Case Assistant. It attacks a frustrating problem: making unstructured data structured so that it\u2019s searchable. Hendricks claimed that 8am has OCRed some 20 million pages into MyCase and will continue to do so. Again, a problem that is often swept under the rug but can bedevil AI tools. 8am saw it. Addressed it.<\/p>\n

The payment announcements also trended practical. Next Day Payment,<\/strong> for example,<\/strong>\u00a0guarantees next-day deposits of fees collected to enable better cash flow. 8am\u2019s Quick Charge allows clients to pay on the spot, even before they are invoiced. And in a savvy nod to 8am\u2019s client base, 8am added an Apple Pay option. Finally, 8am has a Pay Later tool. This tool again reflects 8am\u2019s clients\u2019 customer mix: it allows clients to pay over time while the law firm gets paid immediately.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s New<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hendricks then turned her attention to what she called the new product announcements of the day.<\/p>\n

IQ Draft<\/strong>\u00a0promises to produce comprehensive first drafts of all sorts of documents. It can create templates, pull information in from MyCase, and even draft documents in the firm\u2019s voice, she told us. It will be released in October.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hendricks also announced what 8am is calling\u00a0IQ Firm Agent<\/strong>. It can deliver things like firm-wide business updates. It allows firm personnel to ask questions and get answers to almost anything about what is going on with firm finances and in cases its lawyers are handling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the big announcement on the practice management side seemed to be\u00a0MyCase MCP.\u00a0<\/strong>According to Hendricks, it is the first MCP (that\u2019s Model Context Protocol, if you haven\u2019t been keeping up with all the AI rage) application for practice management. It can provide the same kinds of answers as Firm Agent but from Claude for those who spend most of their day there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the new releases don\u2019t ignore the financial side.\u00a0Smart Spend Intelligence,<\/strong> while\u00a0previously released, has been enhanced. It\u2019s added a dashboard, automated expense tracking, and reconciliation. And a tool for capturing expenses on the go and paying filing fees with a virtual card. It\u2019s increased the ceiling for capturing reimbursable expenses and increased the spend limit on the virtual credit card.<\/p>\n

Finally, perhaps most significant for its customers, Hendricks mentioned\u00a08am Capital.\u00a0<\/strong>It allows 8am customers to prequalify for a loan based on information contained in the firm\u2019s data. Repayment of this loan can be a percentage of the firm\u2019s incoming payments over time.<\/p>\n

All good tools if they work as promised. But what\u2019s striking is how 8am took a long, hard look at the pain points of its customers, even small ones, and tried to address them one by one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For example, I can tell you that cash flow, even for very big firms, can kill them. I once dreamed of starting my own firm until I realized that expenses started day one. Rent. People. Technology. But revenues don\u2019t start until someone decides to pay you.<\/p>\n

And revenue lags even more if matters aren\u2019t promptly billed and collected. Firms can quickly find themselves underwater, especially when many of these administrative tasks are left to the lawyers. Lawyers who also happen to have clients to serve.<\/p>\n

But What Could Possibly Go Wrong?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a moment in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown<\/em>\u00a0where Dylan wonders whether Joan Baez\u2019s songs are a little too pretty.<\/p>\n

I kept thinking about that at the conference. The glitz in Las Vegas, the friendly faces, the NFL sponsorship. And the recent addition of wholesale new C-suite players in critical positions. All made me wonder if 8am could get too pretty. And maybe try to move into more markets and fields.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And you gotta question when the executives in two critical C-suite positions come from a company that aggressively sought acquisitions and big revenue increases. Will they adopt the same approach? Try to lure more venture capital and private equity? Try to become a bigger player like Harvey, Legora, and Clio? Could it go public? If it does all or even some of that, 8am could be hard to stay solely committed to practice management tools for smaller firms and solos.<\/p>\n

The new product announcements also gave me some pause. Much of what was announced seemed to be enhancements more than something new and innovative. Even the way MyCase MCP was described felt like 8am might have looked around and thought, \u201cJesus Christ, everybody has an MCP. We better get one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certainly, enhancements matter. But trying to make them something more, particularly in light of all the leadership changes, raises some questions. \u00a0Especially for a company that has distinguished itself by largely ignoring legal tech hype in an industry producing hype at industrial scale.<\/p>\n

For now, though, 8am is still doing something few vendors are doing. Keeping AI in perspective and using it to create real tools to solve real problems. Not for anybody and everybody. But for its customers. 8am gets it.<\/p>\n

Hughes is right about one thing: it\u2019s all about focus. Let\u2019s hope 8am keeps it.<\/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.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8am\u2019s second Kaleidoscope vendor conference kicked off this week in Las Vegas. Las Vegas. There are worse places to contemplate the dangers of success. 8am (formerly AffiniPay) brings together several legal technology platforms, including the practice management providers MyCase, CasePeer, and DocketWise. It also includes the legal-payments platform, LawPay. All of these are designed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":163499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163498","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=163498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}