“I was always kind of frustrated with some of the challenges,” said Dan Hauck, “in terms of how difficult it was to collaborate, how over-reliant we are on email to manage files, to share ideas, to communicate with our colleagues, and I thought that there was really a huge opportunity to do something innovative to address the problem that lawyers and professionals had.” That frustration led Hauck to leave his job as an associate at a large law firm to co-found ThreadKM, the company
recently acquired by NetDocuments.
What it does
“ThreadKM is a collaboration platform that is matter-centric,” Hauck says, “and allows lawyers and legal teams to have conversations with each other inside of a matter. That information becomes preserved and accessible as part of that matter.” Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have gained popularity by offering a threaded discussion model as an alternative to email, but ThreadKM tailors this experience to work within a matter-centric environment.
“The problem with something like Slack,” says NetDocuments CEO Matt Duncan, “is very similar to the problem with Dropbox, Box, or OneDrive when it comes to a law firm or an in-house legal team, and that's that those solutions lack the security, compliance, and matter centricity that law firms and in-house legal teams absolutely need today. With ThreadKM running as part of the trusted and secure NetDocuments platform, you're effectively giving all that sensitive client-related communication the same security standards, compliance standards, the same storage flexibility with our geo-aware storage, and the same search engine, so the search not only encompasses documents and emails but also conversations. You're unifying all that into a single platform to enable true governance.”
Duncan notes that lawyers complaining about email is nothing new. “This email problem just doesn't seem to go away,” he says, citing surveys that repeatedly list an excessive amount of email as one of the top challenges facing law firms. “These lawyers that are calling the CIO and the IT director, they're thinking about improving the efficiency of the way they communicate and operate, and getting the contextual communication around matters, documents and versions together with the matters, documents and versions.
Hauck agrees, having been one of the lawyers who thought there must be a better way. “They're essentially saying ‘I'm frustrated.’ What ThreadKM can provide is the platform to conduct conversations in a secure way and in a manageable way from an information governance standpoint.”
The Acquisition
ThreadKM had been a
NetDocuments technology partner for a couple of years before both companies began to think about tying the knot. “We had a very similar vision of collaboration. It was a very natural fit and beginning of a conversation.” Hauck says
Duncan saw that ThreadKM would be a good strategic fit. “NetDocuments’ vision is to be the trusted cloud platform in legal for intelligent content management and collaboration. The ThreadKM solution just fits in like a glove,” he said. “It's always been a technology, a solution and a team that we've admired and it just makes so much sense for ThreadKM to be seamlessly integrated to the DMS - it solves so many problems, and it's really one of the ‘1+1=3’ kind of outcomes we look for when exploring strategic acquisitions.”
Over a third of ThreadKM’s customers prior to the acquisition were NetDocuments customers. As Duncan puts it, these are “innovative firms looking at innovative technologies.” He is also quick to add that “the ThreadKM team has a fantastic track record when it comes to innovation. These guys really punch above their weight. Within a year or two of launching, they won the ILTA Innovative Solution of the Year in 2016. That's unusual for such a small early stage company to garner that type of industry recognition.”
The Technology
Even though their products have worked together and integrated for some time, one of the significant advantages of the acquisition is that ThreadKM gets to take advantage of the NetDocuments technology stack. NetDocuments CTO Alvin Tedjamulia is emphatic about the fact that this is not just a surface-level integration. “The storage of the conversations,” he says, “is directly in the NetDocuments object store. And you inherit the dual-custody encryption key. The threads and the conversations are just as protected as the documents and emails are, with the unique encryption key per object, with the dual custody, with the HSM based encryption, with the FIPS 140-2 Level 3... all of those things that NetDocuments is famous for. And it gives us the ability to go to firms that are very concerned about compliance and about GDPR. It’s security by design.”
Hauck adds, “now we have this incredibly powerful, secure and robust NetDocuments solution that we can build the collaboration experience of ThreadKM on top of, and that's really exciting for us.”
The Future
NetDocuments will make the ThreadKM features available for an additional fee, and they plan to make the new functionality available during the second quarter of 2018. The company is also introducing entity extraction, its second artificial intelligence feature, during the first quarter. This will enable entities like names, titles, dollar amounts and dates to be extracted from the items in the object store (documents, emails, and now ThreadKM conversations) and offer up contextual views based on this metadata.
With ThreadKM’s conversation threads as a native part of a matter and a new level of AI built into the NetDocuments technology stack, the company continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in document management.
Author note: NetDocuments hosted a webinar on December 7th 2017 focused on the NetDocuments/ThreadKM integrated solution.
Click here for the replay.