iManage will today (5 March) announce significant advances to Insight+, including enterprise-wide contextual integration, meaning that metadata from external systems will enrich document searches around the likes of matter relationships, expertise patterns and client history. A data warehouse integration means that iManage can now connect to a firm’s centralised source of data, without needing to integrate with multiple systems.
Insight+ is iManage’s knowledge search and management solution. Whereas the initial focus was on building knowledge collections and helping firms to leverage curated knowledge sets, in recent times there has been a demand for centralised knowledge that doesn’t operate in isolation – particularly important given the growth and future trajectory of agentic AI.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider ahead of the announcement, iManage’s global product lead (senior director) for knowledge, search and AI, Alex Smith, said: “This is the second evolution of Insight+. We’re now confidently going to market saying that we can do two things. One, we index the entire document management system. But on top of that, we’re now adding a lot more context. And context is going to be one of those words which is very big this year, because MCP [model context protocol] needs context.”
Within Insight+ you will be able to run a search for documents and emails filtered by the likes of matter profitability, partner, responsible partner and industry.
Smith said: “We all want to make sure our content has the context of ‘Who did I work for?’ ‘Was it in a profitable matter?’ ‘Was it in this industry?’ ‘Was it in this geography?’ All of those kind of aspects, which are going to be important when a user asks a question of either Insight+ or one of these AI tools and says, ‘Find me the last five deals that were over a certain value that were profitable, that had a certain type of fee arrangement,’ all those kind of aspects. Insight+ has now expanded into that full knowledge search across the entire DMS but obviously a lot of that context sits not in the DMS. So, it sits in a billing system, it sits in a practise management system, it sits in an HR system.
“We looked at how we could do this in a really elegant way and what we realised was that firms and corporates are all heading to this idea of data warehouse; data lake; single source of truth. We can now hook Insight+ into that ecosystem, so we can now bring in that context on a matter, on a person, from their HR system, from things like Litera Foundation, a billing system, etc, because they’re bringing it all into a data warehouse and can connect that to the documents and emails within iManage.”
iManage has also started to add the ability to compare matters, with Smith observing: “You can start to compare matters based on industry, based on profitability, based on whether it was run by this supervising partner or whatever it may be.”
iManage are evolving Insight+ capability with an eye on helping customers in their use of agentic AI. Smith says: “As agents start looking at the broader DMS, you need more context. Otherwise, even if you’ve got your security correct, it’s still going to bring in too wide a range of things. And then if you get the first answer wrong in these tools, the second answer when the agent goes off to do something else will be wrong, and there will be a knock-on effect.”
“When we start to look at some of these AI agents you’re going to want to start to run, they’re doing this in the background. So how do you get the trust in that context to make sure that that the 10 documents that get surfaced to MCP are the right ones in the right industry? So, we’re building out this context layer within Insight+.”
It will be interesting to see whether this changes and expands the tasks that legal organisations use their DMS for. It comes as legal tech vendors are under pressure to show increased value and better integrations, and this will be a very welcome announcement.
Smith said: “We’re really excited about this; it’s been a journey to get here and I think it’s exciting in terms of what professionals can now do from both the practise of law and business of law perspective.”
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