Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Matteo Pagani, the founder and CEO of Co-Flo Enterprise, an iManage strategic technology partner.
They discussed how corporate legal teams are effectively leveraging document management, the importance of operational intelligence in today’s AI-enabled legal department, and how AI is affecting the ways enterprises use and access their data.
Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and the genesis of Co-Flo Enterprise.
Matteo Pagani: This is my 19th year in legal tech. I’m a second-generation legal tech geek. My father founded a business that implemented software systems for law firms and moved them from Wang-based computers to PC-based editors, way back in the early ’90s and later in the ’80s. So it was a natural evolution, starting out in his business, supporting law firms by implementing practice management systems, then moving on to document and email management with iManage. The bulk of our customers at that time were large law firms. After working at one of the DLA Piper affiliates in South Africa for a while, many of those contact directors moved to large corporations as GCs or senior counsel, and when they wanted iManage, they’d come to us to implement it for corporate services. We noticed a big difference between how professional and private practice work and how corporate legal teams operate, which started to lay the foundation for this idea behind Co-Flo. At a very similar time, I was studying business process management as a science, and I picked up the concept of a work object and its artifacts being connected to it and moving through a process. In the case of law, those artifacts include documents, emails, approvals and so on. Then you need to be connected to a unit of work—in our case, a matter. And that was the foundation we needed to now make this matter connection to the broader corporate structure, all their legal entities, and the business units and their strategic initiatives. That was the foundation of a business operation system that is built on top of iManage to effectively move work through processes and stages whilst leveraging the strength of that unit-of-work workspace in iManage.
Matteo Pagani is the founder and CEO of Co-Flo Enterprise, an iManage strategic technology partner.
Ari Kaplan: How are corporate legal teams most effectively leveraging document management, and where are there opportunities to improve its use?
Matteo Pagani: This concept of document management is quite key, and we might have to break it down a little bit more for the listeners today. We see document management as two categories, if you will. One category is document-centric document management, and the other is unit-of-work-centric document management. To understand where there are opportunities for improvement or how they’re using it today, we first have to understand those two concepts. In document-centric document management, that would be systems like SharePoint. The unit of work is the document only. It’s all about the document. It’s not about the information surrounding the document, the project the document’s stored in or the matter surrounding the document. It’s just about the document and retrieving it. Usually, an ad hoc or once-off unit-of-work system involves moving a project or matter forward in stages. And it’s not just about one document; it’s about a history of documents, emails and tasks connected to that unit of work. So taking us back to opportunities for improvement and how lawyers are using them. Now, quite often in corporate legal, SharePoint is forced onto legal teams largely because it’s in the organization, but they lack the unit-of-work structure that governs the matter itself. In systems like iManage, which are unit-of-work-centric, you can collate documents and maintain continuity on the matter. Someone can leave, someone else can join. It’s not about the individual’s filing preferences; it’s about the structure we’ve put in place for that process or type of work. And that’s often where the opportunity for improvement is. So, moving from a document-centric side to a unit-of-work-centric way of work.
Ari Kaplan: What makes Co-Flo’s approach to this process unique for corporate legal teams?
Matteo Pagani: One of the principles we hold very dear is that a lawyer or any corporate services team member, in risk, HR or compliance, should not have to work in multiple systems. Traditionally, these knowledge workers work with documents and emails. Historically, they’d have to jump between systems that govern the work process, store documents and emails, and hold the data and BI. Our view is that all of that should be centralized in one view. You should not have to move between systems. It should be super easy to go from data to where the work’s being done. As a manager, I want really quick insights into whether my team is coping with the workload, whether my work is connected to the business’s strategic initiatives and whether I’m driving the revenue, cost and risk objectives of the business as a legal team. The differentiator is connecting the unit of work to the management information needed to drive direction for the team, aligned with the business’s strategic initiatives.
Ari Kaplan: What is operational intelligence, and why does it matter in today’s AI-enabled legal department?
Matteo Pagani: Operational intelligence is a lovely term for connecting the dots between BI and data, where the actual rubber hits the ground, where the work’s being done. In our view, operational intelligence is the ability to use data to drill into what work is happening right now. Based on my insights, I see a high-risk matter. For various reasons and business rules, it’s been marked as high risk. As a manager, I can drill down into that matter. I can see the documents and emails immediately as I drill down, see what’s happening, get context and take action. So, I’ve used live data, focused on the work that’s live and driven action immediately. And that’s our view of operational intelligence.
Ari Kaplan: How is AI affecting how enterprises use and access their information?
Matteo Pagani: I see multiple ways in which large enterprises are looking at AI, and we like to break them down into two separate use cases: ad hoc, more one-off, searching and providing a quick report versus repetitive use cases. Right now, in the market, it’s largely related to the first part. Our view is to link it to the second part, the repeatable use cases, using AI as a capability in a business process to shorten cycle time. And, of course, when we move through a business process more effectively, we reduce costs and streamline our team’s efficiency. Today, teams are focused on the first part and maybe not as much on integrating AI into the business process and ensuring it drives time reduction.
Ari Kaplan: You have experience as an IT manager and a systems administrator. How have the challenges faced by both law firm and law department IT leaders changed over the past decade?
Matteo Pagani: In the early days, particularly in corporate environments, legal teams faced the challenge that the systems they needed were under the purview of general IT. IT had no empathy for how lawyers work and the need to work in a matter-centric way, so the challenge was understanding the law. Those were the early days. As budgets shifted from IT-centric to department-centric, legal teams now have greater accountability and responsibility to identify systems that work for them through legal operations managers. The IT teams and heads of IT now need to ensure that those systems align with global compliance and security standards and are fit for purpose, and I think that’s the transition that’s happened in corporates. In law, I don’t think the challenges are as much. In law now, it’s really how can we use the advantages of generative AI to increase our revenue, which ones should we use, why should we use them, and how effectively can we get them in? That’s the primary challenge we’re seeing.
Ari Kaplan: What changes do you see as most prominent when an individual moves from private practice at a law firm to a corporate legal department?
Matteo Pagani: The first question is: What are my focus areas in private practice? I’ve got four key KPIs. I’ve got time, WIP, billable fees and debtors—getting that money back. It’s all about billing and collecting. Obviously, you do that all through really great service and through understanding and knowledge of your space. When we move into corporate from private practice, you’re no longer a revenue generator. You can start articulating value in a revenue-generating way, but that’s completely different, and the way in which we do that is completely different. The things I like to explain to my colleagues who have moved from private practice into corporate legal is that you need to start by having a baseline understanding of the organization and its processes. You are often coming into contact with contracts and documents that could slow a business process down. They could slow the time to revenue down. They could slow the time to onboarding an employee or a vendor. So firstly, we have to understand the business and its strategic initiatives. Next, we have to understand that we don’t just have one client, like we do in a law firm with multiple matters. We’ve got multiple connection points for that matter. It’s connected to a legal team. It’s connected to an internal legal entity. It’s also connected to business units and opcos, and this is not static. They change. The organizations go through corporate reorgs, and now the risk opens up because matters get disconnected from those structures. So it’s really important to understand the structure of the organization, what your unit of work or matters are connected to, how many different points, and why it’s important to see that. And then making sure you are prioritizing your work with the limited resources you have against the strategic initiatives of the organization.
Ari Kaplan: How do you see corporate legal operations evolving?
Matteo Pagani: Corporate legal operations are already shifting away from reactive work. There’s a lot more pressure on them from the business to become a strategic partner. A contract is a central point. It’s an anchor point in the relationship the corporation has with its vendors, who are responsible for the cost of the organization; its employees, who are responsible for generating value in the organization; regulators, whose risk is tied to the organization; and, obviously, customers, who generate revenue. And if we assume that the contract is the governing document for our interactions between the legal entity and these different connected points, the differentials between the contract and the supplier, the customer, the employee and the regulator are in terms of cost and risk. So the differential between what we say we are going to do and what we can actually do is cost and risk. I see the connection between contracts, documents and matters as much more closely tied to the business process and more driven to proactively highlight risk, rather than focused on producing content and documents. I think they will be strategic enablers of business direction, rather than a supporting function, and that’s going to lead to quite rapid change over the next year or two.
Listen to the complete interview at Reinventing Professionals.
Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change and introduce new technology at his blog and on Apple Podcasts.
