DraftPilot Community Update - why boring features matter
DraftPilot Community Update - why boring features matter
It’s funny, we’re all often so focussed on the AI side of legal tech products, that we forget that the more ‘boring’ features, like user management, are also critical.
What the market wants
A few months ago we learned that larger law firms and in-house teams need more sophisticated user management than most solutions offer.
They asked for things like:
The ability to create many different workspaces, with each workspace holding unique playbooks. That way they can have different playbooks for each of their departments or clients.
The ability to allocate users to one or more specific workspaces, with different permissions (edit/view-only) for each workspace.
Private workspaces for each user where they can experiment with their own private playbooks.
Microsoft Entra single-sign-on
As a result, we prioritised it and built out a more sophisticated workspace and user management layer.
I think it is our most ‘anti-hype’ feature to date - not sexy on any level and it’s very possible to get bored talking about it.
It also isn’t something I can blab about on LinkedIn and expect anyone to care! 😂
Was it worth it?
The good news is… it paid off. In the last 2 months we were chosen for a number of high profile 1-2 month proof-of-concepts. Including with global law firms, interim legal providers and large in-house legal teams.
Most of these were highly competitive RFP (request-for-proposal) processes where we were up against 5-10 other providers.
When we asked why we were chosen we learned that in the customer’s eyes the quality of the AI appeared similar from one provider to the next. So having solid AI is now the bare minimum, but not enough to win.
We were chosen on the basis of the user management feature set, plus the fact that our UX seemed simpler.
What we learned
One of the most common mistakes of tech companies is that they discover a big innovation (a solution) and then go looking for which problem that may solve.
That rarely works. It’s much better to start with a big problem a market faces and then figure out the most efficient solution.
I think most tech companies these days get this and don’t fall into the trap.
I think what I learned though is that this isn’t just true at company level, but also at feature level.
Given that contract redlining (problem) and AI (solution) makes sense, that doesn’t mean we should limit ourselves to mostly wanting to improve/add more AI.
Even within our solution, we have to keep listening to what problems users face, and be open to solving that however we can, whether we can utilise advanced AI or not.
Thanks for being here and until next time 😊,
Daniel
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Daniel van Binsbergen
CEO at DraftPilot