They asked, we answered: iManage Reddit AMA

On the iManage on-premises strategy

Can you share the current iManage vision for the future of on-prem deployments? Is there a plan to discontinue support for on-prem at some point in the future? (NN7500)

Paul Walker: There are no current plans to discontinue iManage Work for On-Premises. A substantial number of our customers are still either constrained by local data protection requirements or client requirements. We had a major multi-thousand-user law firm go live with iManage Work On-Premises in Q4 2025. However, I will note, in much of our roadmap, the way we integrate with the larger legal tech ecosystem, and the opportunities are cloud only, as it makes this much more technically achievable. There is an active roadmap for on-premises that we are happy to share with customers who want to see what they can leverage.

On AI reliability and citations

Can you share in detail how you ensure your AI content citations are trustworthy? (DeepCitation)

Paul Walker: Our AI strategy centers on enabling customers to ground responses in their own data, tuning outputs to the specific document collections users are working with and their organization's collective knowledge. Rather than simply showing a response with a document link, we embed inline citations throughout, surfacing the exact passages used to generate each answer. Because our AI capabilities exist within the core platform, we enable inline preview and dynamic navigation directly to the relevant clause or data point within the source document. This enables rapid human verification, something we've found invaluable for lawyers who need to double-check the AI's work.

On the future of interfaces and assumptions

What assumption about how customers use iManage today do you think is most likely to break over the next five years? (context-missing)

Neil Araujo: As we truly embark on Agentic AI becoming a reality, it challenges so many assumptions that have been the bedrock of computing for 50+ years. The interfaces that we use every day are being challenged. We are seeing the convergence of a number of key developments that change the way we access intelligence and how we perform tasks:

The speed to produce an interface with AI-generated code bases means the lag from idea/concept to a user’s hands is approaching real-time. Google has some good whitepapers on the concept of the dynamic on-demand interface.

We are beginning to see interfaces where the navigation is powered by AI. Where the user simply hints at what they want to do, and the interface is smart enough to action the ask, this is powered by keyboard and voice.

And this leads to a wider point but impacts the user experience, with agents performing more tasks on behalf of the user, and as it increases its autonomy, there is still a need for the inputs, reasoning, and outputs of the AI to be governed, much the same as a human.

Organizing data so that it is available easily and securely to humans or agents will become even more critical. DMS can no longer be just a dumping ground the context you need to add through metadata will be important

What’s a problem customers keep asking AI to solve that you believe shouldn’t be solved with AI, even if others claim they can? (context-missing)

Paul Walker: I think customers hoped that AI could bypass the need for highly structured, governed content, the silver bullet, the hope that AI could determine the relevant vs the non-relevant, the current vs the legacy, the draft vs the final. We’re finding that it’s back to basics – IA (information architecture) before AI has never been more relevant. Do I need to pay Alex Smith to use that phrase now? I'm sure he’s trademarked it.

On lawyer adoption and user experience

Lawyers love the new AI apps. Those companies have hired tons of ex lawyers to make sure they do. iManage is still mostly not loved by lawyers. What are you doing to make lawyers love you more (Substantial-One3856)

Neil Araujo: Keep putting customers - the lawyers and knowledge workers - at the center of everything we do. Developing the platform to embrace the latest innovations available, whilst making the lawyers' daily work experience better. A lawyer loves iManage the most each time they find a document, it saves them hours of work, or the first time they avoid a nasty error because iManage maintains a record of how a document evolved.

Lawyers use document management because it is a necessary part of the diligence and rigor that goes into the practice of law. That said, it is imperative that we utilize every technique that is available to make this task as easy, intuitive, and painless as possible. We have come a long, long way from the early days of electronic document management systems. We have seen that these improvements have a material impact on our CSAT scores. We expect to see further leaps in improving user experience through the use of natural language processing and AI. Stay tuned for more later this year.

iManage is home to dozens of individuals who genuinely care about supporting the legal profession, and we have been rewarded well for it. A lot of our growth comes from lawyers requesting iManage when they move between firms or to corporations. We are grateful for it, but wouldn’t call it love as yet!

As Shakespeare said in A Midsummer Night's Dream -"Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind"!

On search, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and data architecture

Do you want to see more solutions bringing search / RAG on top of iManage, or should iManage be the primary search/RAG provider in the AI world? Do you see iManage ever extending beyond documents to include other forms of structured data, and what software (other than Microsoft Office) best complements iManage? (nolanrh)

Neil Araujo: Most AI use cases start with a set of documents that the user wants to use as context for questions, analysis, or extraction. For that reason, we are investing heavily in improving the search, tagging, and retrieval experience in iManage. iManage has ways to incorporate other structured data so that you can combine document search with attributes that are in financial or practice management systems. This capability is available in our Insight+ product. Using this capability, you could, for example, find a document based on the attributes of the matter, like governing law, industry, profitability, etc.

Lastly, we have hundreds of software applications that complement iManage. That is because a variety of legal workflows need access to documents. Lately, we have seen a huge interest in AI applications that need access. We have an extensive API and partner ecosystem to facilitate building integrations and complementary solutions,

On API openness, integrations, and partners

One of the concerns we have is that your API is not completely open, so we worry about whether you are going to block products like InTapp, DeepJudge, etc., because you have your own competitive offerings. It could be a problem for firms that want to get as much data as possible in iManage, and there’s often a bit of a misunderstanding around how good the iManage offerings are versus third parties. At the moment, this stuff feels discretionary, so I'm wondering if you are thinking of issuing more formal guidance on these things? (Asleep-Translator49)

Paul Walker: The API is open, and, as a policy, we don’t block anyone; customers and technology partners can both leverage it today and at scale. We certify to Tech Partners to ensure that platform best practices are respected. In the cloud, in particular, we take extra precautions to protect the performance of the platform and to ensure the security of our customers' data. It’s essential to us that customers have access to their data and to the tools they need to best leverage that data, whether they are provided by a third party or us. Both IntApp and DeepJudge are tech partners and some of the biggest users of our APIs.

I want to build a custom integration for iManage, what path do I need to follow to test the integration with the platform? (HalSde)

Paul Walker: A person after my own heart! The answer might vary depending on whether you are a customer trying to leverage the APIs or a third-party vendor. If you are a third-party vendor, you can join our tech partner program. Here are the details:

If someone wants to become a partner, they can use our partner application form. Once they fill in the form, we qualify, and the partner team will contact them.

If you are a customer, first you need to register your custom app with iManage. The API documentation is available on our support site at help.imanage.com.

How does iManage approach integrations with third parties, such as newer AI companies? Solve Intelligence is a huge fan of iManage, as are many Solve users, and would love to partner and integrate! (WilliamFalke)

Paul Walker: Hey u/WilliamFalke thank you for the praise! If someone wants to become a partner, they can use our partner application form. Once they fill in the form, we qualify and the partner team will contact them.

Can I integrate my product with iManage? (Autothrotti)

Paul Walker: Hi, yes, you can. We ask that this go through our tech partner programs so that we can best support the integration in terms of support and security, etc. You can sign up through our partner application form. Once they fill in the form, we qualify and the partner team will contact them. Note that while we have scaled the team behind this, we have seen unprecedented submission requests over the last 12 months. By our own calculations, we have witnessed over 700+ Legal Tech AI startups have appeared in the last two years, and many need to integrate with the data; we only foresee these numbers growing as the barriers to entry to build an app drop every day.

Hi Neil & Paul — we’re kinda done with “agent middleware” that can read the DMS but can’t operate it. Will firm-run, non-iManage agents be able to do first-class writes in Work via MCP (docs, metadata, security/ethical walls, filing), with the same access as iManage AI, and without an iManage-controlled orchestration layer? Or are third-party agents staying read-only while iManage keeps the keys? (shaqshuka22)

Paul Walker: Yes, our MCP services for iManage Work are currently in Early Access Programme. This isn’t just the search and retrieve API, which extends to other actions such as Move, Copy, Folder Create, etc. We will have to tread carefully as customers need to be able to control the agent so that it doesn’t go rogue and perform destructive actions, i.e., delete, etc., and so we are developing best practices to help guide customers with that. We are evaluating all our APIs, including Task Management (iManage Tracker), Knowledge (iManage Insight+), Ethical Wall Management (iManage Security Policy Manager), etc., for applicability to be surfaced through MCP. Our iManage AI APIs and MCP services are also in the mix to be opened up. We are just launching our Ask iManage Power Automate connector, as an aside, as it's pivotal to open up the ecosystem as much as we can, always with data safety in mind.

On knowledge management and security

What is the iManage vision for helping firms and clients build shared knowledge and playbooks across matters without compromising confidentiality or security (PitifulCriticism9207)

Paul Walker: Confidentiality and security are at the core of everything we do; the work we have been doing with our tech partners, such as Harvey and Legora, has this at its core. Also, MCP again is incredibly valuable because it maintains the data where it is trusted and managed; you get access to the AI, but without having to manage copies of the data in different stores. The iManage platform has extensive knowledge capabilities today. Our iManage Insight+ capability enables customers to build managed collections of knowledge and surface them into an advanced knowledge interface with the ability to ask natural language questions of the managed collections. This also extends these collections into Copilot experiences to support things like drafting in Word or email drafting in Outlook.

Neil Araujo: We have a team that is focused on this very problem. I would recommend you take a look at what we are doing with Insight+ to help curate the gold standard documents and maintain those collections over time.

On the AI roadmap and competitive landscape

With the rapid rise of legal AI platforms like Harvey and others, alongside heavy multi-billion investment in Azure and OpenAI over the past few years, how is iManage thinking about its AI roadmap for the next 12 to 24 months?

Compared with the pace of innovation seen in the wider legal AI market, iManage’s first-party AI capabilities have generally been released more gradually. Is the long-term strategy primarily iManage as the system of record, with deeper integrations and connectors that allow external AI platforms and agents to operate over iManage content, or do you expect to continue delivering first-party iManage AI products as paid add-ons?

If iManage does continue to invest in first-party AI products, how are you approaching packaging and pricing going forward? Per-user add-ons, usage-based models, or greater inclusion of AI capabilities within core subscriptions?

Finally, as newer legal AI platforms become more matter-centric and introduce stronger security and document storage capabilities, do you see them primarily as partners within the ecosystem, or as a longer-term competitive threat? (Time_Director_7039)

Neil Araujo: We will invest on both fronts:

1. Make it easier for an end user to securely access the right documents from a third-party AI application. We see our MCP services to make this process significantly easier. We are also investing in improving the ability to tag documents and making search more effective.
2. We will continue to provide native AI experiences for end users to apply AI skills to one or more documents right from the iManage Work 10 user interface. We believe that doing so will enable the pervasive use of AI for a variety of end-user workflows.

We feel confident that the security, governance, reliability, and performance are not easy problems to solve at the scale this industry demands, and the rational thing to do is to use the APIs to add value. However, the world is not always rational.

You acknowledged that innovation has been 'released more gradually' compared to the wider legal AI market. Gabe from Harvey mentioned shipping features in hours with Claude Code. What structural constraints prevent iManage from moving at that pace, and are you fundamentally okay being the 'slow and steady' player while startups 'sprint'? (TBP-LETFs)

Neil Araujo: We have prioritized security, performance, scale, and maintainability for the types of workloads we manage. You will see the pace of innovation pick up for some of our newer applications. For example, we had four significant releases for Ask iManage last year, each based on direct feedback from end users using the application.

I think there’s a happy middle ground -where we partner with the AI natives and provide that secure, governed foundation our customers are asking for.

At what point does 'integration partner' become 'competitor taking your lunch'? How do you navigate that tension when deciding what to build vs. what to integrate? (SEO_niche)

Neil Araujo: It is the reality of the tech world; we have navigated this in the past in the spirit of competition. We also have third-party developers who have built integration between iManage and competing products as a way to provide solutions to customers.