iManage at ILTACON: why governed context beats the model

At the iManage company update at ILTACON 2026 in Nashville, iManage executives set out the case for a platform built to scale AI safely and deliver client value. The next-generation iManage platform reaches general availability this October.

The stakes: AI is reshaping legal economics, and clients are the ones asking for it

AI is already changing the shape of legal and knowledge work. The organizations that are able to realize the value of AI at scale must focus on more than just the model. CEO Neil Araujo pointed to Gartner research that puts a number on why the data behind that AI matters as much as the AI itself. As Rita Sallam, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, has previously shared: “Organizations that fail to adopt comprehensive context structures — supported by a robust data layer — will perpetuate data inefficiencies and face heightened financial costs, as well as legal and reputational damage.” Get the data right, and Gartner’s research points to gains of up to 80 percent in model accuracy and a 60 percent reduction in costs. Freed-up hours only become client value if the knowledge behind them compounds. For law firms, a matter handled well this year should make the next one faster, not force every team to start from zero.

Two things determine whether AI delivers that value: context and governance

For a period, the model itself was the industry’s proxy for AI quality — that phase has largely passed. Araujo named where the real differentiation lives now: “It’s not the model. It’s not the layer that goes above the model. It’s your data, your knowledge, your experience — that’s what makes you different.” Every organization now has access to broadly the same frontier models. What separates one firm’s AI assistant from another’s is what it’s allowed to see, and whether its answers can be traced back to something trustworthy.

That's a governance question as much as a technical one. An AI system validated against an organization's own approved guidance, with every answer traceable to its source, lets people apply judgment with confidence rather than checking AI output against nothing at all.

Governed context has to work at scale, not just in theory

Araujo walked through what the iManage context fabric™ draws on: the documents and communications at the center, activity signals showing who worked on what and which version matters, and metadata that identifies what a document is and how current it is. None of that is enough on its own. He gave a concrete example: negotiating the same clause with the same opposing counsel for the tenth time and needing to know their position on a point like limitation of liability from the last negotiation. That information doesn't only live inside the document. It also lives in a practice management system, and only a connected, governed layer can surface it when it matters.

EVP Shawn Misquitta extended the point with a second example from the platform's expert-finder capability: rather than searching lawyer bios for someone who has drafted a facilities agreement before, the system cross-references who has actually worked on comparable deals and narrows to the right two or three people. Context, in other words, extends beyond documents to firmwide expertise.

The next-gen platform: where governed context turns into client value, at scale

This is where the next-generation platform comes in. iManage product strategy is aligned to three themes: a governed Core, Context that explains what's relevant and why, and Connected delivery wherever the work happens. All three arrive together when the platform reaches general availability this October — read the full announcement.

On Core: the platform now extends governance to external collaborators and contractors without breaking the single source of truth or its audit trail, and adds disposition tools to retire redundant, obsolete, or trivial content at scale. This is because AI reasoning over messy files and clutter is more likely to produce inaccurate or irrelevant answers.

Governance now also extends explicitly to AI itself: policies can specify whether a given client's data may be used with AI at all, and with which tools. That addresses outside counsel guidelines and client restrictions raised directly by customers, including government engagements and patent work, where firms are wary of what a model retains.

On Connected: the iManage MCP Server — built on the Model Context Protocol pioneered by Anthropic (which iManage was among the first vendors to support) — lets AI tools reason over governed content without copying it out. Usage bears that out: MCP traffic has grown tenfold since MCP Server became generally available in May 2026, a clear measure of its usefulness. 

Senior Solutions Engineer Emma Furnivall demonstrated MCP connectivity live: a single request to Microsoft Copilot Cowork to prepare for a client meeting pulled from both Outlook and iManage, assembling a briefing without the user hunting across systems. MCP is expanding from read-only access to write actions, including creating workspaces and folders and filing documents, and from iManage Work to iManage Insight+ and iManage Tracker, each tool publishing what it can do so AI assistants can find the right tool for the job.

On Context: an enrichment engine runs continuously across the entire document set, recognizing more than 100 document types and extracting key fields without any prompting. Furnivall's live demo showed the same intelligence applied to a document comparison. The platform read a redline, categorized each change by severity, and surfaced the one substantial edit that really mattered. It then ran a playbook against the draft to flag what complied with firm standard positions and what didn't, leaving the decision to accept or reject with the lawyer throughout. Switching to the next-gen experience required no data migration — just a single click.

The scale behind all of this is real: more than one million professionals at 4,550+ organizations rely on iManage today. Chief Revenue Officer Pat Eskew added that the company now has more than 1,100 employees, about half of whom joined in the last three years, alongside roughly 150 who have been there since near the beginning — and it's adding around 400 new clients this year alone, at every size of firm.

The long view

2026 marks the 30th ILTA appearance for iManage — a company now in its 31st year. Araujo closed on this: a platform built by an organization that thinks in decades is now shipping the foundation for scaling AI into client value. Not promising, shipping. General availability follows in October.

To find out more about the next-generation platform, explore the iManage platform, or register for What's New at iManage: Platform Innovation Update on September 16, 2026.