HighQ: 50 Customer-Driven Enhancements and Counting
Last week’s launch of the latest version of HighQ included integrations with Practical Law, 3E and Microsoft Teams® as well as more than 50 customer-driven enhancements. Legal Current asked Tom MacDonald, director of Product Management, Thomson Reuters, for an insider’s perspective on the new HighQ features.
MacDonald said Practical Law Matter Maps on HighQ are his favorite new feature.
“Matter Maps on HighQ offer firms a framework upon which users can build their project management practices for better planning, management and execution of matters,” he explained. “Clients can use these features to quickly customize, assign and deliver work on a variety of different matter types, all assisted with access to relevant Practical Law content.”
He noted how HighQ is filling a gap in the market for a project management tool that fits into users’ workflows.
“The gap has been developing in line with the rise in the legal project management (LPM) function within law firms, and HighQ has been at the forefront of this expansion,” he said. “One of the problems we regularly come across with LPM teams is that they want to digitalize the process to take advantage of automation, reporting, and alerting capabilities but they need the framework – and that’s what we can now offer.”
MacDonald said it’s rewarding to incorporate customer feedback into HighQ.
“As a SaaS platform, we have client stakeholders who are invested in the product and motivated to help make it better – it gives me a real buzz to hear we’ve built something that enables our clients to deliver a better service,” he said. “We’ve been speaking with LPM teams for years now; we have great relationships and no shortage of feedback and ideas. I’m a big believer in the benefits of continuous improvement through reflection and employing lean practices to cut through the waste to get to the end result quicker.”
The enhancements and key integrations in HighQ 5.6 – including features that streamline contract management work, enabling HighQ users to share Contract Express questionnaires with external users – provide new ways for legal professionals to improve client satisfaction. These upgrades follow the launch of HighQ Contract Analysis, a contract review and analysis tool that uses machine learning and pre-trained models, as well as enhancements to LPM and contract lifecycle management tools.