Kicking off Thomson Reuters Elite’s VANTAGE Worldwide Conference
This year more than ever, VANTAGE is about our customers putting aside the comfort of the status quo to learn about new ways of doing things. We challenge them to re-examine what they and their firms are delivering and to really explore if there are better or smarter ways to drive success.
For a brief hour between breakfast and sessions on Day 2, I get to address our VANTAGE attendees – all 900 of them together – to share what I believe are the most important things that we are trying to accomplish on their behalf and with their support. This year, those things are product, service and the Enterprise-to-3E migration for customers still on our legacy platform.
We are committed to creating powerful new products and enhancements, and to continue to be seen as the innovation leader in our space. To this end, we will drive cloud enablement as a strategic priority. We realize that many firms will say that client data is restrictive, but I firmly believe that this fear will quickly shift. Security is top of agenda for technology leaders, and meanwhile law firm hacking is increasing. We are looking to partner with a cloud leader because they are spending billions on platform security. No law firm can come close to that.
We also will continue to improve Workspace and the attorney desktop. Just weeks ago, the business introduced Workspace Assistant, a way for lawyers to access and perform time management functions via voice-only inputs using Amazon® Echo® or other Alexa®-enabled devices. We’ve shown it to customers at VANTAGE and they have been intrigued.
We will continue on our customer advocacy journey, focusing on making our products and service better for customers. We demonstrate our customer centricity in every part of our business. We developed our current version of 3E with heavy emphasis on our design partners. We work continually with our client advisory board. We are seconding project management staff to law firms to support their work, as well as to let our customers provide a masters class in how law firms use our products. We also are focusing our developers on continually shortening the time it takes to implement 3E in law firms, including standardized workflows and embedded common practices.
Our third shared priority is our Enterprise-to-3E progression. Elite Enterprise is built on a platform that is approaching its “use by” date. Both Microsoft and Elite have notified Enterprise customers that the legacy platform is based on a 25-year-old technology that will soon be sunset by Microsoft, and Elite is working with its customers to bridge them to modern technology.
We are meeting with our Enterprise clients and planning at the customer level what each transition should look like. We are creating packages of implementations that make sense to firms of different sizes, so the migrations can go as smoothly as possible.
Elite is enjoying great momentum in the marketplace. Against key competitors, Thomson Reuters Elite came out on top at a rate of two to one in 2016, and two firms are go live on 3E every month.
This post was written by Eric Ruud, managing director of Legal Enterprise Solutions at Thomson Reuters.
