Vantage EMEA: Taking law firms beyond efficiency, and revealing why Elite is ‘EPIC’
At this year’s VANTAGE conference in London, Law firms from across the EMEA region were treated to an unmissable opportunity to connect and network with their peers in person and to learn how Elite is working to help them take their business forward.
Bill Burch delivering the keynote at VANTAGE EMEA
Kicking off the conference was the keynote speech delivered by Bill Burch, vice president of Global Sales at Thomson Reuters Elite. After welcoming attendees to the biggest VANTAGE conference in London to date, Burch provided some key numbers to highlight the year so far for Elite, including 4,200 customers in 42 countries, the continuing momentum of customers transitioning to 3E, the health of the Elite strategic alliance program (now 94 partners strong) and the recent successful launches of Business Development Premier and Workspace.
There was also a chance to hear how the market was transforming and what Elite was doing to help law firms thrive in today’s market, including the need to capture a higher percentage of corporate legal budgets, the rise of e-billing systems (last year almost 80 percent of corporations required e-billing for their law firms), and the need for law firms to stay out in front of new competitors.
And then it was over to Elisabet Hardy, vice president of Product Management at Elite, to run the audience through a taste of Elite’s product development plans…which we learned are EPIC.
It soon became clear that EPIC is an acronym, with each letter standing for the direction of Elite’s products – experience, productivity, intelligence and connections.
The recently launched Workspace and Workspace Mobile were held up as great examples of how Elite has focused on the user experience to achieve a more simplified way of presenting data. Workspace also enables law firms to quickly access both 3E and MatterSphere functionality.
Elisabet Hardy speaking on Elite’s product development plans
We also learned that another focus for product development has been to intelligently combine data, from both internal and external data sources, across Elite’s portfolio of products. Eric Sugden, chief technology officer at Thomson Reuters Elite, followed up on this theme with a live demo of Envision’s new dashboard, which brings firm data together in a central location with performance indicators and productivity stats.
But it was perhaps the last guiding principle in EPIC, connections, which captured the attention of many at the conference. Connecting Elite products, as well as connecting complimentary products from Elite’s alliance partners and the efforts to include market data from across Thomson Reuters more seamlessly has been a key focus for Elite over the last year.
With the release of Workspace, Elite has delivered on a key phase of its vision to not only connect its products, but to connect the functionality between the front office and back office of law firms.
A record 350 attendees packed into the venue for this year’s VANTAGE conference and following the keynote speech, they were able to take part in the more than 80 sessions and had the opportunity to meet with up to 26 of Elite’s alliance partners in the exhibition room.
