Ep 243: How iManage Is ‘Making Knowledge Work’ for Legal Professionals, with CEO Neil Araujo

With the tagline “Making Knowledge Work,” the document management company iManage is enormously successful within the legal industry, with more than 4,000 customers across six continents, including 80% of the Am Law 100 and more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies. Just last year, it recently reported, it added more than 300 new law firms and companies as customers.   

But over the 30 years since its founding, it hit some speed bumps, of sorts, after it went through a series of acquisitions that led to its ownership by Autonomy and then by Hewlett Packard after HP acquired Autonomy in 2011. The HP-Autonomy deal famously turned into a fiasco when HP claimed Autonomy had fraudulently inflated its value, causing it to write off nearly $8.8 billion of the $11.1 billion purchase price, and the repercussions of that deal continue to reverberate, with Autonomy’s founder currently on trial in San Francisco for criminal fraud charges. 

With iManage, through no fault of its own, caught up in that morass, its original founding management team, led by Neil Araujo, swooped in and bought back the company in 2015. It was, Araujo now says, an opportunity to reboot and apply everything they had learned about what to do and what not to do to build a successful company. 

Neil Araujo is our guest in this episode, to share the story of how iManage became the success it is today and to give us a preview of what lies ahead on its product and development roadmap, including its plans for expanding its use of generative artificial intelligence. .

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

• Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.

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