As Australian law firms approach a technological tipping point, NetDocuments’ chief product officer has unveiled a new suite of platforms packed with cutting-edge tools – arming firms to meet tomorrow’s challenges head-on and maintain a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving legal landscape.
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the legal sector, NetDocuments is emerging as a key player in Australia, offering a suite of AI-powered tools designed to help law firms navigate, optimise, and future-proof their legal technology in an ever-evolving profession.
Speaking with Lawyers Weekly at its Inspire APAC event, NetDocuments’ chief product officer, Dan Hauck, shared how the company is transforming the traditional document management system into an intelligent, value-driven platform – moving beyond simple document storage.
“We are really focused on building an intelligent DMS, and that is a recasting of what the traditional role of the document management system has been,” he said.
“It’s not just a place where you store the documents that you’re working on or have worked on. It’s a place where you can actually extract incredible value both out of your past experiences as well as be able to have AI-driven insights to help with the work that you’re doing today.”
One standout feature that Hauck revealed that NetDocuments has recently launched is its AI-powered editing assistant.
Acting like a virtual associate, he explained, it provides lawyers with fast, precise, and actionable document suggestions – cutting manual work while tailoring edits to the task at hand.
“One of the things we introduced is what we call our editing tool, [which] allows a lawyer to ask our AI assistant for suggestions on how to edit a document, what changes to make in order to make it conform with their needs or requirements,” he said.
“Just the way a partner would say to an associate, I need you to make these changes ... and AI is able to suggest things, including, based on your own precedent, ways to modify that agreement or modify that document.
“Then you, as the lawyer, can evaluate those suggestions and say, ‘That looks great, I’ll accept it.’ That can be marked up in redline in the document, just the same way that [an] associate would come back to you with a redline, and you can evaluate it.”
Beyond editing, Hauck described NetDocuments’ AI-powered search as a game changer for legal research, allowing lawyers to enter concepts or questions to instantly locate relevant documents – whether searching through a few thousand files or a massive repository of 100 million.
“The other area that kind of ties into that is what we’ve been doing in what we call AI search. NetDocuments is famous for having a search across the entire platform. It is incredibly fast and proficient in helping find documents if you know exactly what you’re looking for and can provide search terms to help get there,” he said.
“With AI search, we kind of change that paradigm, and we say, now just put in the concept of what you’re looking for. Put in the question that you have. You don’t have to come up with that magic set of keywords. With our AI search, it can go out and find the documents that really correspond to what you’re looking for.”
But these aren’t changes NetDocuments made on a whim – Hauck emphasised that these tools are built around the evolving needs law firms are expressing on the ground, delivering smarter, more capable legal technology tailored to real-world workflows.
“What we’re hearing from customers is that they want it to be in their workflow. They don’t want to have to complicate it by moving from one solution to another. I think that’s an area where we provide a lot of value to our customers,” he said.
“But they also want support on the journey. They want to understand how they can use it better. What are the kinds of use cases that are the most effective for them?
“So we’re in partnership with our own professional services team. We’ve hired people who have worked in law firms who understand the kinds of things that lawyers are wanting to do every day and have thought a lot about how AI can support them in that journey.”
