I had the pleasure of catching up with Nikki Chamberlain (LinkedIn profile), the Marketing Manager of IRIS Legal at their offices in Knutsford yesterday. Nikki joined IRIS Legal in November last year…So I thought I'd give her six months to settle in before pestering her.
Although we are a digital marketing specialist we like to keep abreast of what the legal IT vendors are doing so we can talk knowledgeably to our clients.
Having attended IRIS Legal World in the autumn of 2010 where there was a degree of dissatisfaction amongst the attendees, it was nice to hear from Nikki that IRIS Legal is currently running at a 95.5% customer retention rate and generally considered to be world class.
I remember Doug Hargrove (MD, IRIS Legal), standing up at IRIS Legal World and telling the audience that no IRIS Legal products would be "end of lifed" which at the time was good news to some users of products like AIM Evolution.
Well, that stance is still the same, it appears there is no change of stance from IRIS Legal. Nikki said that ILB (the old Mountain product), which has been considerably enhanced to make it an enterprise level product, was their "investment go forward" product but that none of the others, ILE, AIM, Videss, OPSIS or AlphaLaw would be end of lifed.
"Cloud" is clearly important as it is for many other vendors and the "ILB Hosted" product is one that I suspect we will hear more about in the coming months & years. That said, are law firms REALLY ready for it? I mean other than small firms and/or startups? That said, I do know one 200 seat law firm in the South East that are now fully cloud.
All in all I came away from the meeting thinking positively about what I'd heard from Nikki.