Developing a sleek and informative collaboration site to share with clients can be a tedious but necessary task as corporate clients demand better insights into their legal matters.

To help with that need, legal software company Aderant launched a new product called Drive that aims to cut the time needed to develop such collaboration sites and securely share them with clients.

Drive is the latest addition to Aderant's suite of legal tech software that includes practice management, time keeping, calendaring and docketing, case management and e-billing.

While Aderant Drive has been in development for two years, Aderant executive vice president Chris Cartrett said current economic uncertainty highlights the greater need to provide transparency in a cost- and time-efficient matter.

What It Is: Drive is a platform that creates customizable client portal sites individualized for any law firm or client. Along with sharing documents, law firms can also share corporate risk information, financial data and other law firm-specific data points on the site, Cartrett explained.

Law firms can also utilize Drive to automate marketing of their practice groups. For example, can send clients links to portals highlighting their lawyers' expertise and experience, Cartrett said.

He also noted Aderant is also targeted at corporate legal departments, who could create a collaboration site for each matter they are working on, which would be accessible to each law firm working on the matter.

Drive users as well as their clients or potential clients can visit a collaboration site through an emailed link that requires dual authentication to access. 

Under the Hood: Drive is enhanced by knowledge management Handshake's software, which Aderant acquired in 2017. Aderant added Handshake's 40 law firm business plug-ins into Drive and built it on top of Office 365′s own collaborative sites platform Sharepoint.

Cartrett believes that Drive brings to the forefront for law firms both Handshake's data points that are unique to the legal industry, such as invoicing history, as well as underused Sharepoint capabilities.

Competition: Handshake and Drive aren't the only portal tools connected to larger legal software platforms. HighQ, which was purchased by Thomson Reuters in 2019, also  boasts integrations with Office 365, and G Suite, DocuSign and other platforms popular in corporate and legal offices. 

Similarly, Citrix ShareFile provides workflow management and real-time document editing accessing and editing capabilities in its portal. Along with its Microsoft and Google cloud integrations, ShareFile has partnered with various software providers, including archiving and compliance platform Smarsh, Sony and e-discovery software and service provider Cicayda. 

Cartrett said Drive differs from the competition and its sibling product Handshakes because of the combination of Handshake's plug-ins and Office 365 makes it a "more feature-rich" option.

In This Economy? Though some legal tech industry observers predict a cautious market for legal tech spend as the economy falters, Cartrett believes GCs won't waver on their growing need for more insights regarding their legal matters. 

Now, as budgets tighten lawyers will still have to provide those insights but potentially with less financial or time resources, he said.

To be sure, some law firms will question if they should develop these extranets in-house and add more to their IT and lawyers' tasks. But Aderant is betting Drive can enable development of these portals without drawing legal staff away from solving their clients' problems.