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Welcome LawNext PR, the podcast where we put a spotlight on the latest news coming out of
the legal tech industry.

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This is Bob Ambrogi.

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And in each sponsored episode of LawNext PR, I interview a legal tech company about its
latest news and developments.

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Today, we're talking with the company Litera about its recent announcement of a global
integration of Litera Compare with Google Workspace.

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Joining me to discuss this and tell us all the details is Kenneth Pechous

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Global Head Business Development and Alliances at Litera Ken, welcome to the show.

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Hey, Bob, thanks for having me.

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Really excited to be here.

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So I gave a little bit of a tease here of the news, but why don't you give us some more
details on what it is that you've announced here.

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Yeah, Bob, thanks again for the opportunity.

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And we're extremely excited here at Litera to announce that we've built an integration
with Google Workspace, which will include Google Docs and Google Drive in the initial

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release.

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And so our Compare product, which is trusted by over 15,000 firms, legal departments of
corporations globally for over 30 years, is now available in Google Workspace.

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So now legal teams can perform.

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all their precise document comparing redlining without having to leave Google Docs or
Google Drive.

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And of course, it's all AI enabled with agentic AI guiding these legal professionals
through their workflow processes.

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this includes the Lido AI as well, right?

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Yeah, yeah, Lido's at the front of everything that we do.

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And so when customers get this integration, and again, these are joint Google Drive slash
Litera customers Compare, they automatically get Lido included.

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And again, that's our agentic AI guide to help legal professionals expedite and be very
efficient and precise and accurate with their document comparisons and redlining

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functions.

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And I know what Compare does you know what Compare does but if there's anybody watching
this right now who maybe isn't familiar with the product before can you give us kind of a

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quick description of what Compare does

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Yeah, Bob, great question.

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And let me give you a particular use case that's available now in the integration.

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So let's say that I'm an attorney at a corporation and I'm working on behalf of a client
and I have to do some document comparisons.

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It might be a merger and acquisition play.

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I can go right now into my Google Drive and right click on the drive and bring up the
relevant documents into my view.

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that I need to Compare in Redline.

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It might be several different versions of the same document.

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It might be documents that we're trying to merge into one master terms and conditions.

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So as a functioning attorney, I bring this all up into one workspace.

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And through AI, I'm able to go through those Redlines and those edits all in one panel or
one pane and go through all the processes that I need to to get to a next revision of that

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document.

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And a use case that we like to, you

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purvey here is that usually sometimes these instances can take up to five hours to do.

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We've reduced that through AI, Lido, and the integration of Compare to a Google Workspace
down to less than five minutes in some cases.

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So very precise and very accurate.

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So it's all about productivity from a lawyer or a legal person's perspective.

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So of course, Compare has long been available for Word and Outlook.

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When I saw this news, one of the questions I immediately wondered was how widespread is
the use of Google Workspace in the legal profession?

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What's your sense of that?

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Yeah, Bob, that's a great insight.

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so traditionally, the AMLAW 200, the largest law firms in the world, have been very
Microsoft-centric.

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They just grew up using Microsoft tools, of course, Word and the entire MS 365 suite.

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And frankly, that's where Litera got its growth from.

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And that's where we focused our development and our product features.

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But if you look at the TAM, the Total Addressable Market for Legal Tech,

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software, specifically, you know, in this case, Litera Compare, there's a huge on tap
market in corporations, you know, so think about tech firms, think about manufacturing,

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big pharma, a lot of these companies are standardized on the Google suite.

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And so we look at that as an opportunity for us to land and expand and grow, you know, our
penetration into those marketplaces.

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And because we have such a great partner in Google, they've worked very closely with us
along building out this integration.

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we feel there's a lot of synergy in the marketplace for their sales organizations and our
sales organization to combine efforts and Co-sell and things like that.

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So the market is ready for us and we see this as a huge expansion opportunity for us.

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That's the main use case and reason why we put the engineering effort and the product
development effort into building this integration.

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I take it that's largely, that's more on the corporate legal side than the law firm side.

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Perhaps, are you also saying law firms begin to use Google Workspace at all?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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It's starting to become a more balanced approach, you know, and not only that on the Word
document or, you know, versus Google Docs side of the play, but also the infrastructure,

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the hyperscaler marketplace.

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You know, you're seeing a lot of Google Cloud, you know, expansion to match that of Azure.

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And so you're seeing that play in the marketplace.

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And so a lot of companies are looking at the best opportunity for their companies to get
the best technology, the right place at the right time, at the right cost.

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And so, yeah, we're starting to see that happen within traditional law firms, but you
nailed it when you said corporations.

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So think about in-house counsel, legal operations, and in some regards, universities, law
schools that are very standardized on Google, big opportunity for Litera to grow in those

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spaces.

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Great.

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You mentioned that this integration is with Google, with workspace, with Drive and with
Doc documents.

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Does that suggest that there may be further Google workspace integrations such as with
Gmail or?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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With Gmail, really across the entire Google Workspace Suite.

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And this first use case that we've built out is more of a land and expand kind of mindset.

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And so we want to get some wins and some traction around the Google Drive and the Google
Docs side of the equation, but Google Sheets across the board in the suite.

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And then even expanding further potentially into Google Cloud Platform.

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other areas within Google where there might be some opportunities for our organizations to
partner.

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But yeah, think I said land and expand, prove out this first use case, which we're seeing
a lot of traction in the marketplace already, and we're very excited about, and then we

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can take it from there.

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So I know you touched on this a little bit in your earlier remarks, but I wonder if you
could talk a little bit more about kind of what is the, what's the pain point or the

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workflow pain point that this addresses for legal teams?

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Yeah, it, you number one, it's, it's, it's productivity and velocity.

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you know, Gone are the days, I believe are the honeymoon of, just checking the box for AI
enabled workflow tools that, you know, legal firms use, to better their opportunity

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around, you know, streamlining contracting processes.

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You know, now it's all about, you know, how to lawyers spend quality time at the next
level and then taking that time and to actually then do

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what lawyers do, you know, instead of just spending time and reviewing and editing
documents, they're out actually doing the practice of law.

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And so it's freeing up their time to focus on their clients.

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And I think that's the big use case here.

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You know, it's all about outcomes for the clients, the clients of the law firms and the
clients, you know, of the corporations in-house counsel.

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So if you think of an in-house counsel team, you know, their clients are usually the lines
of business within that corporation to get contracts out more quickly, to negotiate

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potential.

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mergers and acquisitions.

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So it's all about rapid deployment, using AI and streamlining efficiencies.

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That's the number one pain point in the marketplace.

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And of course, the people that, you know, hired law firms, they're looking for those
outcome driven results.

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And so I think, you know, again, to reiterate, gone are the days of just testing the
waters with AI to check the box that you've done that.

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Companies are looking for real hard, fast results that are most importantly,

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reliable and accurate.

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And I think that's been a little bit of the apprehension is can we rely on these AI
models, agentic or large learning models to make sure that the work that our attorneys

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provide for our clients is accurate and can be, you know, battle tested in the courts,
things like that.

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So yeah.

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Then just to expand more on another point you touched on earlier is the fact that those
who use Compare with Google Workspace are also going to get access to Lido.

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So how do Compare and Lido work together?

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How do they complement each other or integrate with each other?

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Yeah, so at the core of the current versions of Compare, which is in the cloud, we've
built our foundational AI model into the actual tool.

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And so when you open it up, you automatically see the AI agent, Lido, in your purview
within your screen.

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And you can ask Lido questions on demand.

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Lido will automatically peruse the work that you're actually doing within.

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the Compare tool in a Google workspace and then make suggestions as you're moving along.

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And you can actually just have it do all of the editing work for you depending on how far
you want to take it.

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So it is that, you know, it's your best friend right there.

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It comes, like I said, baked into the core of the product going forward.

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And it's GA once you buy the software.

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You know, there's no, you know, there's no additional, you know, script that you have to
download.

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There's no additional SKU that you have to buy.

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It's all baked into the product.

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Yeah.

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Somebody watching this might think, well, if I'm in workspace, I've already got Google
Gemini.

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Why would I need Lido or some other product out there?

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You know, that's a great question.

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And, you know, my observation is that, you know, there's a lot of competitive AI
technologies out there in any given platform.

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In fact, I was at the Google Next conference and, you know, Gemini, of course, was the
main talk of the town.

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But then you had, you know, big companies like, you know, Anthropic with a gigantic booth
presence and walking the floors of the show.

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So I think there's some overlap.

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There's a lot of room for those technologies to complement each other.

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I don't think there's ever going to be just a clear cut one winner.

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And if you look at the way we're building our AI technology, some of it's native and some
of it is, you know, from an OEM perspective, leveraging those big AI native foundational

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platforms to build it into our technology.

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you know, people do ask that question, but if you look at the ecosystem, there's
absolutely use cases where they overlap.

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So if somebody is interested in implementing this integration between Compare and Google
Workspace, how do they do that?

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What do they have to do?

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Yeah, so, well, of course, there's the commercial aspect of it.

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They have to procure the Compare licenses, which, by the way, this integration, which is a
SKU that will be available on the Google Marketplace, will be available for download once

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you purchase the license key for Compare.

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So automatically, like I said, customers will get that part of the equation, the AI
enablement within Compare.

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And for companies that are outside of the Google workspace, it's the same thing.

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Compare has Ledo baked into it.

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So it's really easy.

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they're already a Litera customer or want to become one, they'd first go through that
commercial aspect and then it would be available to them within the workspace marketplace.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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That's the way to go.

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you know, we're working on doing the market penetration and the go-to-market enablement
for both Google on the workspace side, you know, their revenue generating organization,

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and the same thing with our revenue generating organization.

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So we're combining efforts to, you know, to get the word out on the street and to train
our respective sales forces on how to position the solution.

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Yeah.

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And is there any are there any conditions as to as to document type?

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I Google Doc, Word doc.

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Does it it does it matter at all in terms of using this?

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It really doesn't matter.

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In fact, you can have Word docs in Google Drive, and they'd be brought up from the
right-click capabilities within Compare.

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So it doesn't really matter what kind of document.

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And that goes for Excel, that goes for Sheets, that goes for Slides, all the above.

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The whole Google workspace will be enabled through this technology.

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Yeah.

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Well, I mean, it sounds like it sounds like a really significant and major expansion for
Compare.

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I've been peppering you with questions.

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What else would you like listeners to know about this new integration?

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Yeah, well, you know, obviously AI is, you know, the hot topic of the world front and
center.

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You know, you go to these big events like Google Next and you see just a myriad of new
sponsors and vendors that didn't exist three or four years ago.

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And, you know, going back to my earlier comment, you know, the way we look at AI here at
at Litera is that, you know, we we have the mindset that the honeymoon is over.

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you know, within the legal space.

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Law firms, in-house counsel at companies, you know, they're no longer just checking the
box, like I said, and going through the motion of buying an AI solution because it's what

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their customers demand or what their board of directors demands.

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They really need to see true time savings and monetary savings by using these tools.

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The ROI is a little bit hard to measure right now, but we feel that the way we've taken AI
and rolled it into

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almost our entire product suite, there's a few things that are coming along.

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This is really the way that we're going to help customers take and leverage that 30 years
of deep business rule expertise that Litera brings to the table, coupled with a really

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smart and efficient AI strategy to bring the technologies to the customer that are going
to drive ROI, cost savings, which will make law firms more sticky, if you will, and expand

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within their customer and their client bases.

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That is the takeaway that I would love everybody to understand.

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again, traditional law firms, Microsoft shops, traditional corporations with in-house
counsel and legal operations, most standardized on the Google platform, huge opportunity

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for us to grow.

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And then to your point earlier, law firms are also looking at the Google suite as well,
and they're expanding into that technology.

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really, to us, was something that we had to do.

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And Google has been a fantastic partner along the way.

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I know they're very bullish on the relationship as well.

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And we're going to take this first use case and expand it from there.

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But we're very excited, like I said, about what we're

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Well, it's exciting news and I really appreciate your coming on the show and telling us
about it today.

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Yeah.

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Bob, thanks a lot.

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really appreciate the opportunity to get the message out there.

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And if there's follow up from this conversation that you have with me, please go ahead and
ping me.

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I'd be more than happy to talk about the solution in general.

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And hopefully, if we meet again sometime in the future, I can talk about all the wins that
we've had in this space.

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do that.

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But as for those watching this recording or listening to this recording, should they just
go if they don't already have a relationship with the terror and they want to find out

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more, how do they do that?

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Yeah, you know what, I'll, you know, being the head of business development and alliances,
you know, I'll put my info out there.

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And if people want to reach out to me directly, that's fantastic.

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And, my email is kenneth.peckus at latera.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn.

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Ken, thanks so much.

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It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

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appreciate the time, like I said.

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Have a great afternoon.

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Yeah, and that's it for today's episode of Law Next PR.

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We hope you enjoyed it.

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If you did, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast or you can find us on YouTube
at lawnext underscore PR.

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This is Bob Ambrogi.

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Until next time, thanks for joining us.