Aderant Team Member Spotlight: Joe Johnson
A Conversation with Joe Johnson, Handshake Principal Consultant and Team Lead at Aderant
Q: Tell me about your role at the company and your work on Handshake.
Joe: I lead the Handshake professional services consulting team which implements intranets and online portals for law firms. My team works with development, sales, and other divisions within Aderant to improve and deliver Handshake. We gather information from clients based on what problem they are trying to solve and come up with solutions, most times we have an out-of-the-box offering, but we also do a lot of custom consulting work using our toolkit.
Q: How are law firm needs changing for intranets?
Joe: Handshake connects into a law firm’s various systems and presents unified views of that information while targeting content to users based on what we know about them. Historically, a lot of our portal implementations were on-premise and the clients’ data was stored onsite. However, more law firms have shifted into the cloud, and are shifting to SharePoint online. I would say 80% of our implementations in the last few years have been new implementations or migrations to SharePoint Online. When law firms are in the cloud, where we obtain their information to populate our portals is different since they are not storing as much information inside their network. With the transition to hybrid working model, attorneys want to access the information from wherever they are, including from their phone or Microsoft Teams. Lawyers no longer have to be connected on the firm’s network to get to the portal – they want to connect from anywhere.
Q: What impact does it have when law firms shift to the cloud?
Joe: From a Handshake perspective? Not a lot. Our product is designed to help firms access disparate data sources wherever they are and bring together where they are working. That said, in the past we had been getting at a lot of data for Handshake through SQL and other databases, and there was a standardized approach to that process. Now as law firms have gone to the cloud, there are different APIs that we can use to customize integrations and portals. We must rely on other companies’ software APIs to make integrations happen and maximize what our clients’ other vendors enable us to do to connect to their solutions. Those API’s need to be robust enough to provide what the clients are looking for. The end result is the same, though – that clients can seamlessly access their data through the Handshake portal.
Q: What feedback are you receiving from firms that have moved to the cloud with Aderant Handshake?
Joe: Moving to the cloud has been a very positive experience for clients, and our out-of-the-box Handshake Connect solution has been very well-received. We are taking advantage of modern advances in SharePoint online once firms have migrated their content out of their on-premise SharePoint environments. Modern pages, Power Apps for content editing, other native SharePoint features used in conjunction with the Handshake integrations and best practices around managed meta-data has proved beneficial to our clients.
Q: What are some of the innovations you are now delivering to Handshake customers?
Joe: Handshake has improved the appearance and user experience of portals since firms usually do not want their portal to look like SharePoint. Handshake Connect X provides an attractive interface that delivers information to our client how and where they want it. We are able to remove a lot of the pain points of SharePoint Online, but keep the benefits. Another innovation for our cloud-based customers is our newly designed persona-driven pages, which is based on your role – timekeeper, legal assistant, etc. The firm’s portal presents only information that’s relevant to you. A timekeeper might see financial metrics, work-in-progress (WIP) and accounts receivable collections while legal assistants see these metrics for the timekeepers they support. People like seeing data which applies to them rather than a complex interface cluttered with data points that don’t apply to them.
Q: What do you feel like the next big thing for law firm portals?
Joe: API integrations are incredibly important. For Handshake, we have a new integration with iManage and those connectors have been a significant initiative. Also, we are seeing more firms going to data lakes like Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric, where they’re pushing more data into the cloud. Ensuring that we have support and ability to connect to silos of data there, while continuing to present that information is key. It is a major step forward from the on-premise SQL environment that we had historically connected to. SharePoint’s integrated AI capabilities around document management and search also has potential. One other big area is around content management and making it more intuitive with enhanced functionality and features. Analytics are also part of our portal implementations, and we are encouraging longstanding clients to take advantage of tracking to see where people are using most within the portal. We are providing insight about what pages are being viewed and who’s viewing them, who are the champions, and which people are really seeing the value of the intranet. These analytics can be leveraged internally within the firm to help promote the portal or certain pages that are visited most often. Handshake has great dashboards and interfaces showing who and what areas within the portal people are going to, and that’s been very well received.
Q: What kinds of law firms are the “sweet spot” customers for Handshake?
Joe: We deal with all firm sizes and geographic areas. Historically, Handshake has been a solution for larger firms with 200+ attorneys and some of our clients are huge firms with in-house development resources. That said, now Handshake is more accessible to smaller firms, and we are looking at ways to create offerings better suited to that market. Firms of all sizes can extract a lot of value from an intranet.
