Today’s guest is Alex Smith, Global Product Management Lead for iManage RAVN. He got his start at legal publishing giant LexisNexis, where he began in online editorial work and eventually evolved his role to product management and platform innovation. An interest in new roles in law firms led to his time as innovation manager at Reed Smith, a global firm where he oversaw the firm’s Innovation Hub program that encouraged, communicated, connected, and managed a pipeline of ideas across the firm's global network. Today, he oversees the product roadmap for the search, knowledge, and AI offerings within the wider iManage experience, bringing the voice, needs, and ideas of the customer in service design. The common thread in his career journey is his fascination with search and data, and the evolution of new and emerging technologies, from CD-ROM to contract management, artificial intelligence, semantic search, and linked data. In many ways, Alex’s career maps the evolution of technology in the legal sector.

Our conversation flashes back to the early days of online legal publishing up to today's emerging technologies. We talk about Alex's various work experiences, and how he uses lawyers’ penchant for talking about themselves in his work in product design. We also discuss how he has been at the core of some of the critical technology products in the legal industry.