‘Epiq is a 3rd generation ALSP,’ explains Roger Pilc, the group’s President and General Manager for Global Legal Solutions, ‘we provide tech, consulting and managed services.’ They also now offer a range of legal AI capabilities, with significant cost savings for clients.
In fact, as Pilc sets out all that Epiq Global does (see image below), especially through its Epiq Service Cloud and via its relationship with AWS, which also supports its AI offering, the name of a book about Amazon’s rise comes to mind: ‘The Everything Store’.
Pilc agrees that Epiq in some ways is a ‘legal everything store’. It’s certainly taken an approach that’s seeing significant annual growth and the entire company has revenues of well over a billion Dollars, as it expands into multiple aspects of legal sector need.
The Epiq Service Cloud
From handling contract review, to consulting on CLM, to providing on-demand lawyers to inhouse teams, to a myriad of eDiscovery services, to regulatory risk support, to now multiple legal AI solutions (see more below) – in fact, you name it, Epiq has an offering. The only thing they don’t do is direct legal advice, which because of Bar rules in the US is not possible, nor would it match their business model.
In short, aside from doing the core job of a law firm, ALSP Epiq does nearly everything else that one might encounter across the legal and regulatory ecosystem as a corporate. And yet, as Pilc tells this site, several of the company’s senior staff are not from a legal background.
For example, before joining Epiq, Pilc served as executive vice president at Pitney Bowes where he led its digital transformation into a cloud-based, analytics-driven provider of commerce services. He’s also not a lawyer by background and instead trained in engineering and business.
So, with this background in mind, where is Epiq heading?
Pilc notes that the legal sector is experiencing a transformational moment and Epiq is going to be very much part of that. He also notes that digitally-based, gig businesses such as Uber are an inspiration.
Many of their own solutions are digitally-based. Clients can have a single sign-on into the Epiq Services Cloud – which connects dozens of services on a single platform – and then begin to tap what’s on offer. That may mean an entirely digital solution, but it could mean requests for consulting or on-demand services as well, or some of each. But, it can all run through a digital gateway.
Pilc notes that a friend at a hedge fund said to him recently: ‘You’re the gig economy for the legal industry.’
He adds that in other sectors ‘people need a room, they need a car’, perhaps AI is used ‘to connect the consumer and the provider’. When it comes to legal and serving corporates Epiq can have that same flexibility and immediacy.
‘We have borrowed from the IT services sector,’ Pilc adds, and that’s clear.
One other thing is for certain, Epiq has fully embraced its ALSP opportunity and is thinking about what’s possible, approaching the market as a truly multi-faceted tech and services company which engages deeply with the legal world. And with the tech naturally now comes AI.
Epiq and AI
As noted, Epiq works closely with AWS, including for AI services, and it also provides AI-enabled analytics applications and dashboards built on Microsoft Azure. Some of the things the ALSP now offers include:
- ‘Custom Copilots: Legal departments and law firms increase productivity with Epiq’s custom Copilot development, using tuned, relevant agents and predictive models, to build legal AI assistants with secure retrieval augmented generation to define and limit the search area for accurate results.
- AI Text Summarization: Legal professionals can quickly locate and communicate key findings more effectively through concise and accurate summaries of large volumes of text produced by Epiq using the power of Azure OpenAI Service, reducing hours of analysis to minutes, enabling teams to focus on higher value work.
- Responsible AI Adoption, Data Security, and Management Consulting: Clients benefit from end-to-end support rolling out Azure Purview, improving collaboration, productivity, and security while mitigating implementation risks. Epiq supports clients in integrating new Microsoft Security Copilot capabilities as they become available.
- Epiq Data Intelligence Layer: Epiq uses the power of Azure to build, store, and deliver more than 100 expert-trained and industry-specific models that clean, enhance, and enrich legal spend data to guide legal departments in identifying cost savings opportunities.
- Knowledge Search for Law Firms: Utilizing Azure OpenAI Service, Epiq’s proprietary knowledge search empowers legal professionals to find and fully leverage a firm’s experience and expertise.’
However, this is more than just offering AI services because they can. As Pilc explains, it’s rather that the AI is all part of a foundational philosophy.
‘Everything we have done is to create a common platform. And so we need a common genAI platform to serve all the use cases,’ he explains.
The way they are rolling out genAI is the same as with the other areas. ‘We create apps that solve problems,’ he notes, just as the Commercial segment of the group provides distinct modules that help with contract review, or CLM support.
And again the image of ‘the legal everything store’ comes to mind.
There will also be pricing benefits for the customers by offering GenAI solutions, he says.
‘It’s a fantastic value proposition. We can be 10% as expensive as the old way of doing things,’ he adds.
The Big Picture
Where are things heading longer-term?
Pilc says that there are three main strands to their thinking. First is the migration of work to ALSPs like Epiq, whether this is via ‘people arbitrage, tech or process’ there will be a ‘migration of work to digitally empowered ALSPs’.
Next is consolidation. Pilc stresses that their research tells them that corporates want fewer tech providers and that has happened in other industry verticals. ‘There is chaos with so many point solutions [in legal tech],’ he notes and adds that there will inevitably be more M&A between legal tech companies, especially as AI’s impact is felt.
The third aspect is the continued digital transformation of the legal sector and Epiq is clearly positioning itself to be front and centre of this, from a digital entry point, to more data analytics, to now a raft of AI solutions.
ALSPs Come of Age?
For years, this site has expected ALSPs to take on much more of the legal market’s work than they currently do. But, overall, we have not yet seen a massive surge of work leaving more traditional approaches to go to ALSPs – even if on face value and given their specialised and more economical offerings, that would make perfect sense.
That said, Epiq clearly has managed to take a notable slice of legal-related work, in the hundreds of millions of Dollars’ worth. Yet, there is so much more potentially to come.
Will there be a tipping point? Will clients realise that it makes more sense to work with ALSPs, to unbundle and triage their workflows and send their needs to the suppliers that specialise in those areas? Or will they continue to focus on law firms, even if law firms may not be the best solution for their need? Or instead, keep building up their internal costs with larger and larger legal teams and contract management groups? And will that stay the same even as genAI’s capabilities show that traditional legal working patterns are ripe for disruption?
‘I believe that it will be ALSPs that are the ones that most aggressively adopt genAI,’ Pilc says and notes how the use of tech to drive efficiency matches their business model perfectly.
‘It’s the innovators dilemma for legal,’ he adds – and that’s a good way of putting it.
I.e. both customers and suppliers have become used to each other and this has encouraged the incumbents (in this case law firms) to believe nothing will ever change. Of course, things do change, and then they are stuck because they are so wedded to a way of working that is now anachronistic. Meanwhile, the customers who previously gave the impression they’d never change in terms of what they wanted, switch rapidly to a better offering for certain needs.
Conclusion
It’s fair to say that the legal world still has some way to go to embrace ALSPs as much as it could, and this site would argue, as much as it should. But, if the innovators dilemma for law firms does play out as Pilc believes and corporates shift their buying patterns, especially as genAI impacts the legal sector, then Epiq is clearly one of the ALSPs best suited to benefit from this change.