iManage Sets October GA for Next-Gen AI Platform

iManage will release its next-generation platform in October, the company said Monday, following an early access program that included law firms, corporate legal departments and financial institutions.

The platform centers on what iManage calls the Context Fabric, a governed intelligence layer that understands the full record of a matter or project – documents, communications, parties, relationships – enriched with data from practice management and financial systems. Every AI answer draws on the organization's own accumulated knowledge and traces back to it. Nothing is exported. Information barriers are respected. The AI model sees only what each user or agent is permitted to see.

"Every business is going through a transformation enabled by AI. It's reshaping how they manage their data, the tools people use, and how they operate," said Neil Araujo, CEO of iManage. "The organizations getting it right know AI has to reinforce their unique differentiation – while enabling safe and governed use, grounding it in rich context, optimizing token costs, and driving pervasive usage across the business. This is the foundation that we have built and will be available in October."

The platform also includes an MCP server that gives compatible AI applications governed access to iManage knowledge. With the next-gen release, the server supports agentic actions: creating workspaces, folders, filing and linking documents. AI-generated work product lands in the governed record, matching the same permissions, audit trail and lifecycle set in the matter.

AI-powered features have evolved from chat into a context-aware legal assistant that can answer questions across a matter's documents, build chronologies, analyze documents against the organization's own playbooks, run tabular review across hundreds of documents at once, and file its work product back into the knowledge store. Every action respects the organization's guardrails.

Early access participants reported concrete changes. Deal teams compared current drafts against negotiated precedents and playbooks to identify departures from established positions. Litigation teams assessed how new evidence aligned or conflicted with pleadings, testimony and prior analysis. Advisors surfaced prior work product addressing similar issues before counseling a client. In each case, professionals applied the organization's accumulated knowledge more quickly, without altering existing permissions or information barriers.

The platform is built for cloud scale and connects to an open ecosystem of AI tools – Microsoft Copilot, Harvey, Legora, Thomson Reuters, Spellbook, ChatGPT Enterprise and Claude – through governed access.

Scaling AI across an organization also involves training and adoption. iManage supports that through its use iManage program, pairing education and certification paths with a library of use case videos organized by practice area.

The next-generation iManage platform will be generally available in October 2026. Playbook-based review, tabular review, and MCP read and write actions are available today.