iManage to launch next-gen AI platform in October 2026

iManage said its next-generation platform will be generally available in October 2026.

The release follows an early access programme involving law firms, corporate legal departments, and financial institutions.

The launch centres on what iManage calls its Context Fabric, which links documents, communications, parties, and relationships within a matter or project, while adding context from practice management and financial systems. The system is designed to let AI tools work with an organisation's own knowledge while staying within existing access controls and information barriers.

iManage is positioning the platform around a common concern among professional services and legal-sector clients: whether AI systems can produce useful work without losing track of permission settings, audit requirements, and the business context behind documents. The company said every answer generated through the platform traces back to an organisation's own information and that data is not exported outside the governed environment.

That structure also underpins connections to external AI applications. According to iManage, the platform can connect with products including Microsoft Copilot, Harvey, Legora, Thomson Reuters, Spellbook, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Claude through an open ecosystem that uses governed access to organisational knowledge.

Open connections

A central part of that approach is the iManage MCP Server, which links compatible AI applications to an organisation's documents and contextual data while applying the permissions and audit controls already configured in iManage. With the next-generation release, the MCP server is also being extended to support actions such as creating workspaces and folders and filing, moving, and linking documents.

iManage said those write actions are intended to ensure AI-generated work product returns to the governed record for a matter or project under the same access conditions and lifecycle rules as other material. The company argued that this creates a feedback loop in which new work written back into the system deepens the context available to future AI tasks.

The platform also expands AI functions beyond a chat-style assistant. iManage said the software can answer questions across documents within a matter, build chronologies, analyse documents against internal playbooks, carry out tabular review across large document sets, and file the resulting work back into the organisation's knowledge base.

Those functions are aimed at legal and other knowledge-intensive work. According to iManage, deal teams can compare current drafts against negotiated precedents and playbooks, while litigation teams can assess whether new evidence or expert reports align with pleadings, testimony, and earlier analysis across a case. Advisers can also use the system to surface previous advice and work product on similar issues before giving client counsel.

Chief Executive Officer Neil Araujo set out the company's view of the market shift around AI adoption.

"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, Chief Executive Officer 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."

Sector focus

The announcement reflects a broader push among software suppliers to build AI features into document and knowledge management systems used by law firms and financial institutions. In those sectors, the commercial case for AI often depends less on broad, consumer-style generation and more on whether systems can work inside tightly controlled repositories without weakening confidentiality, compliance, and internal barriers.

iManage said its early access programme covered organisations of different sizes, suggesting it is targeting both large global firms and smaller specialist practices. The company serves more than one million professionals across more than 4,500 organisations, giving it an established base from which to introduce the upgraded platform.

The staged rollout also separates features already on the market from those included in the wider release. Playbook-based review, tabular review, and MCP read and write actions are available now, ahead of the broader general availability of the platform in October 2026.

Alongside the software release, iManage said it is supporting user adoption with education and certification paths, as well as use-case videos organised by practice area, including employment and labour, intellectual property, litigation, M&A, real estate, and trusts and estates.