We sat down with CEO Bill Johnson to uncover how TCDI has not only weathered the many technological shifts and innovation breakthroughs in legal services over the past 37 years, but often anticipated them. Bill shares candid insights into how TCDI continues to lead by listening, adapting, and investing in smart people and smart risks. If you’re wondering what it really takes to stay ahead of the curve in legal tech, this conversation offers a rare and refreshingly practical look behind the curtain.
How have you identified emerging trends in the industry early enough to act on them before they became mainstream?
Bill: We’ve always focused on solving problems for individual clients, not watching trends. Typically, if we solve a problem for one client, other people have the same issues. And if it isn’t applicable to more than one client, so be it; we’ve solved at least one client’s problem. It’s not about jumping on the bandwagon of the next hot thing on the market. It’s always been about responding to what the market is saying they need and solving problems instead of creating a product that sells. We’re client-driven, and what we do is all solutions-based.
Our R&D department works on specific innovations that clients need, but we also give developers the freedom to come up with ideas and try stuff without any specific product goals. That’s where a lot of our Tech Lab ideas come from, especially our work with AI; trying new stuff, being creative, and aiming to really understand the technology.
How have you fostered a culture of continuous learning and innovation within TCDI over such a long period?
Bill: By just allowing people to be creative and experiment. It’s being open to trying things without necessarily having a hard and fast return on what you’re trying. We have really smart people, and one of the ways you can hang on to really smart people is to let them try things and come up with creative solutions without being so regimental in how we approach building things. Let them pursue ideas. Sometimes they fail, but we learn from something that doesn’t work. The worst thing that can happen is that people stop trying, because then they stop moving forward. We go and hire the best people we can, and we don’t stand in their way. We let them create.
Looking back, what do you consider the most pivotal technological shift in the legal industry during your career, and how did you adapt in response to that?
Bill: I don’t think there has been one pivotal shift. It’s been a slow, steady evolution. Obviously, the volume of data that we deal with has grown exponentially, and that’s changed the approach and technology. AI is definitely a game changer in a lot of ways, but we’re right at the beginning of it.
In many ways, though, things aren’t that different from 25 years ago. We’re still dealing with data and processing, and the basic technology hasn’t changed. But we’ve gotten faster at it. We can handle a lot more data, and we’re using new techniques and new technologies. So, there hasn’t been a revolutionary change, but there is a constant evolution with innovation; you have to stay with it.
You mentioned allowing team members the opportunity to be creative and take risks. Can you think of a specific example of a time that you had TCDI take a risk on a new technology, and then it proved to be successful?
Bill: One recent example was purchasing a GPU server so that we could do R&D internally with AI. It was a really expensive piece of hardware that we didn’t have any particular project lined up to utilize, but I knew that if we wanted to do anything with AI, we would need our own development environment so that we could figure out how it works. It was a bit of a gamble since we didn’t really have half a million dollars to throw around on new technology, but it’s been worth it. It was an investment that has allowed us to truly understand AI and have our own environment behind firewalls for clients with sensitive data.
Client relationships have always been paramount at TCDI. What role has customer feedback played in shaping the long-term innovation roadmap?
Bill: Customer feedback is everything. Our long-term clients have driven the majority of the innovations we’ve created. It’s an active process between our client services team listening to the needs of our clients and them bringing those requirements to our development team so they can use their expertise to craft solutions. It’s completely client-driven.
Seeking to hear from our clients is part of why we originally started our managed document review service. We were writing software for review, but we weren’t doing review in-house at the time. It was difficult to get feedback from outside vendors who were using our software because they were busy trying to meet deadlines and didn’t have time to provide feedback from the end client so we could grow. Having an in-house group doing review has allowed us to connect with clients better, see places to improve, and work closely with development to build better software.
Legal tech is now crowded with AI-driven solutions. How have you separated hype from substance when evaluating innovations?
Bill: We started the TCDI Tech Lab to evaluate vendors and emerging technology. We realize that our clients don’t necessarily have the time to vet all of these AI vendors, and they don’t want to be down the road with a project only to discover that a vendor won’t work out. So, we do all the work setting up POCs that will test everything they need to know about an AI vendor. And we look at not just how the technology works, but how it works in a true workflow. We ask questions like, “How will it respond when you have real deadlines that you have to meet?” and “Is the vendor responsive to real-world requirements?” so we can get a holistic view of platforms.
A lot of AI vendors know their AI and how to build applications, but they don’t necessarily know about large-scale litigation or understand the business side of the work. Software is just one piece. In eDiscovery, the software doesn’t solve all the problems. It’s also the people, the processes, and the workflows.
There is a lot of hype around AI; people can say anything they want when they’re selling stuff. But vendors need to prove what it can do, and our Tech Lab is there to help test that for clients.
TCDI has been in business 37 years. Where do you see the company in 10-15 years?
Bill: Just doing what we do. Not much has changed. Our key tenets are the same: providing the best service available, being the smartest people out there, and being innovative with our solutions. Those aren’t going to change. The technology and litigation landscape may shift, but we’re going to keep doing what we do.
I don’t claim to be smart enough to know how things are going to be in five years, let alone ten years! I don’t know how it’s going to be in six months. But I do know that we’re going to stay flexible. We’re going to be agile and adapt to changes while continuing to offer service that is better than anybody else.
