We were finalists for two ILTA awards this year.

I flew to Denver last weekend, got all dressed up in suit and didn't bring home the hardware.

So why in the hell am I posting about awards I didn't win?

I think we need to tell more stories of how vendors and law firms create exceptional outcomes together.

Infodash was a finalist for Solution Provider of the Year and a joint finalist with Gowling WLG for the Trailblazer Award. Here's why both projects matter.

Solution Provider of the Year was for our work with Eversheds Sutherland (US). They were our first extranet client. We're well established on the intranet side of the house (1 in 3 Am Law firms use Infodash), but extranet was a new offering for us.

Eversheds had canceled their contract with their legacy provider, and we had a hard go-live date of July 1 last year. No room to slip.

We hit some curveballs migrating their content. We fell behind and it was on us. The pressure was on.

So I started attending every stand-up at 7am, five days a week, for six weeks. I didn't add a lot of value in those meetings.

But the CEO showed up every single day to demonstrate how important the project was to us.

I dug in. I worked to understand where the problems were and how we could deploy more resources effectively.

We got Eversheds live on time. Fully implemented. I was not going to let our first extranet client be anything other than successful and they recognized us with the nomination for Solution Provider of the Year (thank you!🙏).

The Trailblazer Award was a joint nomination with Gowling WLG. The firm was a long time intranet customer but Al Hounsell had a vision for how we could use our extranet platform to build a client-facing enterprise search platform using in-tenant Microsoft AI technology.

The data never leaves Gowling's four walls. Their clients access it safely and securely, with no separate credentials. They sign in with their native Microsoft 365 login.

It's one of the most innovative things I've seen done with a law firm's own data in 20 years in legal.

Two finalist nominations. Zero wins. There must have been some genuinely compelling candidates in those categories, because the work behind both of these projects is something I'd stack up against anyone's.

International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) has a hard job picking winners, and I'm grateful they put us on the shortlist.

Most of all, thank you to the Infodash team who made both of these projects happen, and to Katrina Dittmer and Douglas Tarkington at Eversheds US and Al Hounsell, Julie Wilson, Rodrigo Meister, and Richard McConnell at Gowling WLG for trusting us with the work.

We'll be back next year!