New features are continuously being added to Ask iManage. Refer to the enhancements and feature changes available in each update.
May 2025
Ask Across
Streamline your analysis of datasets with the Ask Across feature. It provides a single, synthesized answer to your questions when working with multiple documents, helping you move beyond sifting through numerous individual responses.
Reduce information overload: Instead of receiving separate answers for each document (for example, 10 documents, 1 question = 10 answers), Ask Across delivers one consolidated response, making it easier to understand the complete picture.
Understand the net position effectively: Ask Across intelligently analyzes your selected documents, accounting for amendments and modifications. For instance, when asking, "What is the current position on termination clauses?" across a main agreement and its subsequent amendments, Ask Across will:
Identify the original clauses.
Recognize how schedules, annexes, or amendments modify these clauses.
Synthesize these findings to inform you of the actual current position, considering all changes.
Simplify complex reviews: This feature is particularly useful for understanding overarching themes, tracking arguments, or determining the definitive stance on an issue across a large volume of information, which can significantly reduce manual effort.
Traceable insights: While providing a consolidated view, the system allows for traceability of how insights were derived.
Ask Across helps you quickly understand key insights, trends, or the consensus across entire document sets, providing a clear and efficient path to the information that matters most.
Projects
The new Projects feature in Ask iManage provides a persistent way to save, organize, and return to your sets of documents and query history, enhancing continuity and efficiency in your workflow.
Never lose your place: Save collections of documents you're working with as a Project. Effortlessly reopen a Project to pick up right where you left off, with the same documents and context.
Streamlined Access with the Ask iManage Home Page: A new Ask iManage icon in the iManage Work left-hand navigation panel takes you to a dedicated Ask iManage home page. This central hub lets you:
Quickly access your recent Projects.
Start a new Project by selecting documents from any location.
Search for past Projects.
Manage your Projects.
Maintain your investigative flow: View previous questions and answers associated with a project, helping you easily recall your thought process and previous findings.
Work more efficiently: Avoid the wasted time of repeatedly searching for and reselecting the same sets of documents for ongoing matters.
Flexible document grouping: Group documents into a Project regardless of their location, without needing to create temporary folders. You can also modify a Project by adding documents as your needs evolve.
Projects provide a structured and efficient way to manage your multi-document analysis in Ask iManage, ensuring your valuable work is always organized and readily accessible.
New Chronology action
Reduce the time spent manually piecing together timelines from dense documents. The new Chronology action, available as a dedicated button in the Ask iManage guided actions panel, automates the creation of precise and comprehensive chronologies.
Save critical time and resources: Minimizes the meticulous, time-intensive manual review traditionally required to identify and sequence key dates, events, and facts.
Enhance accuracy and reduce Risk: By automatically extracting and organizing information, Chronology lessens the risk of human error, omissions, or inaccuracies.
Get clear and structured overviews: Key events, facts, and their associated dates are presented in a clear, structured format.
Verify with ease: Supports validation by linking back to document evidence, helping to ensure the completeness and accuracy of your timeline.
Simple to use: Select your document(s) and click the Chronology action to automatically generate your timeline; no additional user input is required for the action itself.
This new action improves how you prepare for litigation, conduct due diligence, and review transactional histories by providing reliable, quickly generated timelines.
Expanded question list capacity
To better support comprehensive analysis, we've increased the maximum number of questions you can include in a question list to 50. This allows for more detailed and extensive question lists without needing to break up your train of thought.
Increased document size limit
You can now work with even larger documents. We've doubled the token limit from 100,000 to 200,000 tokens, enabling more extensive document analysis and allowing Ask iManage to process and provide insights on more comprehensive content sets.
What are tokens?
Think of tokens as the building blocks of text that AI language models, like the one powering Ask iManage, use to understand and process information.
Mostly words, but not always: A token is often a whole word, but it can also be a part of a word (like "ing" or "est"), a punctuation mark (like a comma or question mark), or even a single character.
How AI reads: When you give the AI a document or ask a question, it first breaks that text down into these tokens. This is how it reads and digests the information. For example, the sentence "What is the termination clause?" might be broken down into tokens like:
["What", "is", "the", "termination", "clause", "?"].
April 2025
Actions and answer formatting in question lists
You can now configure specific actions, such as Extract, Summarize, or Analyze, for individual questions in a question list. This helps you pinpoint the exact information you need. Complementing this, new answer formatting options allow you to tailor the output of each question, ensuring results are presented in the perfect format for immediate use.
March 2025
Ask iManage guided actions (Extract, Summarize, Analyze, Overview)
We've redesigned the Ask iManage panel in iManage Work to provide clearer guidance on the what Ask iManage can assist with, driving engagement and making onboarding simpler. The updated panel on the right presents four key new actions:
Overview: Generate a high-level summary of your document.
Users can select a button to receive an automatic summary without needing a specific prompt.
Extract: Retrieve exact text from your content.
Examples:
"What is the definition of 'know-how' in this document?"
"Identify and return the non-compete clause."
"Find and extract the indemnity clause from this contract."
Summarize: Generate a summary of a specific topic from your content.
Examples:
"Summarize the termination provisions in this agreement."
"Provide a brief overview of the witness testimony on the events of November 21."
"How does this guidance note address confidentiality obligations?"
Analyze: Assess whether your content aligns with a specified requirement.
Examples:
"Does this lease guarantee the tenant's right to quiet enjoyment?"
"Identify whether this contract contains an uncapped indemnity and assess its acceptability."
"Evaluate if this subpoena is valid given the requirement of at least 10 working days' notice. Provide justification."
Question library
We're introducing the Question Library, a powerful way to save and manage frequently asked questions, eliminating the need to manually re-enter prompts across different documents.
How it works:
Save Questions for Reuse: Easily save individual questions from the right-hand panel or matrix page for future use.
Quick Retrieval & Organization: Browse, search, and filter saved questions with options for visibility (Organization/Personal/iManage).
Seamless Integration: Insert saved questions directly when asking a question.
Pre-Defined iManage Questions: Access a set of curated prompts to help you get started.
This update enhances efficiency by providing a centralized question bank, making it easier to track, reuse, and organize queries across different workflows.
Answer formatting
The Answer Formatting feature gives you greater control over how information is presented, reducing the need for manual reformatting.
By default, the Smart Format option intelligently selects the optimal structure and detail level, ensuring clarity and relevance without additional input.
For those who prefer customization, options for Lists, Tables, and Paragraphs, along with Concise or Expanded responses, allow tailored outputs to meet specific needs. This feature enhances usability, readability, and decision-making, making it easier to extract insights and present information effectively.
Export formats
We've extended exporting options to include:
Word (.docx): For use cases requiring a formatted text document.
Excel (.xlsx): For structured data requiring analysis or further manipulation.
CSV: Retains the current support for CSV, useful for simple data storage and transfer.
You can also now export directly from the panel on the right in the interface, reducing the steps required to access export functionality and improving efficiency.
Question suggestions
We're making it easier than ever to engage with Ask iManage by introducing Question Suggestions which are dynamic, document-specific recommendations designed to enhance your productivity.
How It Works:
When you open a document, Ask iManage automatically presents relevant question suggestions tailored to your content.
Suggestions adapt based on document type, content, and selected Action, making it simple to quickly initiate valuable queries.
February 2025
Resizable document preview
The preview window in Ask iManage is now resizable, allowing users to adjust its size for better document or results readability.
Improved language adherence and response quality
We've made several improvements to the Ask iManage system prompt to enhance its correctness, standardize language usage, and remove ambiguity. These changes have resulted in a 5% improvement in response correctness and a 39% increase in language adherence accuracy.
January 2025
Enhanced document understanding
We’re introducing a smarter way to extract and analyze information from your documents. Until now, Ask iManage focused on retrieval-based questions, pinpointing specific areas of a document to answer targeted queries like date or party extraction.
With our new full-document approach, Ask iManage can now process the entire document to provide more comprehensive answers for tasks including:
Summarizing documents: Generate concise or detailed summaries that capture the key points of any document, helping you quickly grasp the main points.
Identifying entities: Extract lists of all the key people, organizations, or clauses mentioned throughout a document.
Clause identification: Locate and list all clauses that match specific criteria, such as references to material breaches.
Cause of action analysis: Identify and list causes of action or legal arguments outlined in a document.
Best of all, Ask iManage intelligently routes your question to the most suitable method—whether it’s retrieval or full-document analysis—so you can focus on your work without extra effort.
Multilingual response support
We’re making Ask iManage more accessible and user-friendly with enhanced multilingual capabilities.
Now, Ask iManage will automatically match the language of the user’s query or respond in a specific language when requested. Key updates include:
Language matching: If no language is specified, Ask iManage responds in the same language as the user query.
Language specification: Explicitly request a language for the response, and the system will adapt accordingly.
Seamless multilingual functionality: Ensures consistent, high-quality responses in any language, making Ask iManage more inclusive and versatile for global teams.
This update simplifies communication and ensures Ask iManage aligns with the linguistic needs of all users.
November 2024
Question list management
The popularity of question lists has made them increasingly hard to manage. We’ve created a new interface to manage these, as well as adding some much-requested features such as import/export, and question list visibility options.
Key Updates:
Import & export: Lists can be easily exported or imported using simple CSV files.
Visibility: Lists can now be marked as either Personal (visible only to the creator) or Organization (visible to everyone with access to Ask iManage). This means that you can work on personal question lists until you’re ready to publish them to the rest of your team.
Favorites: Favorite question lists and easily find these using the new question list search.
Descriptions: Now that you can publish lists to your organization, you might want to provide some additional detail about what the list contains and what it will or won’t find.
Author: View who created a question list. Note that migrated question lists display Author as Unknown.
Search: Search across all question lists using the question list name, description, or the name of any of the questions within.
Question list creation
We’ve also made changes to the page where you edit question lists. You’ll see the new fields Description, and Visibility as well as a new inline question creation interface.
Key Updates:
Reorder: Drag questions to reorder how they are displayed in the right-hand panel or on the matrix page.
Autosave: The edit question list page now autosaves any changes you make, so no more lost question lists!
Question list search
With more and more question lists being created, we needed a better way to find the question list you want to run over the selected document or documents on the matrix page. The improved question list selector lets you search for the specific question list you're looking for, and filter down to just your favorites, your personal question lists, or the lists shared by your organization.
Key Updates:
Search: Search across your question lists to find the one you’re looking for.
Filters: Quickly filter down to just your favorites, your own, or the shared lists.
