Aderant Handshake
eDiscovery software
Legal software
Legal document management software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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What is Aderant Handshake
Aderant Handshake is a legal business development and relationship intelligence platform used by law firms to manage contacts, track client and matter relationships, and support marketing and pitch workflows. It centralizes CRM data and surfaces relationship context to help attorneys and business development teams identify connections and coordinate outreach. The product is typically deployed in mid-sized to large firms and integrates with common firm systems such as email and calendaring to capture interactions.
Purpose-built for law firms
The product is designed around law-firm workflows such as client team coordination, pitch support, and relationship mapping. It supports attorney-facing use cases where adoption depends on low-friction access to contact and relationship context. This focus can reduce the need for extensive customization compared with general-purpose CRM tools.
Relationship intelligence features
Handshake emphasizes relationship mapping and visibility into connections across people, clients, and matters. These capabilities help business development teams identify internal subject-matter experts and existing relationships relevant to an opportunity. Firms can use this to standardize how relationship knowledge is captured and shared.
Integrations with firm systems
Handshake commonly integrates with Microsoft Outlook/Exchange and other firm data sources to synchronize contacts and capture activity. Integration reduces manual data entry and improves the completeness of CRM records. This can be important for firms that need consistent reporting on outreach and engagement.
Not an eDiscovery platform
Despite sometimes being evaluated alongside legal information tools, Handshake does not function as an eDiscovery processing, review, or production system. Organizations needing collection, processing, analytics, review workflows, and productions typically require a dedicated eDiscovery platform. Handshake may only contribute indirectly by providing relationship and matter context.
Limited document management scope
Handshake is not a full legal document management system for matter-centric document storage, versioning, and governance. Firms that need document lifecycle controls, retention, and advanced search across document repositories generally use a dedicated DMS. Handshake may link to documents or systems of record rather than replace them.
Implementation and data quality effort
CRM outcomes depend heavily on data normalization, deduplication, and ongoing governance of contacts and organizations. Integrations can reduce manual work but still require configuration, security review, and change management for attorney adoption. Firms with fragmented legacy CRM data may face longer implementation timelines to achieve reliable reporting.
Seller details
Aderant, LLC
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
1978
Private
https://www.aderant.com/
https://x.com/Aderant
https://www.linkedin.com/company/aderant/
