Why Your ERM Should Work With AI Agents

The way people get to their data is changing fast. Agents like Claude, ChatGPT, and Harvey are quietly rewriting the rules, and the shift matters for anyone who owns relationship data inside a law firm.

For years, getting value out of a complex system meant learning that system. You had to know where to click, which filters to set, and how to build the right query. Agents remove that requirement. Now a person can ask a question in plain language and get an answer back, without ever opening the underlying software. That single change opens the door for business development, marketing, and attorneys to serve themselves, pulling the relationship intelligence they need on their own terms.

What's Happening in the Market

Agentic workflows are taking hold across the legal industry, and the pace of adoption is striking. Firms are bringing Harvey on board to handle a growing list of jobs. Drafting, reviewing, and case law research were the obvious starting points, but they are no longer the whole story. Firms are now using Harvey as a straightforward matter management and search tool, and the benefits are showing up across departments. There is little doubt that firms will keep investing in AI initiatives as those wins accumulate.

As systems like Harvey settle in, expectations shift with them. Attorneys, marketing, and BD will increasingly expect to ask a question and get an answer, rather than navigate yet another piece of software. That expectation creates two things at once for ERM platforms: a real opportunity, and a new criterion buyers will use to judge them.

Why This Matters Specifically for ERM

ERM data is some of the most valuable data a firm holds. Who knows who, how strong each relationship is, the full history of interactions, all of it is gold for business development. Yet it has historically sat behind a user interface that most attorneys will never open. The value is real, but the access has always been limited.

Agent access changes that equation. It extends the power of ERM to attorneys without asking them to learn the system first. An attorney can simply ask, and the relationship data comes back through an interface they already use every day.

The same logic applies to BD and marketing staff. Many of them are genuine power users of ERM, but not everyone can be, and not everyone needs to be. Agents let any BD or marketing professional reach deep into relationship data without climbing a steep learning curve. That is the real superpower here: reach without friction.

The Use Cases Agent Access Unlocks

Once agents can talk to ERM data, a set of practical, everyday use cases opens up:

• Look up who knows who at a target company or firm, without logging into anything.
• Give attorneys self-serve access to relationship data through a familiar chat interface.
• Ask questions of ERM data and combine it with data from other systems to answer richer questions than either source could answer alone.
• Pull a list of people and get a usable export, such as an Excel file, on demand.
• Take action instead of just reading. Add a contact, or add someone to a list or campaign.
• Identify which attorney has the strongest relationship with a target client, then ask that attorney for an introduction.

These use cases can be delivered today if you are using an ERM that has made the necessary investments in their technology that enable agentic access. 

Not Every Vendor Can Actually Deliver This

Here is where firms need to look closely, because the capability is not automatic. To deliver any of this, an ERM vendor needs to provide what is called an MCP server. In simple terms, an MCP server is the way an agent talks to a vendor's existing APIs to pull data. But an MCP server on its own is meaningless without the foundation underneath it.

What a vendor truly needs is:

• A robust set of open APIs for both ingesting and exporting data.
• An MCP server endpoint that exposes those APIs, so the agent knows how to reach them.
• A continuing commitment to building more APIs, so that over time all of the data in the system becomes reachable.
• Both read and write capability, so agents can answer questions and take action.

The point is straightforward. An MCP server is only as good as the API layer beneath it. A thin API surface means a thin set of things an agent can actually do, no matter how the MCP server is marketed.

How to Evaluate an ERM Vendor's AI and Agent Strategy

Very few ERM vendors today have the necessary API endpoints to enable agentic access. When you are assessing an ERM vendor, or comparing a few of them, these questions cut through the noise:

• Do they have a real MCP server in production, or just a beta or preview announcement?
• Do they offer a deep and expanding set of high quality APIs, or a closed, self-contained system?
• Can agents write back to the system, or only read from it?
• How quickly are they expanding coverage of their own data through new APIs?

If a vendor has not built out an extensive set of APIs, their agentic roadmap will stall. You will not be able to offer Claude, Harvey, or ChatGPT access to your BD or marketing teams, no matter what the product slides promise. This section is worth keeping handy and sharing with prospects, because it works just as well as a buyer's guide.

Conclusion

Agent access to ERM data is moving from a nice-to-have toward table stakes. As that happens, the foundation underneath the agent is what separates real capability from a press release. A polished announcement does not help your attorneys if the APIs behind it cannot reach the data they need.

Looking ahead, this is where legal business development is going. As firms grow comfortable engaging with AI in their daily work, they will expect their relationship data to be available the same way everything else is, through a simple question to an agent. Your ERM vendor should have a clear strategy to deliver ERM data through agents like Claude, so the firm can stay relevant as the world shifts to a new way of getting to information.