Project Fortress and Polsinelli Named ILTA Trailblazer Award Finalists

Project Fortress and Polsinelli have been named finalists for the International Legal Technology Association’s Trailblazer Award. The Trailblazer Award recognizes a collaborative initiative between a law firm and a technology partner in the early deployment of a new product or service.

This recognition stems from the structured co-development program Fortress and Polsinelli executed between June and August 2025. The two teams expanded the Fortress platform into new and highly specialized practice areas: Intellectual Property, Patents, Emerging Companies & Venture Capital, Energy, and select litigation subgroups.

What the Project Involved

Polsinelli had already deployed Fortress across its core Corporate and Litigation practices. This phase was different. Each new practice group operated with materially different workflows, terminology, document types, and regulatory requirements. Expanding Fortress to serve them required building from scratch in several areas.

Over three months, the teams designed and deployed practice-specific matter structures, customized checklists and playbooks, real-time dashboards, and AI workflows tied directly to each group’s document types and matter stages. Active matters were migrated into the platform before the first attorney logged in, so adoption began with real work rather than empty templates.

Two examples capture the approach well. For the Energy practice, the Fortress team built an AI tool that monitors public sentiment and regulatory commentary for new development projects. For Patents, the team integrated a firm-assigned USPTO API to surface live patent application data, replacing a manual monitoring process attorneys had maintained for years.

The Results

Within months of deployment, the expansion produced measurable impact across practices, including:

• 80%+ faster redline analysis, market trend analysis, and issues list preparation

• More than 30% reduction in litigation drafting and research time.

How It Was Built

The approach that made this work came down to a few principles the teams applied consistently.

Rather than asking practice groups what technology they wanted, the teams mapped their actual workflows and presented working prototypes. Attorneys reacted to real systems rather than abstract capabilities. This avoided analysis paralysis in requirements gathering and compressed the time from design to adoption.

Active matter migration was non-negotiable. Attorneys at Polsinelli opened the platform and saw their current cases already organized inside it. There was no period of parallel systems or duplicate entry. The platform reduced workload from Day One.

And because Fortress is built on Salesforce, the expansion never required Polsinelli to accept a tradeoff between innovation and security. The Salesforce backbone meets enterprise security standards applied to federal agencies, which gave the firm’s leadership the confidence to move quickly without compromising governance.

What This Recognition Reflects

The ILTA Trailblazer Award criteria center on managing early-adopter risk, executing a genuine collaboration, achieving results quickly, and building toward a defined next phase. The Polsinelli program was designed to address all four, and the framework built during this program now serves as the model for how Fortress expands into new practice areas going forward.

The award ceremony is May 1. More information about the ILTA Trailblazer Award is available here.