How to Build a Legal Software

Such benefits are really noticeable when it comes to law firms’ profitability — 68% of those who use legal software report its increase after implementing one. Additionally, 52% even have an income increase.

So, it allows us to say that the correct and effective implementation of such software can significantly improve your workflow. Yet, there are multiple aspects that you should take into account. For instance:

• Whether you need it to be compatible with the currently used software or systems (e.g. a custom CRM system).
• How to shorten the learning curve — teach your workers to use it without spending too much time.
• Maintenance ensuring & others.

Surely, we can’t help you with certain managerial tasks, but we definitely know how to make it easier for you using modern digital tools and will gladly tell you all the details of legal software development!

💼 Custom Development vs. Legal Software Providers

So, there are quite a lot of out-of-the-box legal software solutions that are accessible by subscription. They have a predetermined set of features, a design, and provide you with a server.

So, basically, you sort of install the software just like you do with apps from app stores, create a profile, set it up, and you’re good to go. However, a lot of law firms choose custom software development for many reasons.

In this section, we’ll review a couple of cases when custom legal software might suit you better.

Case # 1: Excessive Functionality

Since ready-made software is intended to cover the needs of as many law firms as possible, their functionality will include more features than you probably need. Yet, you can’t pay for a limited number of features — you buy a whole set of them.

Additionally, if you’ll have some features you don’t need, the software might be too bulky, which damages the convenience.

Surely, we’re not saying that 3rd-party legal software is dangerous to use — of course not. It’s just that security is not under your control. In case you want an extra layer of security, you won’t be able to implement it (unless your subscription implies it initially).

With custom software, however, you can add any security feature you want and ready to allocate a budget for.

⚙️ Top Legal Software Features

Custom legal software’s functionality really depends on your specific use case but surely can be generalized. We decided to divide the workflow into several parts and talk about how the software can be useful in each one of them.

# 1: Case Management Flow 📄

The first flow we selected is case management, which is where you’ll have all information on cases you work on. It can include:

• Data about clients like name, contact details, etc.
• Documentation, recordings, lab results, court results — whatever information that relates to the matter.
• Important dates like trials.
• Payments.
• Notes to save additional information, place links to articles, legal acts.
• Assigned attorney & others.

The main function here is generating analytical reports, which implies data collection, its analysis, and then providing a report. To maximize efficiency, you could customize reporting for different departments.

For instance, if it’s a report for the sales and marketing department, such numbers as sales dynamics, the structure of service types (X number — contract review, Y number — legal defense) matter. But for the accounting department, stats like income and expenses over a certain period are more important.

Plus, one of the most useful aspects of analytics is generating infographics like different kinds of graphs & charts, tables, and so on. With a visual representation of the data, it’s easier to track the dynamics, spot repetitive patterns, and make predictions.

# 7: Third-Party Integrations 🤖

The market is full of various 3rd-party SDKs and APIs that enable a specific feature or a set of them in your digital solution. Let’s take a look at what you can use for your legal software:

• Chats and messages: Twilio, WhatsApp.
• Calendar: Google Calendar API, Cronofy.
• Emailing: Sendgrid, Mailchimp.
• Payments: Braintree, Stripe, SolarisBank. If you’d like to learn more about integrating payment systems, we have an article on this topic.

Keep in mind, most of the flows aren’t separated. For instance, case management flow can have essential information from every other flow. Moreover, you can structure their cooperation in any convenient way. The easiest one is changing the information in all flows where it’s displayed once it’s changed in at least 1 of them.

✅ Remote Access & Integration with a Current Solution

In this section, we’re going to share some information that’s important to take into account if you decide to start using or build legal software.

Remote Access through Cloud Storage or Legal App Development

Since there’s a good chance that you’ll need to access your legal software outside the office (while working remotely, having a meeting with a client, on a business trip, etc.), it’s essential to think out how you’ll log in in such cases.

Plus, the process of trial itself is getting more digitized — no less than 80% of lawyers use smartphones in court. Laptops are used for quite a long time to present evidence, conduct quick online research, show presentations, etc.

The first one is writing the whole code from scratch. There might be too many changes so it’s easier to write it anew than trying to fix it since it’s more time-efficient.

The second one is redesigning the current software to be more suitable for your legal business. That is, add new features, delete some of the old ones, change the design, etc. For instance, if you have a well-developed CRM, you can leave task & team management as it was, change the client management flow, and add the rest.

And the third one is practically the same as the second but here you reuse the code of your current product and implement it into your new software’s code. The concept is similar, yet, it can change the way your development team will perform the integration.

If you’d like to have a more specific review of your use case, you should talk to the development team you work with about it. Or feel free to contact us.

🔐 Legal Software Security

If you work with a legal software provider, make sure to check if they store data on their private server or use shared storage.

In case of shared storage, consider asking for your own server since, with shared ones, the data is more exposed to breaches, leaks, and other cybersecurity risks. In case of rejection, think about what other provider options there are.

So, back to the point. Even though you’re likely aware of how to secure the data from the legislative perspective, we’d like to give you a couple of tips on how to enable high-level security digitally.

Database Protection

Database security implies a lot of features. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that each feature’s end goal is to protect the data. Yet, there are some of them that you can apply directly to your database.

First of all, there should be a limited number of people who have access to it. Plus, permissions of those who have access should be restricted to the minimum that’s needed to perform their duties successfully.

You can also create various levels of access instead of defining such for each employee. For instance, junior attorneys can access A set of info, Chief Legal Officer — full access to legal documents, etc.

Such can be enabled with help of CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) tools. In this way, you can conduct bug and breach scanning automatically as often as you want by using CI. All of that is performed in a simulation and not the actual code.

It’s also helpful in a way that fixing fresh breaches is cheaper and safer than stale ones.

After the problem is spotted, CI tools change the code and then CD is used to apply changes to the actual code. Such a system is normally used when updating the solution, however, the concept of security scans is practically the same.

💰 What Affects Custom Legal Software Development Costs

Unfortunately, it’s quite a challenge to predict what the development will cost. However, there are aspects that you surely need to take into account when performing budgetary planning:

• Features’ number and complexity of features.
• Whether you want third-party integrations.
• Design.
• An hourly rate of your development team & others.

💡 Takeaways

To sum up, we’d like to point out once again that legal software can optimize a lot of processes in your law firm — team communication, client management, accounting and invoicing, document management, business analysis, etc.

Both custom development and legal software providers have pros and cons. Thus, it’s up to you what option suits your use case the most. From our side, we tried to give you as much input data as we could so you’ll be able to meet the right decision.

We, from our side, would gladly help you build a sustainable legal software that'll fully meet your business needs. If you need any help with the development, have questions left, or want to share your thoughts with us, feel free to reach out!