aLawPractice.com

This blog will be squarely focused on the business of managing a Law Practice and how our Software as a Service is designed to minimize the time you spend on the clerical stitching required to keep the lights on and you focused on the client.  As we like to say we are about “Letting Attorneys Practice Law”. We understand that any interest you have in our ramblings needs to be connected to your practice of law.  Nevertheless, there may be a few times when it is appropriate for us to touch on the technology side.  This is one of those times, so if you are only interested in the bottom line, please feel free to now skip to the final paragraph.

aLawPractice.com is designed to deliver legal matter management whenever, wherever the attorney finds them self.  Our aim is to support many different types of technological devices which support attorneys in and out of the law office.  To deliver a highly collaborative application through the internet requires an understanding of many different technologies and the rapidly evolving landscape to support computing in the cloud.  Many decisions need to be made at several levels.  These decisions need to be reevaluated at various stages as the product evolves.

At ALP we are evaluating many simultaneous considerations such as platform, programming language, protocols.  Do we develop within LAMP or .Net?  Do we develop web services with a Service Oriented Architecture or simply JBOS?  Is it Java, Ruby on Rails or Objective-C?  Do we leverage Javascript, Ajax, Flash?  Are we working in the Cocoa or the Android API.   Are we focused on building strictly Restful services or do entertain a Registry/Repository?  Do we even care whether the app relies on state or not? Do we restrict the MVC pattern to the UI or is it ok for data services.  Do we build services only at the data layer or are there true business level services?  Are we developing in an Agile style or not?  Do we strive for a common platform or do target specific environments?  Do we seek open-source solutions for common tasks or should it be developed de novo.

I am not saying that as an attorney you should care much about our technical decisions, only that we stay informed and continue to make good choices.  Creating a modern application which runs on a browser over http or uses a smartphone and web services to populate your time entries mandates that we select and deploy many different technologies.   The reality is that the more user friendly an app becomes, in general, the more involved are the technologies.  Quickly developers find themselves with a problem in combinatorics and one which new components keep getting added.  You want a vendor which is capable of playing in this space as software can quickly become stale in this evolving landscape.  Having the technological knowledge and acumen to put the appropriate technologies together is one of the four pillars we at Legal SaaS believe is required to deliver in this world of Software as a Service.

So my take away message is that if you are entrusting your data and your client’s data to a software vendor then you want assurance that your vendor is thinking through the problems of delivering a collaborative app which is highly stable, very secure, has an architecture that will readily allow new extensions but that, collectively, is well constructed.  Moreover, the application you will be relying on needs to be built with technologies that will deliver for you whenever, wherever you may need to be to support your clients.   The technologies need to be current and supportive of many different types of devices.  It is not enough to have access to your matters when you are sitting in your office.  Moreover, a well constructed app needs for its technologies to hang together and you certainly should not be paying for the developers chasing some hot new platform that the blogerati is all jazzed about.   It is incumbent on you that one of the foundational pillars your vendor must be bringing to the market is significant developer engagement with modern software development and constant monitoring of the continuously evolving landscape so that your system is able to deliver consistently and effectively when you are.