Lawcadia, the matter and spend management platform for in-house legal teams and their law firms, has announced the launch of a new rules-based engine to improve workflows.
Sacha Kirk, CMO & Co-Founder of Lawcadia, explained that the platform allows the creation of bespoke rule-based responses to matter management issues, such as:
- if a matter is expected to be over a certain amount/budget it goes out to three law firms for competitive RFP
- if under it goes out to a single law firm
- it could suggest to the user a few law firms to send certain work out to based on previous matters and even suggest budgets
- if invoices exceed agreed budget on a matter the relationship partner at the law firm receives a text message prompting action
- certain data can be pushed to external systems or pulled from external systems quite easily
This approach is helped by a new ‘plugin architecture’ that allows for rapid product development, giving customers, partners and Lawcadia’s own development team the ability to build new plugins quickly.
The main benefit of its architecture is that new functionality can be added without changing the core infrastructure of the platform. They are planning to provide SDKs (Software Development Kits) so that third party developers can develop unique plugins for certain requirements.
In terms of the thinking behind the new capabilities, Kirk explained that: ‘Law firms and in-house legal departments [often] have different requirements in terms of functionality, systems integrations, even naming conventions and the data fields that are important to them to track and report on.
‘We built our new intelligent engine to allow for almost endless solutions and variations to be created using our legal operations platform as the core operating system. Our core system currently provides matter intake, matter management, competitive RFPs, scope and budget management, as well as ebilling.
Our workflow tool was already quite configurable, but the new engine just blows this out of the water.’
Co-Founder and CEO, Warwick Walsh, added: ‘Efficiency and control is a key focus for in-house legal teams, whilst law firms are seeking solutions that embed client relationships and add tangible value to their service offering.
‘Technology is crucial to success in these areas, however many ideas and initiatives fall over because there is too much cost and complexity in customisations and getting different systems working together or alongside each other.’
Originally published in the Artificial Lawyer.
