This is the question a few legal news sites have been asking over the last couple of weeks based on the news of Reynen Court. (see here and here).

I’ve had a couple of thoughts after reading these, first a general answer that it’s probably less bursting, but more the general economy contracting and so the availability to finance those nice tech/low business value products is diminished. The valuable tech I’m sure will still survive and thrive still. The demand for tech solutions to drive efficiency and innovate in law firms continues to grow, whatever the conference circuit might say.

The second was more on Reynen Court. It’ll be interesting to see whether they manage their way through, I thought as a concept it was quite intriguing and would probably benefit firms if it succeeded. In particular those firms that were well on their way to cloud platforms (and by that I mean their own modern Azure/AWS application architectures rather than just SaaS or IaaS cloud).

The ability to manage purchase through to deployment all in one place and have the application deployed into your own cloud was quite a compelling technical solution.

I did wonder whether they would achieve the legal tech appstore as I was always a little sceptical whether the vendors themselves would play ball. Firstly whether they would want to hand off that 1-2-1 customer contact, especially the established players, and secondly whether technically the vendors were able to deliver in this container based architecture. Based on experience of simply getting vendors away from COM add-ins in Word made me think this was going to be a long road!!

No one really knows how this next year will play out, but I’ll continue to keep an eye on this tech and in answer to the post title question. No not yet.