“Workflow” was my introduction into Legal IT, after a number of years in the utility industry where my work included; the introduction of VAT on your fuel bills for those in the UK and also ensuring the customer service dept. were aware of faults affecting people calling from within Yorkshire. My first few years in legal involved looking at personal injury workflows, case management systems but there was some aspects of workflow built in. The product under the bonnet (hood for US readers) was the Vectus product from Hatton Blue. Since then I’ve not really been involved in workflow technology. However over the last couple of months I’ve come across two products that are really nice entries into the Legal IT landscape and show how far the products have come since the early days. These aren’t big heavyweight BPM (business process management) solutions but neat solutions designed with legal in mind.

The first I’m going to cover in this post and the second I’ll highlight in another post in a few days time.

This particular product I could have been dealing with firsthand if I’d made a different career choice back in 2010, however my first view of this product was through an invite to a launch briefing in London. The venue was intriguing as “Bentley’s Oyster Bar and Grill” is not your average place to catch a software product demo, but then maybe this is the answer to my vendor hall woes 🙂

The products name is “sharedo” by a company called Slicedbread. One of a new wave of Legal IT companies that have a bit of a silicon valley start up feel to them, both in their approach to tech and the quality look and feel to their products. A welcome trend! To call this a modern day Hatton Blue is doing sharedo a massive disservice, it is born our of an adaptive case management system but through a number of iterations and an 8 year long R&D cycle what we have is much more.

Underneath is now an “intelligence based” system, an IT technology called “complex event processing” (CEP), a method of tracking and analysing (processing) streams of information (data) about things that happen (events), and deriving a conclusion from them. All this is wrapped up in a slick modern interface. No more Windows 95 “look and feel” to Legal IT systems with their grey “Windows”, this is more an iOS or Windows 10 feel to Legal IT.

You get the feeling that as a lawyer this system would be a joy to use, all the key information at your fingertips with the data analysis and intelligence to help you make decisions. And the product is designed to provide a unique feel to the clients as well, as the marketing blurb says “When you buy a new mini you are presented with a product configurator with literally thousands of options enabling you to choose your unique customer experience and also unique price. Why shouldn’t you be able to configure your legal service in the same way?”

To analyse the data the slicebread team use Microsoft’s PowerBI which fits nicely with the look and feel they are trying to achieve with the product as well as being a really powerful reporting tool.

Clearly the product is suited to personal injury work and you can see the fit with those firms looking at the insurance markets, however as they say “Whilst I have lots of features that are applicable for law and law alone I am not a platform for legal per se” and you could see how it could be applied to other legal processes, in fact during lunch I did discuss possibilities for using it for internal business processes within law firms and you could see with a little bit of work it could potentially apply to these as well.

As mentioned this is one of a number of new products from new Legal IT vendors that are starting to freshen up the legal market, long may it continue!