Heavy hitters of the legal world are backing a new tech initiative in hopes of changing the game on law firm software. This might be the dawn of a new era in high-end legal software suites. It also might be a kludge of epic proportions. What matters is that someone is taking a crack at solving some of legal tech’s biggest problems, and the entire industry stands to benefit if they manage to get it right.
When it comes to legal technology, the options are Secure, Functional, and Deployable. You get to pick two. If the software you want is highly secure and super useful, chances are that installing it will be a long, expensive, painful process. Purely cloud-based options are easy to deploy and generally work well enough, but leave you trusting your clients’ most sensitive data to a third party. And easy-to-install, highly secure software has an annoying tendency to not actually do anything that useful.
Lawyers are finicky creatures, and our software requirements are no exception. We like our software to host its data on our own servers, where we can take full responsibility for keeping it safe. And keeping data safe means strictly limiting the ways that other software can come in and use that data. We tend to trade away functionality for the sake of software security.
There are plenty of reasons why this can be a smart trade, especially when dealing with attorney-client privileged information. Every time a piece of software interacts with another piece of software, it’s an invitation for errors, security breaches, and general headaches. Have you ever tried pasting from a Word document into a PowerPoint, then immediately regretted it as your formatting vaporizes and your monitor shuts itself down out of shame? That’s what happens when you try to combine legal software. Getting complex legal programs from different developers to play nicely with each other is at best a crapshoot, and at worst a total impossibility.
That’s why so many law firms have such a broad array of software installed on their attorneys’ desktops. You’ve got the Office suite for day-to-day business, the billing software, the time-tracking software, the finance and bookkeeping software, the document management system, the customized document generator, et al. Every tool has its place, but none of them work together very well, and we spend valuable time just switching between our systems.
Reynen Court is the startup that’s trying to change that, and it may actually have the firepower to make it happen. Their key differentiator is early buy-in by some major players in Biglaw — names like Cravath, Latham, Gibson Dunn, Skadden Arps, and others. Their website copy is nigh-impenetrable, but in a nutshell Reynen Court has convinced a dozen megafirms to form a consortium focused on standardizing their needs for legal software. Once they’ve identified the needs, Reynan Court can develop the software these firms would benefit from.
So far, so normal. The difference is that Reynan Court is also developing a platform for the software to operate from, one that makes downloading and installing new software easy. Moreover, every piece of software developed for this platform will be designed from the ground up from the same principles and using the same system guidelines, meaning it will interact easily and securely with other software on the platform. By mapping out design principles early, and guiding development along those principles, Reynan Court is hoping to thread the needle of keeping its software secure, highly functional, and easy to deploy.
It could be revolutionary if they pull this off, but the idea is anything but new. They’re trying to make Biglaw’s App Store. A single authority dictates the basic, high-level requirements of everything that appears in its storefront. Independent developers prepare software they think meets those requirements, which get revised, edited, and curated before being made available to the public. If all goes well, you end up with a suite of software solutions that deploy easily, are housed on your local hardware, and most importantly work.
All app platforms aren’t built the same. Apple takes a famously hands-on approach to apps in its App Store, especially when compared to its competitor Google Play, which caters to Android phones. Developing for the App Store is resource intensive, because Apple requires in-person testing and imposes a slew of content and function requirements on its developers. The few programs that make it through are going to be high quality, but the extensive roadblocks between conception, development, and deployment mean it’s hard to meet client needs rapidly.
In contrast, Google Play is a relative free-for-all, with very few restrictions on content, function, or quality. If you can come up with a concept for an app and hack it into some form of useable, chances are you can get it onto Google Play. Google Play’s library is consequently much bigger and broader than the App Store’s, and potentially more likely to carry the software that you’re looking for, but the quality of its offerings varies hugely. Dozens of Google Play apps have turned out to be malware in disguise.
Reynan Court would almost certainly hew closer to the Apple model — lots of oversight, lots of software development requirements, and a consequently smaller library of products. Security is too important to what attorneys do to sacrifice that in almost any context, and the number of apps we’ll need isn’t likely that high. The App Store is hoping to convince you to spend $0.99 on an impulse purchase; Reynan Court’s going to be asking you to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on the software necessary to take your firm to the next level. Quality can’t be compromised. If Reynan Court can make this model work, though, it won’t have to.
I’m going to be keeping an eye on this project in the coming years. The consortium might fizzle out and go nowhere, or end up producing some fuzzy high-level goals for software developers to ignore, but my gut tells me something bigger is in the works. Legal software that managed to be functional, deployable, secure, and that played nice with other programs could help forward-thinking firms deliver unparalleled service and value. We need that kind of edge in a legal market with more competition every day. With Biglaw’s heavies behind it, Reynan Court might be able to gain the traction it needs to set the standard for legal software going forward. The future belongs to those who are paying attention.
James Goodnow
James Goodnow is an attorney, commentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of an NLJ 250 law firm. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management category. As a practitioner, he and his colleagues created a tech-based plaintiffs’ practice and business model. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.
