[lawyersg.io] legal.partner

Helping to connect legal partners and associates even if sometimes they don't speak a lot to each other in the busyness of life and more. More than words can say!

Comment 1

What it does and how it works

Legal partner balances maintaining work efficiency and helping Lawyers destress. Our basic features like chats and profiles are tailored for the legal community. Despite how entrenched the pinnacle system is whereby the hard work of applying the law falls to those who are more junior, we believe that our app is the first step to to giving relief to associates as they get the opportunity connect with partners. Legal partner facilitates discussions about tech bites and helps lawyers gain exposure to other types of legal sectors within the space such as litigation, mediation, conveyance as we know that lawyers have little time to spare on tech. In addition, the barriers to entry to other fields may be high as many specialise quickly. Not only with their own partners in the law firm, we aspire to let the associates freely find out more about other fields and even connect with those currently practicing in that space. Believing that helping lawyers feel less alone and that they can solve their problems by seeking help as well, we conclude that more communication can relief burn out and help them find meaning in their work.

Specially designed for information transfer, without spoken word, the app tracks the availability and efficiency of associates. This availability is shown in a bar chart. From the partner's perspective, they would be able to see what percentage of associates are available each day of the week as an overview. Understanding that from the firm's perspective, The return of investment (ROI) is important so we also included a page which can calculate the ROI based on the time spent by various lawyers grouped by seniority on each case. If the partner wishes, he can compare the ROI from previous months and see if less work load is possible as the ROI can be maintained. When partners view each associate who is available, they can immediately see in general, which type of tasks they are especially good at as the general tasks are ranked. Therefore, when time is tight, they can choose the associate with the skill sets that is best suited for the job. In contrast, when there is room to manoeuvre, giving the task to those who are less skilled at it can help them to improve. The gains would be greater as they would have a steeper learning curve. How do we derive this information you may think? After grouping the associates based on seniority, for every month, time sheet data can be used to produce an average for each general type of job grouped by seniority. This data is presented in a menu page for the partners. It can also be presented to associates to improve productivity as associates would know where they stand, provided it is not too stressful for them.

In a nutshell, apart from direct interaction, our focus on indirect interaction by letting Partners keep track of junior's availability, reading the same daily feed of legal and tech articles as the juniors would help in connecting them together. In addition, letting associates understand more about the industry standard would help with improving efficiency. As with any firm, these expectations would rest upon the culture there so it should be determined there. Either way, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of themselves and of those they are in charge of taking care of can only help employees reach the law firms expected returns without overexertion, leading to long term sustainability. To future address work-life balance as an issue, in Legal partner, Associates could schedule their leaves to rest and in a way, at a time that they can best catch up with their work and not feel even more stressed when they return. Legal partner puts the choice in the lawyers hands by providing them with calculated information whilst supporting them to spend time to recharge. This way, lawyers would feel less forced and trapped and instead, find meaning in their work.

Moving on to the technology, Legal partner plans to utilise artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning to generate articles that accommodate to the preferences of associates and partners. The feed is updated regularly and automatically in our app through AI, enabling personalised small tech bites to help them solve a tech issue quickly and this would be curated based on their tech expertise. Presuming that google can stalk us like this, our app can also curate content in the same way. Particularly for the calculation of the associates average timing, perhaps big data would come into play.

Just as tessaract.io has done we aim to have a way for the law firm to personalise the app but more than just the designs, this customisation can fit the trust that partners and associates have with each other.

Challenges we ran into

It was challenging to choose and implement APIs and make the app able to store data. As it is well known, getting data from the legal sector hard as it keeps much information secure. Therefore, we had to patch up the gaps in our mind by making assumptions that we frequently reviewed for its' credibility based on new information that we found. The idea of efficiency in the legal space is particularly hard to grasp as it cannot be quantified and it is a grey area, open for interpretation. For example, efficiency could be the time clocked, the quality of work done, the ability to navigate difficult areas. A short document doesn't mean that it is about a simple topic so there is room for consideration there. We are still thinking about how the calculation of average can be determined considering all these factors but we believe that it is important to take it as a bench mark especially in the digital era.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learnt Flutterflow from scratch just a 3 days before the deadline. Creating Legal partner as a 3 man team with not much tech background is nothing short of a miracle.

What we learned

Investigating pain points of lawyers and trying to navigate through it makes us more able to put ourselves in their shoes. Perhaps in future, we would be able to think of better solutions that is able to mitigate all the pain points as much as possible rather than focusing a lot on one to the neglect of another. For instance, it really came as a surprise that lawyers had to continuously up skill themselves even after having many years of experience under their belt, also learning about tech can help them be more efficient in their work, when I think about them having to meet a minimum amount of knowledge attained, it seems as if it may make it less fun of an experience. Perhaps, next time, we can think of some more ways to go about it!

What's next for legal.partner

Other countries have different billing types, we contemplate that in the future, the ROI can be calculated in such a way that can cater to other billing methods such as package deals. Anticipating that technology makes lawyers works faster but the it is still as valuable, our aim is for legal partner to support accurate calculation of the ROI for law firms and balance the aim of retaining lawyers with the value that each of them bring to the company.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates