Article: Choosing a Platform for Delivering a Legal Service Product

You have an idea – maybe already implemented – for an interactive software application that helps someone accomplish a legal task.  You’d like to make it available to others. Which platform should be used for delivery? What’s the best way to deliver the application to the target market?

Maybe you’re a public-interest-oriented sort who wants to help folks who can’t afford lawyers deal with legal issues. Or maybe you’re an entrepreneurial associate at a firm that wants to open up a side income stream by productizing some of your expertise.  What tools should you use?

One of the first decisions that you must make, is to determine which platform will be used for the development and delivery of your legal product.

A Worksheet for Choosing among Platforms

The Exponential Legal Essentials course provides a ‘launch lifecycle’ roadmap for conceiving, designing, building, and delivering a legal service software product.  I’m part of the faculty for that, but I still recommend it!  Lots of important guidance on the overall process – how to de-risk things, etc.

One of the many choices creators face along the way is which tool(s) to use for implementing and delivering their ideas. There’s a startling number of alternatives, and many considerations need to be taken into account.

Here’s a worksheet we’ve made available as part of that course, for would-be productizers to organize their decisions as to which platform makes the most sense for delivering their product to customers:

A Deeper Dive into Delivery Features

Many of your concerns will be around the features of the application framework.  What can it do? Interactive questioning, document generation, expert analysis? How does it do it? What’s the user experience like? What’s the authoring experience like?  Etc.

This article focuses on the terms and features around the actual delivery of a product. Once you have something built, how can it be served to customers or other users?  Before spending a lot of time building something, you’ll want to be reasonably confident it can be delivered in a way that serves you and your users well.

There are some high-level considerations.  One is – how widely do you want to distribute your product?  Maybe just to yourself, across different devices or locations.  Or to colleagues. Or to clients.  Or to a broader group of potential users.  What’s the ‘target market’?

Other top questions are – Do you want to make your application available for free, or charge something for it? Do you want users to be able to save their responses to questions and resume their sessions at a later time?  Getting paid and letting users securely save sessions are some of the trickier things to arrange.

Depending on your answers, you may be best served by serving your application from your own website. Or by creating a special purpose one on a custom basis.  Either of those strategies could limit your features or impose substantial costs. How about using some kind of hosting service?

Most of the hosting services just support one form of content. So one critical factor is the ‘flavor’ of your content. (That is, what system it was built in.)

Dozens of other considerations might be important.  New ones keep suggesting themselves. E.g., can you block users from particular states, like Florida, which has a particularly regressive view of what constitutes the unauthorized practice of law? See https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/florida-supreme-court-rules-ticket-fighting-startup-was-engaged-in-unauthorized-law-practice.

Think about what you would ideally want in a delivery environment. Here’s a framework for comparing the options:

Legal service product delivery options

I’ve started to compile data about some of the options.  Here’s a partial summary of what I have so far:

Bottom Line

We have more affordable and powerful tools than ever for delivering legal service products. Choosing the right one for your project may be critical to its success.

The points here are just suggestive. I welcome input from vendors and users. What platforms would you add?  What other considerations would you suggest?

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Marc Lauritsen is the founder and president of Capstone Practice Systems, Inc.,  and Exponential Legal, an educational resource on how to productize legal services. He has worked in legal technology since 1984. He practiced law and supervised in legal services programs, and then served as an instructor, director of clinical programs, and a senior research associate at Harvard Law School. Marc has two undergraduate degrees from MIT and a law degree from Harvard.

To comment or discuss the content of this blog post go to the Law Product Makers Discussion Group on Linkedin.