LawVu: Legal operations, made easy

Sam Kidd, Co-founder & CEO

After decades of system neglect, it’s not surprising that the legal world has moved at a much slower pace when it comes to digitalization and moving with the times. It’s crazy to think that in 2017, a vast number of law firms remain mired in paper and old dated system and processes. There is, however, a number of law firms and legal departments wanting to improve processes and make big changes, yet they face a tough road ahead for a number of reasons. Some due to the lack of software products available, others face a deeper challenge around embracing change which means putting the skills in place and having the fortitude to put change at the top of their list.

A New Zealand-based legal software company, LawVu, is aiming to solve these problems by making change easy. It’s cloud-based platform is the key to this as there is no expensive hardware or software to install. The roll out process is straight forward and they aim to make the shift as smooth as possible for their clients. “We work with our users a lot to mirror their current flows and processes, it’s not about going into an organization and trying to change everything, it’s about improving key areas. Quite often it’s just about workflow and how and where the data flows, a few small changes can have a huge impact,” said Sam Kidd, Co-founder and CEO of LawVu.

“We want to equip legal teams with software that’s incredibly easy to use and roll out. It’s about giving an organization one place to go for all their legal information. If a CEO or a CFO wants to know what’s going on within the legal department and find out the status of a legal matter or pull out metrics on the financial spend, we make that possible,” he said.

The company’s cloud-based solution has been targeted at in-house legal teams but there are also law firms now very interested in the system, as they are seeing the benefits it brings when working with their corporate clients.

LawVu’s solutions provide legal departments with matter management tools, e-billing through to analytics and reporting which is allowing organizations to take full control of their legal process.

We want to equip legal teams with software that’s incredibly easy to use and roll out. It’s about giving an organization one place to go for all their legal information

The information management features allows organizations to gainfully discover and see more into the process around a legal matter which helps unlock valuable MI which was pretty much unknown before. The system offers live-status reports and real-time monitoring of the entire legal workload. Combined with optional plugin that hooks into Outlook allowing users to forward e-mails directly from their inbox straight into a LawVu matter, makes collaboration seamless with all external legal providers.

One of the key aspects to the software is how it allows in-house legal departments to engage with internal clients and all their external advisors in one cloud-based system that offers full, or partial, visibility to the relevant parties on the matter. This means that parties are always on the same page when it comes to the scope, status and next stepson a legal matter.

“We provide one platform which is browser-based, this makes it easy for law firms to access the system as well. It’s a very low-touch solution that doesn’t require dedicated efforts of IT teams to get everyone hooked in.”

“The enterprise software market is currently filled with a lot of complicated and very costly technology solutions, we are aiming to shake this up and enable change and help improve the way legal departments function,” Kidd continued.

The company has recently and successfully demystified the activities of the legal department for one of its clients. The client, a large organization, had been unable to easily gain a total overview into it’s on-going legal work.

Engaging with LawVu provided them with a suite of solutions straight out of the box, converging all communication in and out of the department, allowing them to see which matters are being looked after by which service providers, combined with seeing what work remained in-house. They have been blown away with how easy it was to setup and more importantly, how fast it unlocked insight and metrics that had previously been difficult to obtain.

LawVu believes that the market for legal software still has a hard road ahead because there is a large number of point solutions and technology being introduced into the legal world. There is also a lot scare mongering going on in legal tech at the moment causing a lot of enterprises and legal firms to stall.

Change doesn’t have to be scary or complicated, the company continues to engage with law firms and enterprises to educate them on the importance of collaborative legal software. Next year, the company wants to expand its horizons and is already in talks to offer its services outside New Zealand and to become an international player in specialized legal software market.