Case Study: Custom LegalTech Solution for a Mexican Client

Summary

Industry: LegalTech
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Partnership period: November 2020–Ongoing
Team size: 6–8 experts
Software products delivered: API Platform, web application, mobile application (iOS)
Expertise delivered: Web development services, mobile apps development services, architecture design, infrastructure build (AWS Lambda), API design and engineering, FE development (React), UI/UX design, and requirements development.

Challenge

LegalShelf, the Mexico city-based innovative LegalTech provider, was looking to optimize their mission-critical mobile application. This application was intended to enable secure and comprehensive legal interactions between the company’s B2B clients.

The company was dissatisfied with their mobile app’s performance that severely hampered their customer acquisition and market expansion. In their search for an optimal solution, LegalShelf got referred to SPD Technology by a business associate of ours.

Our experts became familiar with the client’s expectations and their mobile app’s capabilities. Jointly with the client, they arrived at the conclusion the existing solution could not be optimized well enough to support the client’s business goals. It was thus decided to develop from scratch a new LegalTech solution, consisting of a Web application and a mobile app. The client entrusted SPD Technology with implementing the entirety of their project.

The functionality of the client’s solution

LegalShelf’s new B2B LegalTech solution is a complex software platform that allows their clients to comprehensively and securely manage and exchange legal documents. The solution comprises the following functional areas:

• A digital library with simple and advanced search
• Document Management
• Simple and advanced document-signing process
• Notifications
• Tasks Management
• Roles Management

The platform allows accordingly authorized users to:

• Create and store various legal documents in the client’s digital library.
• Make a search for legal documents, stored in the digital library (including by using such metadata, as Names, Tags, Descriptions, Participants, and time period).
• Invite various process actors, including those of their company’s counterparts, to collaborate on legal documents.
• Sign legal documents using Advanced Electronic Signatures (via an integration with Mifel), as well as submit them for signature by colleagues and counterparts.
• Track various events within legal documents, such as, for instance, their expiration date.
• Add metadata to a legal document (including Name, Type, Subtype, Set of dates, Tags, and Description).
• Add attachments to legal documents.
• Manage Participants and Signers for a legal document.
• Set and receive notifications related to legal documents and events within them and push notifications.

The client’s system allows collaborating on legal documents in real time. It uses strong encryption for all the document-related operations. The solution also makes it possible to share documents with external process actors by inviting the latter as guests on a temporary basis. The task management functionality of the client’s solution allows creating tasks and assigning them to other users. The user can create tasks that are related to a legal document’s signature, renewal, or the updating of the information it contains. Any of the tasks can be assigned a reminder date, so that the appropriate person(s) will be notified when a task becomes due.

To enable full-value user interactions within the platform, Legalshelf’s solution provides a complex user role hierarchy with different access rights for the different user roles. Presently, these user roles include:

• Super Admin – a Legal Shelf expert with full access to all the companies in the platform’s database and their digital libraries.
• Full-Access User – a user with full rights for a specific client company in the system.
• Document Manager – a Legal Shelf expert, who helps Client Users manage their documents and supports the document-signing process.
• Client Admin – a user with the permissions to manage file access for the Client Users and Guests of a specific company.
• Client User – a user with access rights for some specific folders and legal documents within their company’s digital library.
• Guest – a user, who has temporary, view-only access to some specific folders or legal documents that are made available to them through an invite. Guests can sign legal documents when these documents are assigned to them as a Signer.
• Signer – a project actor that has been invited to take part in the processing of a legal document on a temporary basis (possibly, from outside the system).

To provide signing of legal documents, the system automatically uses MIFIEL, the recognized Latin-American e-signature provider. The system is available in three languages – English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Solution

The project started in the fall of 2020 and has been ongoing ever since.

To implement the project, SPD Technology put together a project team that included 6-8 experts during the project’s different phases. In addition to the PM, software developers, and one QA engineer, the team also included a software architect during the project’s initial phase, and a business analyst throughout the project’s duration.

We started by collecting and analyzing the requirements for the system. We also proactively helped shape the client’s product more optimally.

It took our project team 1 year and 3 months to design the software architecture for the solution and develop all the planned functionality. The solution successfully went live in the summer of 2022. Currently, our experts are enhancing the functionality we’ve delivered previously. In particular, they are adding advanced text recognition and other NLP/AI та Machine Learning functions.

In implementing the project, we’ve solved several noteworthy challenges. For example, to comply with the client’s requirement to integrate the platform with a local electronic signature provider, our project team had to establish contact with a Mexican eSignature company and interact with them directly. Also, we’ve had to deliver part of the solution’s functionality against a very tight business-related deadline.

It took our project team around 3 months to build a Cloud service for Legal Shelf. One can access the company’s Cloud service through Web and PWA for the digital signature, storage, tagging, and search for legal documents.

Technical Solution

In implementing the project, SPD Technology’s project team has been using the following tech stack:

• Infrastructure: AWS (Amazon Web Services) Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudFront, SES, GitHub Actions, Terraform
• Back-end: Java, Quarkus with GraalVM, Hibernate, PostgreSQL
• Front-end: TypeScript, React
• Mobile: TypeScript, React Native, Expo
• Authentication: Auth0

Methodology, Tools

• Shortcut
• GitHub
• Slack
• Figma

Our team opted for a serverless solution that uses AWS Lambda for the following reasons:

• Using AWS Lambda ensures a high availability and out-of-the-box scalability.
• AWS Lambda’s versioning support allows easy deployment.
• Service charges are levied only for the resources used when requests are running. Thus, the development and testing can be done with little to no cost in terms of the computing resources.

We decided to use PostgreSQL for the system’s backend as it was a very good fit that provides both OLTP and OLAP functionality. We opted for AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) as the storage for documents, contracts, and the eSignature provider’s metadata because it offers secure and durable storage with quick access.

Migrating data from the client’s legacy storage to the new one posed a significant challenge due to the difficulties in mapping the legacy data models and the magnitude of the client’s data.

To overcome these difficulties, we intensified the communication with the client and devised an automatic script that has proven to be extremely effective. Using this automatic script eliminated a lot of the related hassle and expedited the data migration process very significantly.

Result

Implementing the new mission-critical software solution has allowed LegalShelf to significantly strengthen and dramatically expand their business presence on their national market. It has increased LegalShelf’s customer base by around 30-40% (around 20+ enterprise clients), and created significant cost savings to the client. The new solution has brought limitless scalability. Additionally, it has also made LegalShelf’s services a great deal less expensive for the company’s clients.

At present, LegalShelf’s solution is used by some 50+ enterprise сlients. It represents the most innovative digital solution for document management in Latin America, and is used by leading enterprise companies, including the Latin-American branch of IBM.