Peer to Peer Magazine

18 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2017 BEST PRACTICES Plug and Play and Succeed: Integrated Adaptive Legal Matter Management Plug and Play and Succeed: Integrated Adaptive Legal Maer Management Historic Overview If you have been in the legal industry long enough, you might remember early efforts to develop "all-in- one" soware applications. WordPerfect Office 2.0, introduced in 1988, included several integrated features in a single application. Those of us who worked with MS-DOS before then well remember the limitation of using one application at a time, making the appeal of an all-in-one solution quite aractive, especially in terms of productivity. Multiple business functions in a single application reduced the need to exit and launch another application to take a note, check a schedule or track time. As Microso Windows introduced the concept of multiple applications running concurrently, functional capabilities of applications became more discrete. Soware designers could concentrate on a narrower set of functionalities, resulting in significantly beer applications. This ushered in a new era of "best-of-breed" applications. With the fragmenting of application functionality came the need to share information among these applications. This requirement was not lost on soware designers, particularly at Microso, where they were developing best-of-breed apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). These discrete applications needed to integrate in a way that was seamless and natural so the applications were "tightly integrated." Hence, the phrase "loosely coupled, tightly integrated" became a strategic design goal for soware architects. Modern Matter Management Software Architecture The ability to integrate applications has been significantly enriched by universal network access. Modern applications not only communicate with each other on the same computer and local area networks, they also now can communicate across the internet in ways that combine functionality across an infinite number of resources. The site www.programmableweb. com lists several thousand web application programming interfaces (APIs) that vendors have provided for their products and services. Workflow, productivity, mobility, extendibility and flexibility should all be cited when describing what properly integrated applications offer modern businesses. Don't fall victim to using technology designed around the limitations of legacy technology architectures. Law firms and legal departments need a maer- based ecosystem that will allow their organization to achieve the highest level of efficiency for their clients. Oen, their current business systems are inflexible and too structured or, sometimes, are not structured at all. Organizations need an end-to-end ecosystem capable by Steve Stockstill

• Cover