Case Study: Allens overhauls legacy systems to improve efficiency and scale

Commercial law firm Allens has invested in digital to improve efficiencies and scale, according to chief innovation and legal solutions officer Lisa Kozaris.

Kozaris told Digital Nation Australia that the organisation was relying on a number of legacy systems to build apps, and developers were spending too much time developing solutions that could not scale and required a large support and maintenance overhead for the firm.

“We'd really reached a point in our journey where we needed to be able to service a greater number of clients, so we needed more scale and we also needed to make the development work that we were doing, more efficient,” she said.

Allens looked beyond the legaltech sector to find an omnichannel platform to run its enterprise applications. It settled on Outsystems.

“[They] weren't selling themselves as a legaltech provider, but when we actually benchmarked them against other similar solutions within legaltech, we found the capabilities far surpassed anything we had seen previously.”

The user interface and user experience was a key differentiator for the brand, she said.

“We had people vote on a whole range of different things, but one of them is what application they preferred. How was the user experience here versus here? And 91 percent said that they far prefer the OutSystems version. So, from that initial look and feel, usability perspective, 91 percent of our users said, ‘Yep, this is the winner’.”

Kozaris named the industry standard code as another drawcard.

As the solution uses industry-standard code and practices,  adoption and usability by the team were really seamless, said Kozaris. "That's not something that we had before. And it meant that they could get support from other providers, they could jump onto forums, they could engage with the IT community in a different way because of that,” she said.

Allens now has multiple apps running in the environment, which Kozaris believes has improved the quality and volume of ideas from the team.

“The ideas that people are coming up with of how we can deploy more of this type of thing have been great. So, in terms of the frequency of ideas, where we could leverage those types of solutions, has gone up,” she said.

The company has also improved its support and maintenance time, said Kozaris.

“We've actually reduced support and maintenance time by 70 percent, which is massive. And in fact, that far exceeded our expectations.”