Taking law firm management to a new level

Legalsense is a Dutch business behind a successful SaaS product for legal professionals. Since being founded in 2009, Legalsense acquired over 300 clients (such as Eversheds, Taxand, De Haan) and grew its in-house team by 10 people.

Legalsense provides law firms with software that helps manage law cases, track working time, issue invoices, and generate reports - all with the goal of boosting their productivity.

Business

In 2015, Legalsense Co-founder & CEO Bram was struggling to advance the platform's technology to keep up with the commercial success of the product. Legalsense wanted to streamline the acquisition and onboarding process for new customers, so they needed to grow their in-house tech team.

However, recruitment proved to be too slow and expensive.

Legalsense needed a tech partner who could solve the problem by providing a team of talented Python engineers. Code quality, financial sustainability, and the ability to scale the team were at the top of the team's priorities. That's when one of the active members of the Python community kindly recommended Sunscrapers to Bram.

Technology

Legalsense is a SaaS web-based application focused on stability and security. Each customer (law firm) is served by a sandboxed instance of the application that ensures the logical separation of data.

The application's backend consists of a web interface, a relational database, REST API, and an asynchronous task worker. The latter handles cache updates, sending emails, and other background data processing tasks.

The major part of the engineering effort lies in the complex business rules for pricing, invoicing, dunning process, reporting and more. New features that are implemented incrementally support flexible business models and the needs of Legalsense clients. There are also tight integrations with third-party systems for accounting and document management.

The most challenging part of the backend development is striving for technical excellence and system stability while providing new features that meet the business goals of Legalsense users.

On top of the SaaS web application, there is an iOS application that covers some important features of the web app and allows lawyers to work offline and synchronize the data with the system later on.

Sunscrapers and Legalsense kicked off our joint efforts with a test project that dealt with data migration from a third-party competitor product. After this initial success, we launched an ongoing collaboration by setting up a dedicated team in our office with a remote Dutch team.

After starting with just one Python engineer, we grew the team to match the growing needs of the business. We also designed, developed and launched the Legalsense iOS application to expand its presence from web to mobile.