Legal portal development for 150K lawyers and accountants

Context

Our customer is a European company that owns a proprietary legal information system. The system allows users to search throughout a centralized database of legal and regulatory documents. Operating since 1998, the company serves over 20,000 companies.

For many years, the legal information solution had only been available as a desktop app, which restricted its reach. As online products started to dominate the market, end users – mainly accountants, lawyers, and business owners – voiced their need in accessing the system on the go.

The company wanted to strengthen their position on the market by offering convenient and easy access to legal and regulatory information. Therefore, in addition to the desktop version, they decided to create a b2b web portal solution that would enable full-cycle legal content management. Since the information presented online differed from its offline counterpart, the company decided to build a web solution from scratch.

Based on our business analysis findings, technical specification and proposed features, the customer selected Itransition’s team to perform end-to-end legal portal development.

Features

Document import

To keep the existing document management process, the web solution had to use the same source files as the offline system. These source files had a specific text formatting (for example, links and highlighted text boxes in custom styles). It was critical to preserve the structure of the source files as they had to stay unchanged for the correct operation of the desktop version.

To address this challenge, Itransition’s team designed the solution to recognize the formatting of the source files, process and transform them into new documents to be stored in the web system along with their source files.

Search engine

Search result rankings are based on a custom search algorithm adapting regulatory language to users’ simple queries. All queries are grouped into topic-related clusters. Based on these clusters, the system defines matching synonyms and phrases. The search features include:

• Different search mechanisms for different user profiles
• A query analyzer that recognizes key document attributes in user requests, such as dates, numbers, titles, etc.
• Autocomplete of a search query
• Alternative options for search queries

Document view

In the view mode, the system processes content within documents on the fly. For example, if document A contains the link to document B that doesn’t exist in the system or isn’t available for the viewer, this link will not be displayed.

When new versions of a document appear, the system automatically analyzes and indicates all important changes in the document, such as deleted or added sections, edits, etc. This feature allows corporate users to learn about the changes quickly and adjust their activities if necessary to comply with newly introduced regulations.

Smart pages

• Built-in calculators to help accountants and lawyers quickly calculate different types of benefits and payments to the state budget.
• Legal checkups for users to search for and get all the information about the status of a business entity to ensure it is not liquidated or bankrupt, has no active debt or registered violations, etc.
• Onboarding to ensure that users get up to speed with new system features and to guarantee successful user adoption.
• Online chat for users to ask questions, get advice, and give feedback on the solution, and to improve the overall quality and speed of support services.

Personnal settings

• Management of selected documents and bookmarks, so that users can add entire documents or their parts to their favorites.
• Feed category configuration for users to customize their news feed and get relevant content only.

Content management system

Itransition’s team developed and integrated a content management system to facilitate legal data management, specifically, of legal documents. The system organizes documents by semantic criteria, simplifies navigation through the table of contents, and enables users to mark any text fragments or separate words with identifiers – tags or links (for example, to a relevant regulatory act). These identifiers could be collapsed, expanded, or highlighted graphically. Users can see all the documents that refer to a given document as a list of links. Here, the added tags serve as the foundation of a legal vocabulary.

To ensure effortless content management, we integrated the solution with the following third-party tools:

• TinyMCE, a powerful text editing platform
• Alfresco, a document management system that supports well-structured document management workflows

With this custom content management system in place, users can publish documents in real time, which was impossible in the offline version where documents had to be scheduled for release (e.g., no more than once a day). Real-time publishing also made it easier to correct any errors in documents.

The CMS is compatible with the legacy offline system. Materials created and published online are can be then downloaded and automatically converted to the XML format supported by the legacy system. After that, documents can be released within the offline solution according to the schedule.

Maintenance and support

To ensure positive user experience, especially for those previously subscribed to the desktop version, Itransition established the customer support process.

Within one week, Itransition’s support and maintenance specialists launched first-line user support to help external and internal end users with the newly delivered web solution.

We also created a knowledge base for the customer’s in-house support team. As the project progressed, we gradually filled the knowledge base with content and provided training for the customer’s internal team.

Our specialists set up automated 24/7 monitoring of both the online and offline portals, as well as launched preventive maintenance.

Itransition’s team was also responsible for Level 2 support, which included regular software updates and the maintenance of the solution’s infrastructure.

These are various parameters that are monitored ongoingly and help the support team take relevant maintenance measures:

• The server and home page availability with real-time notifications that are manually checked and verified through auxiliary metrics.

• Server data showing the percentage of processor load, task queues, etc.

• Availability of additional environments (stage, test) and services (i.e. billing).

• Disk space availability. We integrated Graylog with automated alerts initiated by triggers colored yellow (<25% free disk space), orange (<15%), red (<5%). Each color suggests a specific escalation path and reaction time.

All the alerts and notifications are controlled by the additional alert “Agent doesn’t send data on %server_name%” that appears when the server stops sending data on the monitored metrics. The alert gets triggered for multiple reasons, from physical damage (overheating) to network-related issues and server reconfiguration.

Itransition provided detailed reports on the resolved incidents. They included the following information:

• Problem type (website issues, user unable to log in, document export issues, low speed of document loading, incorrect user authorization, etc.)
• Number of requests (by type)
• Issue resolution time for different incident priorities (critical, standard, or change request)
• Number of incidents reported by end users (by phone and via the portal)
• Number of incidents reported by the customer’s employees

Process

The custom web portal development started with business analysis. We ran several weekly meetings to discuss the customer’s existing processes, the current and planned features of the portal, and the business specifics.

This stage was instrumental in helping us design and implement the solution without any disruptions to the customer’s established business processes. We preserved the source file formats and content creation mechanisms, so the customer needed no extra resources to integrate the online and offline systems.

Depending on a component to be designed (e.g., the news feed, search engine functionality, content categories, etc.), the development team was split into eight workgroups combining Itransition’s and the customer’s specialists, who worked in close collaboration. We organized regular meetings to share ideas and discuss new features.