Challenge
Our client, a leading German eBilling vendor, had experienced rapid growth due to the success of its legal spend and billing platform. To continue expanding, the company recognized the need to enhance its product portfolio by incorporating matter management capabilities. This addition would transform their offering into a comprehensive legal operations platform, enabling the management of not only spend but also legal requests, matters, contracts, and documents. Given the outdated nature of their current technology stack, they decided against integrating the new matter management functionality into the existing platform. Instead, they opted to develop a completely new matter management tool, built on a separate and modern tech stack, with Microsoft integration a key strategic priority.
Solution
To address the client's needs, we adopted an API-first approach, ensuring that the new matter management tool was not only modular and scalable but also fully interoperable with other systems, including Microsoft's suite of products. By prioritizing API development, we facilitated seamless integration across different Microsoft tools, enabling the client to offer a unified experience to their users. Our solution was built on a modern tech stack, chosen for its scalability, performance, high availability and alignment with the client’s long-term goals. We used Angular for a dynamic and responsive user interface. The UXUI experience was part of cooperation between us and the UXUI team. For a robust backend architecture we employed Java and Spring Boot. Elasticsearch was integrated for its powerful search capabilities across matters, documents and contracts, and PostgreSQL provided a reliable and scalable database solution. The entire platform was hosted on Azure, leveraging its cloud-native capabilities for enhanced performance and security. The infrastructure was built with the IaC approach, supported by Terraform, which helped to keep configurable and repeatable deployment experiences for all infrastructure components, including Kubernetes. By introducing the Datadog, we provided the alerting and monitoring capabilities that gave great visibility for both business and engineering teams.
Results
Our focused and iterative development approach enabled the client to bring the new matter management platform to market quickly. The MVP was well-received by the development partners, who validated its performance and usability under realistic conditions. Based on their feedback, we implemented several high-value enhancements before the platform's full launch. The impact was significant: within the first 12 months of launch, our client secured over 10 new high-profile customers across the US and mainland Europe, solidifying their position as a leader in the legal operations space.
Client Feedback
"The Appliscale team played a crucial role in bringing our matter management tool to market. From guiding us on strategy and tech stack selection to developing a scalable MVP, they provided support throughout the entire process. They seamlessly integrated with our product team, working closely with our product managers to find practical solutions that aligned with our vision and launch objectives. Beyond their engineering expertise, they demonstrated a strong commercial awareness, ensuring we delivered value to our early customers without falling into the needs to be perfect' trap." VP of Product