Custom App Development for Legal Writing Company
Case Study
Client
Amiicuss, LLC is a legal-focused Word processing startup company. It is owned by Paul Jennings who created a purpose-built tool for legal document creation and management for attorneys.
Business Challenge
Legal documents must be formatted following published standards, and the standards cover various aspects of formatting and organization. The predominant Word processing software today is Microsoft Word. While capable of producing documents that meet the prescribed standards, the process is tedious and error-prone.
Amiicuss had identified an opportunity to enhance Word with Microsoft Word Add-In capabilities. Amiicuss reached out to SOLTECH to develop a customized Microsoft Word Add-In which would address the shortcomings of Word as it pertains to creating and formatting legal documents, and which meet published and legally required standards.
Many hours need to be spent formatting and reformatting legal documents and these hours are not directly billable resulting in additional overhead and costs for legal firms.
“SOLTECH’s ability to take the project from the ground up is outstanding.”
– Paul Jennings
Solutions
SOLTECH initially conducted a Solution Design to define the specifics of the final solution. It was determined SOLTECH would build a custom Word Add-In utilizing the JavaScript language React. The areas that would be customized were:
- Citation Insertions
- Table of Contents
- Table of Authorities
- Page Numbering
- Case Pleading Header
- Insertion of common symbols and abbreviations
Impact
After a few months of development, demos, and testing, SOLTECH successfully deployed the solution for Amiicuss to use. The custom add-on that SOLTECH built allows users to enter required legal details into their documents in a quick and efficient manner that conforms to the published standards and formats. The “update Table of Authorities” feature saved the Amiicuss team significant time over the previous way to update the table. What was a very manual task that required several steps to update the Table of Authorities, is now a few clicks away from the “update” button and the Table of Authorities updates.
When Amiicuss first utilized the tool in a live court scenario on May 17th, Paul Jennings said the result was “amazingly quick and it did exactly what I wanted. It saved me at least two hours of manual work!”
