Lawyer Monthly - October 2021 Edition

cloud platform “JUNE” in 2020. It allows tens of thousands of legal processes to be handled comprehensively and efficiently. However, an intelligent platform like JUNE is not just created on the drawing board. We are, of course, also building on a wealth of experience that we have gained over many mass litigation projects. At FROMMER LEGAL, we have specialised in precisely that – the management of large-scale legal projects. Here we have always relied on specific technologies. JUNE was nevertheless the start of something entirely new. We translated all the wishes and visions from our almost 20 years of legal practice into reality. JUNE is thus based on our own experience and provides us with the best tool currently available for handling mass proceedings. I would say that we have been successful. Today I am sure of one thing: you have to have walked a rocky path (sometimes even a wrong one) yourself to reach your goal. Shortcuts do not work in such complex projects, because otherwise the software would lack the crucial proximity to reality. Why are other law firms having such a hard time with digitalisation? Every company that relies on software to deliver its services has the same problem: users lack the technical know-how, while IT service providers usually lack the specialist knowledge requirement that users are confronted with. Finally, we lawyers lack the time and patience to take on this challenge. And by that, I do not mean programming the software ourselves, but rather dealing in depth with the countless possibilities, testing them, EXPERT INSIGHT 53 OCT 2021 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM investigating them, acquiring them, on-boarding them, learning them, etc. The solution here is actually rather simple: we need IT specialists for the law firm’s IT. That is no longer questioned. Specialists are also necessary for the technological content. These could be either external legal tech consultants or internal staff units. Legal engineers, i.e. those who translate legal needs into technological requirement profiles, also bring the requisite knowledge. So, what has to be done? Law firms have to create new positions. It is that simple. And to avoid any misunderstanding: lawyers do not have to become programmers. The technical implementation should and can be done by others. That we did it was in our case logical and consistent. Could you say that JUNE is the result of recycling? JUNE is not just a fusion of recycled programmes. At FROMMER LEGAL we have been writing our own programmes for decades, but for JUNE we pooled all our ideas and wishes and we started the whole development process from scratch on a completely clean slate. The important thing here was that we did not just develop for ourselves, but for the market. That makes a big difference in terms of software architecture. Our previous law firm systems were obviously strongly tailored to our needs and built to be rather monolithic. JUNE, on the other hand, is designed to meet a wide variety of needs and, above all, is Since we are also receiving enquiries from other countries, JUNE now has to become multilingual. This is an item on our roadmap.