Product personalisation: Making the most of legal management software
With such a large array of legal software to choose from, finding the right program to fit your company is a challenge. Many legal technology products come “off-the-shelf,” boasting practical features and customer support, but without the flexibility needed to suit niche requirements in the legal field. While these programs may deliver on advertised functionality, they lack the power to comprehensively improve efficiency in a legal department if they don’t properly fit the team’s identity. Dazychain, Yarris’s premier legal management software product, was founded on the principle of customisation. Through painstaking examination of your legal department’s needs and careful calibration of Dazychain’s parameters to suit those needs, Yarris strives for the next level in custom-fit legal technology.
“Personalisation,” says Katherine King, Yarris COO and Dazychain product owner, “means that when you actually use the program each day, you feel like you’re at home in a place designed for your own benefit, for your own efficiency.” This level of customisation begins with an intimate understanding of what, exactly, a legal team’s requirements are. “Sitting down with new clients, we ask about their matter types, the kinds of data they want to be collecting, their organisational structure, their risk metric… anything they want to be able to report on or gather information about.”
Once the Dazychain team has this information, they can begin the process of customising Dazychain’s parameters. “We have a very easy method of configuration on Dazychain’s backend which allows us to spend roughly the same amount of time personalising the program as we did finding out how to personalise the program. It’s like a shell, into which we plug the various configurations for different customers,” says King. “To make this process faster for our clients, we show them some examples of best practice with Dazychain, saying ‘here’s what other customers do. Would you like to do it this way?’ They usually take one of these examples and add their own spin to it, adding and subtracting sections to make it their own.”
Ultimately, the benefits of such deep customisation are self-evident. “To be able to segment data by business unit, law firm, cost, and all of those categories specifically created for your way of working is immensely useful in a legal department. Not only does it improve overall efficiency, it allows the legal team to report on the work they do, readily demonstrating the value that their team brings to the organisation.” And Dazychain’s range of functionality is always expanding thanks to the very people who best know what it needs to do: “the customers often have better ideas than we do,” King says with a laugh. “They’re the people using the product in the field. They discover and suggest all kinds of different things that we might be able to do with the program.” Truly, Yarris and its customers benefit symbiotically, with Dazychain constantly improving because of it.
By Cameron Raia
