2022 Legal Practice Management Software Buying Guide
It’s never been a secret that law has historically been slow to evolve and adapt alongside other professions. When Smokeball released the last version of this guide, “Is Legal Practice Management Software Worth It?” we acknowledged that many firms still avoided change due to fear or stubbornness. Such firms could still maintain their status quo without the help of software.
In 2022, the question of worth no longer applies: Legal practice management software is a necessity, not a nice-to-have. The shift to remote/hybrid law offices is permanent, and attorneys must permanently shift their mindsets and processes to keep up — and keep ahead.
Smokeball understands that legal practice management software is a major investment of your firm’s money and time. Because we want to give you the most value and productivity for your investment, we updated this guide to reflect the reality of 2022. The legal landscape has shifted significantly since you started your practice. Let’s take advantage of the opportunity together.
Cool Vendors in Software Engineering: Enhancing Developer Productivity
Tidelift is recognized as a Cool Vendor
We're excited to share that Tidelift has been named as a Cool Vendor in the 2022 Gartner® Cool Vendors™ in Software Engineering: Enhancing Developer Productivity report.
The report is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services.
From the report:
"Software engineers struggle to navigate complex code environments and to improve security of the systems they build while remaining productive. These Cool Vendors offer innovative solutions that help software engineering leaders boost developer productivity and mitigate security risks."
Innovation Use Case Assessment Infographic
See how compatible your use case is with Betty Blocks. We hear from our users that they want to create all types of solutions. Whilst there are endless possibilities of solutions that can be created with Betty Blocks, when creating a use case there are factors to consider.
Follow the steps below to discover if your use case is a good fit with Betty Blocks!
The Top 6 No-Code Legal Applications
In order to stay ahead of innovative competitors and fast-emerging legal tech companies, law firms need to onboard new technology and build applications themselves.
How can your firm do this? And what kind of applications could you build?
In our article “The Top Six Legal Applications Your Law Firm Can Build Without Coding” we explain how law firms can empower business users in the development process on the Betty Blocks platform. Yes, your very own people (with the best knowledge of your firm, its employees, and its clients) will be at the forefront of innovation.
The article sets out six examples of both internal and customer-facing applications your firm could build using LCNC technology.
The Case for Digital Transformation in the Legal Profession
In this whitepaper, we’ll take a closer look at some of the challenges faced by law firms today, both in terms of achieving current goals and creating opportunities for growth. We’ll explore why the legal profession should be looking to implement digital transformation strategies without delay.
We’ll also look at what some of the leading law firms are doing to drive innovation, including:
- Digital tools, processes, and strategies;
- Advocating for cultural change (including how innovation can work alongside the billable hour model);
- Changing the way legal professionals are trained;
- Expanding current roles and creating new ones.
Innovation Use Case Assessment Infographic
See how compatible your use case is with Betty Blocks. We hear from our users that they want to create all types of solutions. Whilst there are endless possibilities of solutions that can be created with Betty Blocks, when creating a use case there are factors to consider.
Follow the steps below to discover if your use case is a good fit with Betty Blocks!
The Top 6 No-Code Legal Applications
In order to stay ahead of innovative competitors and fast-emerging legal tech companies, law firms need to onboard new technology and build applications themselves.
How can your firm do this? And what kind of applications could you build?
In our article “The Top Six Legal Applications Your Law Firm Can Build Without Coding” we explain how law firms can empower business users in the development process on the Betty Blocks platform. Yes, your very own people (with the best knowledge of your firm, its employees, and its clients) will be at the forefront of innovation.
The article sets out six examples of both internal and customer-facing applications your firm could build using LCNC technology.
The Case for Digital Transformation in the Legal Profession
In this whitepaper, we’ll take a closer look at some of the challenges faced by law firms today, both in terms of achieving current goals and creating opportunities for growth. We’ll explore why the legal profession should be looking to implement digital transformation strategies without delay.
We’ll also look at what some of the leading law firms are doing to drive innovation, including:
- Digital tools, processes, and strategies;
- Advocating for cultural change (including how innovation can work alongside the billable hour model);
- Changing the way legal professionals are trained;
- Expanding current roles and creating new ones.
Cooking with Tidelift
When cooking for friends or family, many of us go out of the way to seek the freshest, tastiest ingredients possible. You may have favorite producers at the local farmers market, or brands from the grocery that you've come to know and trust. But when choosing the ingredients that make up our open source applications, we often bring in new libraries without any guarantees that they are safe and well maintained.
We wanted to distill the idea of managing open source down to something so simple, you could explain it to a child, so that’s why we wrote a children’s book about enterprise open source software management. Yes, we just used the phrases “children’s book” and “enterprise open source software” in the same sentence.
We call it Cooking with Tidelift, and it will show you how we can help you create catalogs of known-good, proactively maintained open source components to ensure your apps are as safe and healthy as they can be.
Log4Shell, Open Source Maintenance, And Why SBOMs Are Critical Now
Tidelift CEO and co-founder Donald Fischer and guest speaker Forrester Principal Analyst Sandy Carielli discussed some of the key lessons organizations can learn from Log4Shell along with some critical recommendations organizations can use to prepare for handling similar issues down the road.
Sandy and Donald talked about how enterprise organizations should:
- Use software bills of materials to better understand and manage their open source software supply chain.
- Enhance their visibility of the open source components being used and the associated transitive dependencies.
- Focus on proactive open source maintenance and how to better prepare their teams to quickly mitigate the risk of future vulnerabilities.
- Consider the role open source maintainers play in risk planning and mitigation.
Ten Steps For Preparing a TOGAF Project
A large number of enterprise architecture (EA) projects fail to realize their initial goals, despite the use of good architecture frameworks and methods. TOGAF is one of the most widely used EA frameworks and is trusted by hundreds of large organizations, but by itself does not guarantee success. Effective preparation can make all the difference.
This poster will go through 10 steps that an enterprise architecture team should take priority to embark on a TOGAF project. Embracing these steps can deliver better comprehension of initiatives, full stakeholder buy-in, and an understanding of the position of an EA project relative to the wider organization and industry.
Download now to find out:
- The essential knowledge necessary for starting a project
- Why alignment might be the most important aspect for success
- How to achieve sustainability in an EA team
The Definitive Enterprise Architecture Blueprint
As we approach a new decade, rapid technical changes and advances present a raft of new challenges for business leaders. For CIOs in particular, the stakes have never been so high; a plethora of new opportunity abounds, but get the dynamic between business and IT wrong, and the company will become fragmented, its tools and process unwieldy and impossible to manage.
An enterprise architecture practice makes it possible to model the entire organization and make informed strategic decisions. From here solutions across the business can be derived with a full understanding of their implications, and an effective realtime analysis of their success.
CIO Challenges: Mounting Technical Debt with an Unclear Roadmap
The concept of technical debt has been well understood in software development for decades, but it applies just as well to a firm’s overall technology infrastructure. Enterprises will often maintain legacy systems well beyond their useful life, or cut corners to meet project deadlines and then fail to adjust or update the technology workarounds used. As these old and low quality systems proliferate, costs rise and it becomes increasingly difficult to enact changes.
This eBook will look at how technical debt will mount for businesses and the difficulties of addressing this problem without a clear and sensible roadmap.
The 2021 Tidelift Open Source Maintainer Survey
In early 2021, Tidelift fielded its first-ever comprehensive survey of open source maintainers. Nearly 400 maintainers responded with thoughts about how they fund their work, what they enjoy about being a maintainer, what they don’t like so much, along with a host of other interesting insights.
Over the following pages, we’ll share nine of the most interesting findings with you.
OSS Supply Chain Security and How to Help Your Overburdened Dev Team
In this Upstream chat, Tracy Bannon from MITRE joined us to discuss why it took so long, what is happening now that will help organizations positively impact their own security preparedness, and how we can bring forward good ideas and warnings in the future.
She discussed how to talk about risk profile and ways organizations can force-rank priorities. She also discussed why it’s important to reduce cognitive load on the development teams and why it’s important to offload some tasks onto trusted vendors.
Tidelift CEO and co-founder Donald Fischer then joined the discussion and explained how all this applies to open source software specifically. Donald and Tracy discussed the recently disclosed security vulnerability in the Apache log4j project, which has been dubbed “Log4Shell”, why it’s important to address quickly, how to address it, and how to better prepare for future vulnerabilities. You won't want to miss this.
