What is no-code / low-code, and why should you care?

As an example of how no-code and citizen development strategies can be used within the legal profession, we’ll look at a Betty Blocks client: an international law firm with more than 4000 lawyers and legal professionals at its disposal. 

The law firm’s innovation manager was well aware of how no-code development could be used to streamline processes and solve some of the problems caused by the firm’s legacy system. Additionally, the law firm was receiving an increasing number of requests from its clients for innovative digital solutions. 

30 hours to 30 minutes

The innovation manager had 4 key goals: 

1. Optimize processes; 
2. Minimize and control security risk;
3. Generate new opportunities; 
4. Enable workflow automation and reporting. 

With these goals in mind, the innovation manager and his team went on to build 25 apps using Betty Blocks’ no-code platform — some internal and some client-facing. One such client-facing application was requested by a large financial institution that was starting a new funding program for affordable housing across Canada. 

For each loan application that the financial client processed, around 20 documents had to be produced — a process that took around 30 hours to complete. With thousands of these requests being received, the last thing the client wanted was for information to be lost in lengthy email chains. As such, the client asked the law firm to develop an application to automate this process. 

Within just 1 day, the innovation manager and his team had used Betty Blocks to create a prototype application. After having created the back-end, the team developed a front-end that would be user-friendly, with large buttons and lots of white space, making it “hard to get things wrong”. The parameters, of course, changed as the development process progressed. But, in just 2 weeks, the application was ready to show to the client. Here are some of the application’s capabilities: 

• Integration with multiple web services; 
• A back-end that handles vast amounts of data effortlessly with no “time-lag”; 
• Standardized back-end across the entire firm; 
• Maintenance and updates are deployed 5-10 times faster than with traditionally coded; applications; 
• At least one full week of development time saved. 

The innovation manager reflects that he and his team now rarely have to say “no” to clients. Many of the requests the law firm receives from its clients are, in fact, relatively simple. Yet they previously took a huge amount of time to execute due to the development methods being used. Now, law firms like our client are able to say “yes” more often, leading a better satisfaction rate for their clients, and greater opportunities.