Every writer out there hopes that his masterpiece will be discovered one day and maybe will make an impact in someone's life. And of course, some writers just do that for the purpose of being published, becoming famous, market themselves and so on. However, most writers just want to share with the world a piece of themselves because by doing that they are healing their own wounds, and show me one person who doesn't have at least one.
Growing up in East Europe, I sure have some of my own reasons why I've postponed looking into the existing legal software in Russia. Call me biased or emotionally attached, involved or just someone who has more awareness around this part of the world. Also, being someone who went to Law School in an East European country, like Moldova, I've experienced the influence of the Russian, as well as, Romanian Legal doctrine. I can see how it can be a bit challenging for someone who hasn't been exposed to this type of educational merger to understand where I am coming from with this, however, I can say that this circumstantial impact brought rather a potential for growth, rather than a downside. In 2003, Moldova was a fairly new independent country, with pretty young laws and not much legal doctrine history of its own. So, in order to be able to prepare for a class, as a law student, you would have to refer to the legal resources written in Russian and Romanian, to be able to draft your own outline, translate it where needed and adapt it to the local laws. And all this happened in a computerless era.
Why did I find the need to come up with this intro? It was because I wanted to give you a sense of why maybe Russia is choosing to utilize the legal software that is not so popular in the west, or at least not so much, or not anymore. And, we can follow a general "against the trend" flow here. Some of these legal software are very unfamiliar to me, which makes me even more curious. So, let's dive in!
It looks like the winner in Russia is the legal software called Ayfie. This legal software seems to be built upon the AI's concept, and is mostly used by financial institutions to search and analyze court decisions.
The following platform used in Russia is BanyanRFP. This is a cloud software that is helping law firms become more efficient by shortening the legal process workflow and take better decisions.
CaseOne is a platform pretty popular in the US, or at least it was at least five years ago. It was among the first platforms who was allowing law firms to e-store their files, handle a part of the billing and case management from one computer.
DoeLEGAL, is another platform that again focuses on enhancing law firms efficiency.
LawClerk is mostly used and known among legal freelancers. It is a great tool that allows them to organize their work.
LEAP, a legal software we've talked about in our past articles, is very popular in the west and I personally find it very helpful, however, in Russia it came up pretty far down the line during our research.
LexisNexis also seems to be used in Russia and very popular in the US as well, however, this is not your usual practice management platform, but rather a tool that can be used as an adds-on to your management software platform.
MyCase was also among the first popular legal platforms allowing lawyers to transfer their legal practice from the offline medium to the online one in the US. Not so much used today due to its limitations.
Other platforms that came up during our research are Minesoft, Planet Data, Rocket Lawyer Incorporated and Logikcull. It seems that Russia is using the above mentioned platforms as adds-on tools rather than as legal practice management to run the legal institutions. And you can correct me if I am wrong.
Still figuring out what may stay behind this resistance towards joining the trend; it may be history, lack of resources, "not wanting to give up on the traditional way of managing legal practices because it works", or maybe there is not much data on this topic in the open source and we were not able to identify it.
What are your thoughts on this?
by Galina Barbascumpa