What are the essential integrations with legal case management software?
With the variety of work types and requirements law firms must undertake while completing client cases, it is vitally important that the legal case management system being used seamlessly integrates with third-party software, portals and applications. These integrations allow data to be passed between the systems, saving fee earners many hours, every week, leading to increased productivity and profitability. Furthermore, it makes law firm employees lives much easier and allows them to focus on delivering great client experiences and services.
Most popular legal case management integrations
The most popular integrations really depend on the areas of work a law firm is active in. There are some integrations such as anti-money laundering checks and identity verification which are very important for all law firms, whichever area they work in, therefore these are arguably the most popular type of integration.
Some very popular, area specific, integrations include searches, SDLT and HM Land Registry integrations for conveyancers, County Court Bulk Centre (SDT) for Debt Recovery firms and the Claims Portal and Official Injury Claim (OIC) integrations for Personal Injury Lawyers.
How do case management integrations work and how do they differ?
There are two types of case management integrations, one-way Application Programming Interface (API) or two-way API. One-way API is where one party integrates with the service (typically a webservice) of another party and is able to transfer data from one destination to another. Two-way integration occurs when both parties have an API connected to each of their services, allowing them to pass data to and from one another.
There are two common formats of webservice APIs, RESTful and SOAP. According to Amazon Web Services, a RESTful api is an interface that two computer systems use to exchange information securely over the internet[1]. Whereas a SOAP API, according to Stoplight, is the Simple Object Access Protocol, a messaging standard defined by the World Wide Web Consortium and its member editors. SOAP uses an XML data format to declare its request and response messages, relying on XML Schema and other technologies to enforce the structure of its payloads[2].
API’s can be built and exposed using many different tools however their effectiveness and ease of adoption will be affected by the quality and availability of the schemas that define the authentication, methods and data payloads that the service expects and returns.
Examples of case management integrations
There are hundreds of different integrations available for legal case management users and each system will have different ones available. Below is a list of different integration categories which a case management system may have:
- Legal accounts and finance
- Conveyancing searches
- Digital dictation
- Identity and verification checks
- Performance metrics
- Payments
- Postcode lookups
- Client self-service portals
- Short messaging service (SMS) integrations
- Information submission
- Business software
- Court document software
- Government services
- Marketing software
- Document and workflow management
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/restful-api/
[2] https://stoplight.io/api-types/soap-api
