Matterius - Connects lawyers with corporations. German based startup.
Story by DP Press Team
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5 min read
There is no room for untested solutions in law and business.
Looking for the right corporate law specialist or B2B legal service doesn't have to be troublesome. Just reach for the right tool. A version of MVP Matterius, a platform that connects lawyers with the business world, has been launched.
CLIENT
Matterius is a group of independent German lawyers who decided to take matters into their own hands and revamp communication with clients. They come from legal corporations, where they dealt with IT law and data protection, among other things.
Using their business experience, together they are developing an innovative startup. Now, thanks to their actions, companies, and individuals can find a lawyer or legal counsel that meets their needs much more effortlessly.
The company has its headquarters in Munich. Although at the moment Matterius operates mainly in Germany, its ambitions stretch much further, as they intend to gradually enter other markets.
CHALLENGE
The client approached us with a need to create a tool that would improve communication with their clients and facilitate the search for legal services in the B2B market.
So far most companies have struggled to access reliable and objective information about lawyers and their experience. They chose them based on personal referrals or non-verified recommendations. Unfortunately, in many cases it backfired and at the corporate level, it usually meant considerable financial drawbacks.
Matterius wanted to take advantage of the review mechanism. They decided to take it to the next level and make it scalable and easy to use. They set themselves the challenge of creating a comprehensive and publicly accessible database of lawyers and cases they currently run. Using this solution, business lawyers could acquire new clients and the clients themselves could be assured that they are hiring the right specialist for the job.
SOLUTION
To meet our client's expectations, we proposed to build a platform from scratch to achieve the established goals. We used technology that we have been working with for many years, namely the latest Drupal 9. Using the ready-made system, lawyers can easily create detailed profiles, describe their past experience and define the scope of their expertise.
They can also publish descriptions of the cases they have worked on. A potential client is given a chance to get to know them and decide whether a particular lawyer fits a given case. The reliability of the given expert’s achievements description is guaranteed by a mechanism we came up with. It allows confirmation of its truthfulness by previous clients and views recommendations issued by them. All this being transparent, objective, and giving potential clients the certainty of real verification.
Deployment of the verification mechanism proved to be no small feat. Although from the users' perspective, it looks very straightforward and intuitive, we had to take into account all possible scenarios of the relationship between a corporate client and a specialist.
Lawyers as well as their cases can be searched in the database, narrowing down the search to specific areas of law, jurisdictions, or lawyers acting for specific companies.
To make sure that the data search works properly and quickly we decided to utilize Elasticsearch – a full-text search engine that uses Apache Lucene technology. Thanks to the possibility of advanced grouping and filtering according to specific guidelines, we obtain search results almost in real-time. This is one of the best and most popular solutions of this kind in the world.
When creating the platform from the front-end side, we followed the latest design trends and atomic design principles. In doing so, we applied the modern Emulsify framework and its Storybook component. It allowed us to work on the front-end much more efficiently, and the client received a ready-made library of elements that, if necessary, may be used in the development of the system with new functionalities.
Taking care of the quality of the published content, we also created appropriate supervision tools that will allow the client to receive a product almost completely immune to the threat of fraud committed by potential scammers.
END RESULT
Our efforts coupled with our exceptional client’s commitment gave birth to the platform Matterius. It's a great solution that changes the way relationships between clients and legal experts are shaped.
- At the kick-off of the MVP, two language versions of the platform were launched: German and English.
- The platform is designed using Atomic Design methodology, Emulsify tool and its Storybook component.
- Drupal 9 as the groundwork of the solution.
- Elasticsearch – a full-text search engine.
Implementation time: 6 months
Klient: Matterius GmbH
