Reynen Court, the so-called app store for legal technology, yesterday announced a new full-service offering aimed at making it easier and more economical for mid-sized law firms and corporate legal departments to test and deploy innovative cloud-based applications.
The new offering provides provides firms and legal departments turn-key access to what the company describes as “Innovation in a Box” — enabling them to obtain the full benefits of the Reynen Court platform, without requiring them to provision and manage their own virtual private cloud, platform and application deployments.
Reynen Court also announced yesterday that the 1,100-lawyer firm Womble Bond Dickinson, which has 26 offices in the U.S. and U.K., has signed up for the new model.
No Installation Needed
Until now, firms and legal departments could use Reynen Court’s platform only on a self-managed basis, where they would install the Reynen Court platform on their own infrastructure and then deploy and manage containerized third-party software applications on premises or to their own virtual private clouds under their exclusive control.
While customers still have that self-managed option, this new offering provides them access to all the same benefits and standardization of the platform, without having to provision and manage their own private cloud, platform and application deployments.
Instead, with this new full-service offering, Reynen Court deploys the platform to a virtual private cloud that it provides and controls for the benefit of the law firm. Reynen Court installs the platform and then manages the platform and the cloud infrastructure and each application deployment.
That makes it ideal for firms wanting a fast and easy way to discover and test new technologies, but without having to go through the time and expense of setting up and managing their own private cloud. Firms can migrate applications to self-managed platforms at any time.
Lower Up-front Price
Another advantage of this new full-service offering is that the up-front subscription fee is lower than for the self-managed option, provides predictability for budgeting, and offers a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing regime.
Deployment-specific application management services and cloud infrastructure provisioning are bundled into supplemental fees that Reynen Court quotes up front in connection with each prospective application deployment.
Speaking by phone from his base in Amsterdam, Andrew D. Klein, Reynen Court’s founder and CEO, said that mid-sized firms and legal departments often lack the budget and resources to bring the Reynen Court platform into their own private clouds. With this new offering, Reynen Court provides the private cloud, but otherwise the functionality is entirely the same.
“Think of it as a hosted version of our platform,” he said.
Single Trusted Environment
While firms and legal departments will still have to go through the process of establishing trust for hosting their data in the hosted private cloud, they need do that only once, Klein said, and then they have a trusted environment in which to test and deploy any of the solutions available through Reynen Court.
“In-house legal departments and mid-sized firms that are really trying to figure out how to accelerate their innovation are willing to get one private cloud set up,” Klein said, “and they like the idea of bringing their applications into that.”
Whether self-managed or full service, the Reynen Court platform allows users to run third-party applications in a centralized platform that has greater security and less risk than deploying through any number of separate vendors’ SaaS offerings.
Both options provide the ability to test-drive applications with one click, easily purchase vendor licenses or bring their own, and take advantage of Reynen Court’s telemetry and other services.
App Store for Legal Tech
Reynen Court launched in 2018 as the self-described app store for legal technology. Its mission is to make it easy for law firms and legal departments to adopt and manage modern cloud-based software applications without having to trust firm or client content to vertically integrated SaaS providers.
It does this through containerization, which is a way of packaging software and everything it needs to run so that it can be operated on any infrastructure.
With financial backing from international law firms Clifford Chance, Latham & Watkins, and Orrick, and backing from a consortium of 20 global law firms, it formally launched its commercial offering in January 2020.
Last December, as I wrote here at the time, it introduced One-Click Test Drive, a feature that makes it easy for law firms and legal departments to test products without having to buy them or negotiate trial licenses.
“From the time we first met Reynen Court, we felt strongly they could make a substantial contribution toward our innovation initiatives as we work to accelerate our ability to source and test new practice-focused applications,” Bill Koch, chief knowledge officer at Womble Bond Dickinson (US), said in a statement.
“Like everyone in our industry, we see no end to the onslaught of new technologies, and Reynen Court will allow us to cut through the noise so that we may rapidly adopt technologies that improve our efficiency and facilitate purposeful interactions with our clients.”
