This week marks my one-year anniversary writing at Above the Law. I consider at least part of what I do with this column as providing a service to the legal community, and to the legal operations population in particular. So, when I learn about tools that I believe to be useful, especially they involve legal technology, well, I try to write about it.
Since the ILTA Conference a few weeks ago, I’ve been hearing and reading about Reynen Court. It’s being called the app store for legal. The concept itself is not entirely original; other companies bundle software applications for users and obviously there are other app stores. What’s unique about Reynen Court, however, is the automation and interoperability the platform offers. That and their close ties to the legal community and the fact that the platform is designed for and supported by a consortium of 19 global law firms. We don’t typically see this kind of collaboration across competing law firms.
Reynen Court recently launched a beta version of its platform, which is intended to help legal operations teams in corporate and at law firms gain fast access to software applications without worrying about the time, cost, and hassle of on-premise implementation, expensive infrastructure, or concerns about cloud security.
Christian Lang, Reynen’s Chief Strategy Officer, told me that “the platform itself is boring middleware.” What’s makes Reynen Court useful is it enables subscribers to find and buy software, manage computing power and user access, and it provides metrics that aid in monitoring usage and expenditures. It’s also designed to foster interoperability between unrelated applications.
Applications offered through Reynen run in an already secure, containerized environment. Corporations and firms do not need to worry about gathering the different requirements and deployment or server specs or undertaking lengthy POC trials and security audits. Subscribers choose their own infrastructure, either on-premise or their own private cloud environment, and they subscribe to the apps they’d like to use. It makes implementing and scaling software more efficient, cost predictable, and secure.
Currently, there are more than 50 applications available in the Reynen Court platform, and they are continuously adding more. I had a quick look at Reynen’s interface when I spoke last week with Lang. There is a menu of options here that would make tech-driven legal operations professionals salivate. Users can access everything from time and billing software, business intelligence, research, case management and budgeting tools, and yes, eDiscovery and machine learning tools.
Lang did not offer any announcements of new applications that will be coming online in the coming months, but he says they are engaged in conversations with many of the major software providers in the legal technology space.
Does this mean that legal departments and law firms will soon be able to subscribe to popular solutions like Relativity via Reynen Court? Maybe. CEO Andy Klein, a former Cravath attorney turned brewery owner and asset manager who founded Reynen Court in 2017 on the premise that he wanted to accelerate adoption of legal technology, believes there is plenty of room in the legal tech space for large SaaS providers; Reynen Court will be available for those organizations who cannot or choose not to make that investment.
Klein recently commented during an interview on Bob Ambrogi’s LawNext Podcast that big organizations sometimes take a year or more to vet and implement a new software offering. At the same time, the software companies spend an equal amount of time selling, providing demos, testing, and implementing their products. With Reynen Court, software offerings in the platform can be deployed almost instantly, even on a Friday at 5 p.m. when a transactional team realizes they need to dig into some documents as part of a due diligence effort.
This all sounds very expensive, doesn’t it? Well, Reynen won’t disclose subscriber costs just yet. After all, there are just five firms taking part in the beta release. But Lang expressed confidence that organizations will quickly see the value.
Subscribers to the platform pay a modest fee that is the same for all organizations. Lang says that Reynen Court is working to develop a tiered pricing model that scales based on usage. Another source of revenue comes from the software companies that make their products available for deployment through the platform, which pay a fee to Reynen Court. Additionally, if a software company chooses to sell their product through the Reynen platform, there’s a revenue share with Reynen Court.
The beta release has begun with five large law firms. However, the platform is not just for the biggest firms. In fact, there’s an advantage to using Reynen Court for medium to small organizations and firms — those who do not have the infrastructure or resources to run a full suite of technology tools. For smaller companies with small legal departments or smaller firms that have big clients, Reynen Court could really level the playing field and give them access to the same tools as the largest firms.
Reynen Court is hoping to have a full commercial release in the first quarter of 2020.
Mike Quartararo is the managing director of eDPM Advisory Services, a consulting firm providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to the legal industry. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery. Mike has many years of experience delivering e-discovery, project management, and legal technology solutions to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe and is widely considered an expert on project management, e-discovery and legal matter management. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@edpmadvisory.com. Follow him on Twitter @edpmadvisory.