Post by Braz Pereira, muchBeta’s Chief Commercial Officer:

When we first started to develop LawRD, we were quite aware that, in many fronts, the concept we meant to come up with was going to be ground-breaking to most law practice professionals.

The innovation here, is the fact that LawRD is a service, not software sold in a CD-ROM demanding an upfront investment and periodical upgradings.

Being a SaaS, all its data is hosted in the “cloud” (Amazon data centers in LawRD’s case) thus being available through any Internet connection, freeing its users from concerns with servers, firewalls, viruses, IT infrastructure, compatibilities and safety.

LawRD has a mandatory free 30-day trial, no upfront investment and its monthly payment is done  accordingly to the number of active users. No long-term contracts or commitments, quit when you want to.

These facts are self-evident and, in our view, point to the new paradigm to which we move into at fast pace (thanks Gmail, homebanking, Salesforce and all other that paved the way to solutions such as LawRD).

The awareness for these advantages really stands out when a software “glitch” turns up, though. Usually, users call the software vendor presenting a complaint or asking for customer support. Then, a location visit from a technician is scheduled, which never happens as soons as needed, plus there are delays of all sorts, traffic jams and other setbacks until the problem is fixed and that support is paid for.

On the other hand, LawRD’s support is requested through the application itself:

Right away, LawRD team takes charge of the situation and, on most instances, users doubts are cleared or the problem is solved in a couple of hours. Most of our replies to help requests are just to inform our clients that the situation they contacted us for in the first place, is now solved.

Odd as it may seem, it is there and then, when doubts and problems arise, that we can better prove the edge that SaaS presents, being much more than software that one must pay for the the right to use it, LawRD is actually a service, provided by a team that stands only a click away, to solve any doubts or problems from our clients, in a quick and swift way, shortening waiting and offline times to a minimum.

To conclude, for LawRD, solving doubts and problems, is a deciding factor in our clients trust and satisfaction.

Sam Glover, Editor in Chief at Lawyerist.com, posted a review on LawRD - Reports on Demand titled: LawRD: Affordable Law Practice Management Software as a Service.

Beyond welcoming a new competitor in the SaaS world aiming at law firms, Sam Glover points out:

• The features that make LawRD stand out from the competition: “LawRD has some features the competition lacks, such as smart, preset billing configurations, always-present contextual help, and a great interface.”
• The reports issued by LawRD: “RD stands for Reports on Demand, and LawRD excels at providing helpful, good-looking reports for all aspects of your law practice, from productivity to profitability.”
• LawRD pricing: “But for all that, LawRD’s best feature may be its price. (…) LawRD has a realistic pricing structure, just $20 per user, a third of the others”

One more thing to clear the issue on server location: LawRD uses Amazon’s AWS, therefore the datacenter is not located in Portugal

Sam Glover wraps up saying the following: “Overall, though, I was quite impressed with LawRD”.

LawRD is a SaaS - software as a service - application, thus delivered over the Internet. Therefore, LawRD’s users data is stored on Web servers.

It is only natural for issues and doubts on data security to arise.

Before getting to the point, here is some food for thought: it is almost certain that you already bought something or did some sort of banking transaction on the Internet. Most definitely, you use e-mail.

The commom denominator to these 3 situations: with no exceptions, they all use Web servers.

With LawRD, we have implemented industry’s best practices in order to offering the safest data protection possible. Such procedures are:

• Data storing on Amazon servers via Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon web servers have physical security that equals the one found in military facilities. For instance, every access, be it physical or electronic, to data centres by Amazon employees is registered and audited regularly. AWS service security was good enough for NASDAQ to lodged store it’s Market Replay service.
  Adding to this, operational security is ensured by LawRD’s development team and suported by implementing firewalls and permanently updating the operating systems that support the Web application stored on Amazon servers.

• Safe communication between users’ browsers and the application servers. From the very first access to the site, communication is protected by HTTPS protocol through a 256 bits SSL digital certificate.
  
  HTTPS and the digital certificate assure that both communication between browsers and servers is encrypted (safe from prying eyes), but also garantees that users are actually accessing LawRD’s website and not an illegal surrogate.
  
  For a more in depth  reading on LawRD’s security, please go to
  https://www.lawrd.com/html/files/en/security.pdf

• Pledge of confidentiality: for us at LawRD confidentiality is a pledge described in our Privacy Policy document: https://www.lawrd.com/html/files/en/privacy.pdf. The #5 of that document states: 5 - muchBeta will not make any of the collected information available to anyone. We will never sell, rent, exchange or share your personal information with any third-parties (…)
  Another important issue: Although muchBeta owns the code, databases, and all rights to the LAWRD application, you retain all rights to your data.

Aware that data security is vital to all web application users, we ground ourselves to the best safety practices available and keep updated using state of the art technology.

An issue of security: where is my data lodged? Answer: at Amazon´s servers!

The data of our users is lodged on the servers of Amazon via Amazon Web Services (AWS). This way, LawRD provides its users the same level of security as the one given by that famous e-commerce web site.

Jeff Barr, Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, wrote this about LawRD on AWS blog:

After paying a very modest per-user monthly fee of 14 Euros per month, users can track the facts (what, when, where, and how) for each case, client, and employee. Timesheets, contact lists, invoices, and reports are all readily available. All data is encrypted and of course there’s no local software to install.

If you want to know more about data lodging on Amazon, please read the PDF on Security Policy, below:

https://www.lawrd.com/html/files/en/security.pdf