Lawfront gives legal teams the power to turn working ideas into tools

Lawfront had acquired 16 law firms in four years. Each acquisition brought its own technology, including practice-management, document-management and case-management systems, alongside specialist legal tools and subscriptions.

The group needed to support these systems while moving towards a shared future platform. With IT resources stretched, the innovation team wanted to address smaller business needs without requiring additional technical support for every project.

One immediate requirement was a way to share and manage AI prompts across all seven firms. Lawfront wanted something more sophisticated than a basic prompt library, which it called a “recipe-card platform”.

Meanwhile, lawyers were beginning to build their own tools. One lawyer had created several Claude artifacts on his personal computer and asked how to deploy them within the business. This raised a wider governance question: how could Lawfront support experimentation while maintaining appropriate oversight?

We were not ready for that, and we were not set up to deploy independently created Claude artifacts into the firm without much more thought and preparation.

James Grice, Head of Innovation & AI, Lawfront

During a hands-on introduction to Fliplet, James quickly created a simple event app. He then recognised its potential to support Lawfront’s recipe-card platform, giving the innovation team a way to build and manage the solution itself.

I could build it, manage it, control it, and deploy it without having to add another task to the IT team's workload.

Beyond that initial use case, James saw an opportunity to give lawyers a managed space to build “micro apps”: small tools that solve focused, task-based problems.

Governance was central to that opportunity. James wanted to enable experimentation while retaining control over access, development and deployment.

I could administer and manage the environment, control who was using it, what they were building, where and how they were building it, and apply the security guardrails Ian had described.

He also saw value in the platform’s surrounding capabilities, which could reduce the need to involve information-security specialists, technical IT colleagues or architects in every small project. Building confidence in those capabilities remained part of Lawfront’s rollout plans.

That wraparound support gives an already well-embedded team that understands the business’s problems room to get creative inside a managed environment.

The approach suited the innovation team’s existing skills. Its legal engineers and legal technologists understood business problems and were experienced at prompting, but had no development background.

The skills I need are people who can talk to lawyers, engage them, understand a legal process, and translate that into what IT needs.

Lawfront’s initial exploration established a practical first use case and identified a broader opportunity for governed, lawyer-led innovation.

At the time of the interview:

• The recipe-card solution was close to launch.
• James had quickly built a simple app during his first experience with Fliplet.
• The team had identified a potential route for developing micro apps within a centrally managed environment.
• James saw an opportunity to build on the team’s existing expertise without recruiting dedicated developers for these projects.

Fliplet allows us to harness the team's existing skills without recruiting a dedicated developer skill set for these projects.

The experience expanded James’s view of Fliplet from an app-building tool to a potential platform for rapid prototyping and managed experimentation.

I came away with one relatively small problem potentially solved and a much bigger opportunity for the future.

These were early findings. Adoption, time savings and financial returns had not yet been established, and the wider rollout was still ahead.

• Start with a clear business need. The recipe-card platform gave Lawfront a focused first application relevant across its seven firms.
• Make governance part of the approach. Lawfront wanted oversight of who could build, what they could create and how tools would be deployed.
• Build on existing expertise. Process knowledge, creativity and prompting skills were central to the innovation team’s approach.
• Create a supported route for experimentation. Lawyer interest was already emerging, making a managed path from idea to deployment increasingly relevant.
• Invest in awareness. Lawyers need to understand the capabilities available before they can identify where new tools could help.

Lawfront’s next steps were to build confidence in the platform, launch its initial solution and introduce the capability across the business.

First, we need confidence in the platform and to launch our initial solution, which was close at the time of the session. Then we need to socialize the capability across the business.

Education would play a significant role. The innovation team needed lawyers to bring forward specific problems and processes where new applications could make a difference.

James also saw opportunities to use design thinking, hackathons and ideation sessions to help lawyers move from an idea to a working prototype.

Other possibilities included reporting dashboards, integrations with existing platforms and tools to help demonstrate the innovation team’s return on investment. These remained exploratory, with priorities still to be determined.