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How could lawyers use a ‘Software for Domain Experts’ type service?

Lawyers have to search through large amounts of information to find something useful (such as how the last case like theirs went). They need to make difficult decisions. They need to publish and disseminate reports.

For structured legal processes (like conveyancing) they might have to go through a standard list of steps, of which documents or approvals are requested from who, when.

A quick search of UK law software firms shows that there are several companies offering software for ‘practise management’ (which we take to mean all aspects of a legal practise, including cases, accounting).

There are other tools to help manage performance.

Some of them run on the cloud, some on your desktop computer.

• http://www.pepperminttechnology.co.uk/ combines in one place, using one database, all the different legal software applications required by a law firm
• http://www.selectlegal.co.uk/ legal case management software
• http://www.eclipselegal.co.uk/ “practise management software”
• http://www.leap.co.uk/ legal software for small law firms
• https://www.redbricksolutions.co.uk/ – legal case management software
• http://www.cognitosoftware.com/ – case management, practise management, legal accounting
• http://www.soslegal.co.uk/ performance management / business process management
• http://www.eclipselegal.co.uk/proclaim-software/ case management, practise management
• http://www.insightlegal.co.uk/product/ legal accounting and practise management
• http://www.advanced-legal.co.uk/ legal practise and case management software
• http://www.legaloffice.co.uk/ cloud based legal productivity tools

AgilePoint – based on Microsoft technology – based in Mountain View, California, with some international offices. offers App Builder tool. Describes itself as “Responsive Application Development software”.

Outsystems – headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with international offices – makes app builder tools which are used in Banking, insurance, retail, pharma, healthcare, financial services, energy, telecoms, transport / logistics, public sector, IT, advertising / publishing, travel / leisure, manufacturing, construction.

Alphinat – “build applications once and deploy them everywhere” – based in Montreal, Canada – “cut Web, Cloud and Mobile application development time by 50%, 66% — even 75%” . Ideally suited for “Customer self-service, Electronic forms, Knowledge bases, Guided selling, Diagnostic tools, Life event based applications, Education or training”

Here are some “Software for Domain Experts” in the deep sea shipping industry

Ship operations
Ulysses Systems – knowledge management related to operations
Marine Software – maintenance and stores management
SpecTec – all aspects of vessel operations
Star Information Solutions – ship operations and safety
Danaos – maintenance, purchasing management
Maroz Maritime Software – quality management, maintenance management

Crewing
Crew inspector – online crew management

Ship energy efficiency
Interschalt – ship energy efficiency and ship loading

Commercial operations
ShipNet – commercial operations and procurement
Glomaris – managing commercial operations
Softcom – “pre fixture and post fixture”

Shipbroking and cargo management
Veson Nautical
Trigonal – shipbroking and post fixture
AXS Marine – vessel chartering

The jobs of experts around the world are getting more complicated all  the time – with more data to work through, more complex demands, faster decision making required.

As a nice illustration, consider the list of tasks which India Prime Minister Modi has set himself, shown midway through this Economist article.  Open 75m bank accounts, unique identity number for 1bn people, set up courts for politicians, cut Delhi air pollution, implement a goods and services tax and improve the sex ratio (stop female babies being killed), and that’s the first 6 out of 30 projects.

And we include experts in all businesses and government areas here – running shipping companies, oil and gas exploration (two industries we know a little about), managing carbon emissions, running police departments, anything.

All of these sectors have millions of subsectors – for example, see yesterday’s post showing a sample of “software for domain experts” active in the upstream oil and gas industry – all very specialist.

Probably the lesson here is that in order to spot a market opportunity, you probably need to be a domain specialist yourself. There are plenty around. But that doesn’t mean it is easy to find one who is ready to work with you in a partnership!

Your editor is also editor of a magazine about digital technology in the upstream oil and gas industry, and so has specialist knowledge of this sector, and the  domain expert software companies in it.

Here are some of the companies active in this sector.

Exploration / subsurface

Ikon Science – managing rock physics data
Lynx Information Systems– working with seismic data and geographical information systems
Interica – helping manage subsurface data
Acceleware – developing seismic interpretation algorithms
OpenDTect – open source seismic interpretation software

Drilling / wells

Verdande – gathering and sharing data from drilling operations
Safekick – visualising information about your current drilling program
Peloton – managing well data and drilling
Geologix – software for working with well logs
IDS – managing data associated with drilling

Developments

8over8 – managing cost overruns with project developments

Production
EnergySys – working with production data online
OVS Group – managing data about production

Operations
Datum360 – managing information associated with oil and gas operations
Asset Guardian – managing software used to run control systems
Permasense – manage data about corrosion
Absoft – applying SAP related tools in oil and gas

All sectors:

Meera – helping automatically search data sets

We think the Software for Domain Experts business model could also be very attractive to investors.

In a world of 0.25 per cent interest rates, all the “commodity” investment opportunities have gone long ago – if you define a “commodity” investment as one where (as an investor) you have no relationship to the company you invest in, and are promised some kind of low risk.

The Software for Domain Experts model is higher risk to an investor but promises higher returns if it works (for example, invest Eur 50,000 to get a company started, take a 30% share, if the company makes Eur 10,000 profit a year, that gives you an annual return of 6%).

And you will probably be working much more closely with the company you invest in – sharing your expertise in how to build a business, and being part of  an exciting environment.

Here’s 7 reasons,

1) One of the most exciting is the recent growth of ‘low-code’ tools, which make the task of building a useful ‘app’ much easier – you can do it with 2 programmers rather than 50. A 2014 Forrester study cited 3 different sorts of ‘low -code’ platform vendors – business process management tools (AgilePoint, Bizagi, K2, Nintex, MicroPact, Software AG); App platforms (Alpha Software, Alphinat, Mendix, OutSystems, salesforce.com); and Web content platforms (Acquia Adobe). There is some cross over between the sections. (see here for more). We’ll also add data search tools (such as Maana).

2) From the user’s point of view, most business / government professionals are now treated with massive amounts of data and expected to take all of the organisation’s knowledge into account when making decisions. They need as much help via automated tools as possible to bring them the right data and case studies, search and process it. And most of the time this means customised tools, because every specialism has different needs – different language, different risks, different context, even if the processes seem art first similar. Most professionals are trying to do everything with Microsoft Office a very generic set of tools, or perhaps some ERP package servicing thousands of large companies in the same way.

3) Add to this the ‘internet of things’ – including entering and reading data via mobile phones, collecting data with sensors, drones, and body sensors, and using controllers. You can let your imagination go wild thinking about what you can do with it – but making the software to build it requires some expertise!

4) There do seem to be many underemployed domain experts around these days, who can assist in putting tools and services together. Many people have taken early retirement from stressful jobs in big organisations, but still prefer to work (just something less stressful meaning less doing more thinking)

5) We hear that software engineers around the world are getting frustrated with working with big companies. Perhaps all the initiatives to keep programmers motivated, like ‘hackathons’ and ‘agile’, are all a response to the demotivating force of feeling like a tiny cog in a big company. Rather than invent more clever initiatives, why don’t programmers start their own companies – nothing is more motivating than that?

6) Of course it is much easier for a small company to develop and provide specialist software if it can use the cloud

7) Add in the growing numbers of cost efficient outsourcing companies for data and knowledge processing, particularly in places like India and the Philippines

What kind of user would like a ‘Software for Domain Experts’ company and why?

To some extent, generalising a user doesn’t make sense – everybody’s needs are different – and you need domain expertise to work out what they are.

For example in the oil and gas industry, where your writer has some domain expertise, there have been ‘software for domain experts’ companies performing complex subsurface data analytical tasks, mapping data onto geographical information systems, keeping track of costs and anomalies in project development, integrity gravity data with seismic data, managing drilling data reports, helping make decisions about supply chain management. Even with massive oil and gas domain expertise, it would be hard to spot these business opportunities before someone else.

However there are some factors which bring many of these projects together.

Your expert (we imagine) is working with many different data sources – and spends his time logging into different systems to gather the data.

There is probably some kind of work which needs to be done on the data – at least part of which can be easily automated. For example a certain mathematical processing task,  integrating one data set with another, spotting data which is obviously wrong, making it easier to manage and find the right data, or indexing data against a map.

Perhaps the user is too busy to regularly check all the data available – and would benefit from a algorithm or search system which can go through the data and spot something which could be worth the user’s attention.

The user might need to contact colleagues or be updated about what they are doing.

Probably the user needs to make a ‘diagnosis’ of some kind, or a decision about what needs to be done.

Then if something is done, then the next step is to implement the decision and see how well has been implemented.

Software systems can do all of this and much more – with specialist experts building tools, using mass produced software frameworks.

“Franchising” is basically about selling someone the rules for how to run a business which have been proven to work, along with a known brand name. That (I imagine) is what you get when you buy a franchise for McDonalds.

As business gurus have pointed out, proven rules really help improve your odds with a start-up, on the basis that (they say) 80 per cent of start-up companies fail in the first 5 years, while 80 per cent of franchise start-ups survive the first five years.

Having a proven business model is really useful.

For “Software for Domain Experts” we don’t yet have a proven business model, but we’d like to create one with your help – and once we have it, we can make it freely available for everyone to use.

We can guess what the fundamental components are:
– spot a market need (which probably takes specialist insight, ie you’d need to be a domain expert yourself to do this)
– put a team together – involving software people and domain experts – and make sure you can work together well with people  in your team
– build (what you think is) a product quickly, making maximum use of off the shelf software framework tools
– your domain expert works together with domain experts in the market (no salespeople here) to try to build interest
– iterate, improve the product, build up a customer base
– offer them really good personal service, the sort they can never get from a big company
– repeat

I don’t think the above list of components really counts as a ‘business model’ but perhaps it provides something useful to build on – next step is to refine and develop the components!

We believe that there could be room for a new business model for developing software for specialist business users – and we invite you to explore it with us.

As a big generalisation, the majority of software start-ups are tackling the consumer sector, where the chances of success for any particular company is very low, and the payment per user (if you get any at all) is low.

However the software market for specialist users (which we are calling ‘domain experts’), in the business and government sector, is dominated by large companies. In this sector, individual users are willing to pay large fees.

But they would also really appreciate or need personal service – which big companies are not usually as able to provide as small companies are.

There are many other business reasons why we think the time is right for more Software for Domain Experts which we will be posting on our website.