Full Stack Development

Pacific Legal Network (PLN) is an Australia-based company that serves as the leading provider of legal and business advisory services in the Pacific. Its services include financial and banking services, consulting on overseas business expansion, and large-scale corporate and commercial work.

Pacific Legal Network (PLN) came to Capmation with a challenge: it needed to provide its clients convenient, consistent access to essential legal and business resources in the form of a custom app. Its previous ‘off the shelf’ app service had failed to meet its expectations for functionality and effectiveness—users weren’t provided links that took them to articles, and there were no reporting capabilities. On a mission to alleviate frustrations for both clients and PLN employees alike, PLN reached out to Capmation to develop a new app solution with smoother logistics, analytics, and automated push notifications.

“We could send notifications, but if users clicked on the article, the links didn’t take them anywhere,” explained Vivienne Storey, Business Development and Marketing Manager for PLN. “We didn’t have any analytics and couldn’t see who was using the app and the success or failure of the information we put out there.”

As an additional hurdle, the Pacific is a difficult region to find relevant economic, business and legal information. Because it’s largely composed of a collection of small islands and developing nation states, companies looking to do business there need to compile massive volumes of information on different laws and policies. As advisors and consultants, PLN felt passionately about creating easy to access information that would be relevant to their client decision makers.

Despite sounding simple, developing a portal would not be an easy task. In order to create this access, PLN would need to work with Capmation to not only rewrite their current system, but create a system that would respond equally to different devices throughout a region with differing technical abilities.

A core part of PLN’s mission is to work with other companies in the Pacific Islands. PLN chose to partner with Capmation not only because of a pre-existing relationship, but also because Capmation has a team in Fiji. According to Storey, “Our ethos is that we try to use Pacific Island suppliers. As a matter of alignment, we were very pleased that Capmation had a Fiji office that we could work with.”

After an initial discovery meeting, Capmation set to work using the Agile methodology of software development. With an emphasis on collaboration and flexibility, Capmation worked to fulfill the objectives set forth by PLN. The two teams met three days a week via Zoom and communicated regularly through Slack and email to ensure product and idea consistency.

As with previous Capmation projects, this communication proved to be the key to success. “If I had any questions, the team was fantastic,” said Storey. “I felt very well looked after.”

Before the kickoff, PLN was worried about the significant time difference, but those fears were soon eased. “The Fiji team had to change from morning to afternoon meetings—and quite late for Fiji—and they were very accommodating,” Storey noted.

In developing the new app, Capmation worked with firebase hosting and analytics to create a website with a powerful infrastructure geared towards file hosting and cloud-sharing. Due to concerns about expense and long-term storage, however, they eventually shifted gears to a Portal hosted through AWS. This switch cut down costs and provided better opportunities for PLN’s future scaling.

Results

Through collaborative sprints over the course of two weeks, Capmation created a new, modern mobile application for PLN. This technologically advanced app serves as an updateable distribution portal for articles, data, and other relevant industry resources.

In keeping PLN’s clients’ interests at the heart of the project, Capmation built customizable profiles into the app so users could select the types of information they needed and receive notifications for new articles with relevant sentences and keywords. This organizational tool gives clients the access they want and the ability to filter through articles, invitations, and regulatory and legal updates to keep content aligned with their interests.

In addition, the new PLN resource app sends valuable customer information to the PLN portal so administrators can monitor subscribers and article hits. With these new reporting and analytics capabilities, PLN has the tools to hone in on its customer experience and evolve its services in the years to come.

Capmation’s dedication to collaboration and responsive service during development proved crucial to this success story. “The biggest success from an implementation standpoint is that it was just easy,” explained Storey. “It went according to plan, there was nothing unexpected, the communications were excellent, and we were very well serviced by the Capmation team.”

Coming together and working towards a common vision not only created a successful product, it created a healthy working relationship that fostered innovation and future collaborations.

• Fast, simple access to coveted legal and business information for PLN clients.
• A unique branding opportunity and competitive edge for PLN as the only company to offer this informative service.
• A solution based on the latest mobile framework technologies to allow for reporting analytics, future scalability, and additions.