KL Legal Technology’s (“KLT”) award winning proprietary product, 4Corners, provides clients with specific, on-demand legal opinions about contracts. The tool can answer complex questions in real-time that could otherwise take weeks to resolve. The tool serves KLT’s blue-chip financial services clients in respect of their legal information needs.
Photography by Samson
KLT needed a cloud solution that would allow for the secure storage, query, and audit of sensitive data processed with 4Corners. A collaborative engagement with AWS Partner Network Select Consulting Partner Vitamin Software to transition 4Corners to AWS and Amazon RDS was a natural fit. Vitamin Software leveraged the security, compartmentalization, and customization offered by AWS and Amazon RDS to design a sustainable, scalable solution, paving the way for KLT’s continued innovation in the technology and legal field.
“It has been a pleasure working with Vitamin, and benefiting from their experience, on this journey of expanding our 4Corners and bringing it to market in a robust and secure way.”
— Richard Folsom, CEO of KL Legal Technology
About the Customer
KLT is a London based LegalTech company, aiming to change the way that legal advice is created and delivered. Created by tier 1 technology lawyers to fit their clients’ needs, KLT’s flagship product is 4Corners, a contract analysis tool. 4Corners uses natural language processing and KLT’s taxonomy system to provide clients with specific, on-demand legal opinions about contracts. The tool can answer complex questions in real-time that could otherwise take weeks to resolve.
Customer Challenge
KLT prides itself on being at the nexus of technology and business. Founded and run by lawyers, and serving the legal departments of FS institutions, KLT requires a stable and secure infrastructure to serve client needs and guarantee client data privacy.
Due to the nature of the data processed by 4Corners, KLT has very specific infrastructure security needs:
complete isolation between the data of any two customers;
a flexible schema for storing data;
durable mechanisms that ensure survival in disaster scenarios;
an infrastructure that complies with enterprise-grade security standards;
ability to provision infrastructure in a way that can be replicated across multiple clients, through the use of advanced APIs; and
advanced control over where data is stored geographically, ensuring that data cannot leave those geographical locations to comply with legal statutes surrounding data protection.
The 4Corners infrastructure undergoes regular security audits – from the firm, from the firm’s customers, and from third parties retained by KLT. If infrastructure security is found to be deficient, KLT risks losing the trust of its technology enterprise clientele and undermining associated legal reputation.
Why Was AWS a Good Fit?
Amazon Web Services was a natural fit for this use case. The AWS emphasis on data security aligned with KLT’s security needs. We achieved enterprise-level security compliance for data at rest and in transit, using AWS Key Management Service and AWS Certificate Manager.
Further, 4Corners uses a standard, yet easily customizable set of infrastructure components for each customer. AWS CloudFormation’s ability to model our linearly increasing infrastructure of isolated customer resources provided a tool that would enable KLT to scale the use of cloud infrastructure over time.
Why Did KLT Choose Vitamin Software?
Vitamin Software was uniquely positioned to solve this technical challenge. Vitamin has a deep familiarity with AWS, which was recently formalized when Vitamin became an AWS Partner Network (APN) Select Consulting Partner. Vitamin also understands the requirements associated with securely managing data within heavily regulated industries, including experience with the United States’ healthcare industry.
Finally, the Vitamin Engagement Model provides a tested middle ground between Agile and Waterfall software engineering methodologies, ensuring the transition to AWS was carefully planned and executed on time. Our preexisting business relationship with KLT also helped foster trust between our teams for the migration of 4Corners to AWS and Amazon RDS.
The Solution: Technical Bits
First and foremost, we focused on infrastructure security. As mentioned before, we needed to cleanly separate resources between KLT clients.
Separation could be achieved by using either of two potential AWS solutions:
opening a separate AWS account for each customer; or
constructing a different Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for each customer,solely accessible from a two-factor authentication-enabled management VPC.
Depending on KLT’s customer requirements, we usually choose one of the above solutions.
Next, Vitamin Software used state of the art technologies like AWS Key Management Service and AWS Certificate Manager to ensure data is encrypted both in-transit and at rest. Traffic restrictions were achieved by using firewall rules, and Amazon GuardDuty is in place to observe any suspicious activity.
Finally, data is stored using Amazon RDS, with a complex data schema that is available across multiple availability zones. AWS supports enterprise-grade retention policies, and backups are typically held for at least one year.
Outcomes
Vitamin Software and AWS were able to provide a secure and scalable solution for KLT and 4Corners. The strict yet easy-to-use security controls have enabled 4Corners to numerous security audits and welcome several new FTSE100 customers.
For KLT’s customers, deploying this solution to AWS has meant a significant reduction in time to answer their legal queries - from days and weeks, to minutes.
For Vitamin Software, we appreciate the depth of the integration between AWS services. What would have normally taken our team weeks to set up without AWS can now be done in a matter of days. Given Vitamin’s long-term engagements with enterprise customers, we also plan to take advantage of the up to 60% cost reductions with three-year contracts for reserved instances with AWS.
Next Steps
KLT and Vitamin Software aim to continue their partnership for years to come. Building on the groundwork of a successful move to AWS and Amazon RDS, KLT can further pursue innovation in the legal field at the intersection of technology and business.
Reach Out
Vitamin Software is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network Select Consulting Partner, specializing in building, operating, and maintaining robust and secure application integrations. As part of its comprehensive offering, Vitamin Software tackles the infrastructure on which the software runs, from inception to retirement.
Vitamin Software builds bridges: From problem to solution, from difficult to feasible, from impossible to outstanding.
Want to know how? Just drop us a line.