Platforms: Creating value for the collective

Software platforms are value drivers.

In fact, there’s a quote attributed to Bill Gates, tarnished though his reputation may be, that goes: “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it.”

If you’ve been following our work on the recently-launched 2022 RubyLaw Legal Marketing Technology Stack, if you viewed last year’s Platforms, not Platitudes webinar (which grew out of our 2021 marketing tech study), or if you read our previous Spotlight on RubyLaw covering Art, Science, and the Power of Platforms, you may already be familiar with the concept.

In fact, as we dive in and analyze results from the 2022 legal marketing tech study that informed the 2022 RubyLaw Legal Marketing Tech Stack, we’re even more convinced that the legal sector, historically a laggard in terms of tech adoption, is (still) late to embrace platforms. 

Whether because of resources, priorities, a lack of awareness, or other constraints, law firms are missing opportunities to level-up the technology driving their marketing and business development operations and use complementary systems—as platforms—to increase efficiency and accelerate results. 

RubyLaw, a cutting-edge Content Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform, is a clear example of a platform that drives economic value for the collective. Our 2021 briefing on productivity platforms illustrates how RubyLaw’s impact has material outcomes, i.e., hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings by switching and adopting the complete suite. 

Consider just one of several examples by using RubyLaw Content, our website-powering module, in combination with RubyLaw Proposals, our proposal automation module. Rather than losing time through context-switching, i.e., moving from your Content Management System (CMS) for proposal content to Microsoft Word for local editing to Adobe Acrobat to produce a final PDF, RubyLaw users have the ability to remain within the familiar RubyLaw environment for the entire experience to produce a final, polished, elegant, and natively output proposal document. 

Without having to jump from application to application, RubyLaw users can save time and headaches—not to mention the risk of losing valuable content caused by cutting and pasting between environments. More, if we add RubyLaw Experience, our matter management module, to the equation, we can automatically include experience content in the process without having to incorporate another system. Now that’s value!

If you’d like to learn more about how the RubyLaw CLM, and its various modules, can power your team’s marketing and business development operations, please contact your RubyLaw representative. You can also attend an upcoming session of RubyLaw Live.

Here are some helpful resources to review:
—2022 RubyLaw Legal Marketing Tech Stack
—Spotlight on RubyLaw: Art, Science, and the Power of Platforms
—Webinar: Platforms, not Platitudes
—Marketing Briefing on Productivity Platforms

RubyLaw Live: Thursday, June 16 at 4:30pm ET

In addition to addressing your questions, the June edition of RubyLaw Live will include a segment on platforms. The "platforms" concept is based on the idea that legal marketers can achieve better outcomes when technology solutions, or even efficient processes, are intelligently combined.

Please join us for our ongoing RubyLaw Live series, open to all RubyLaw clients. These sessions provide an opportunity for you to connect with other RubyLaw users, as well as our experts for discussion, Q&A, education, and more!

Please sign up here.