The Legal Industry has a growing genre of no-code platform offerings. The main messaging seems to be the ability to create complex apps or workflows easily.
I believe no-code platforms themselves are incredibly powerful in terms of accessibility, but they can be easier to start with than to finish (read: integrate).
So, we’re going to break down what no-code platforms can do strategically to better penetrate the market in Part 1.
Part 2 will explore how Lawyers can best prepare to leverage these platforms effectively.
What is No-Code?
No-code is essentially how it reads, a platform where traditionally coded applications can be designed for by the user with no-code. This also implies then that the creation of your application needs to be done with some form of canvas and paint.
Most no-code platforms then use a blank white screen or whiteboard-type screen as the canvas and use “objects” “forms” or “blocks” as the paint.
So instead of doing this 👇
You end up with something like this 👇
Here is where it gets interesting. Because you now give the control or “freedom” to the user to essentially “program” their own application, how you facilitate the space becomes the most important factor.
Facilitation is something that we as humans find extremely valuable. Knowledge without facilitation has limited use. For example, imagine handing your 5 year old a bag, lunchbox, stationary and books with no context of school. It would be a very confusing collection of items to hand to them and expect tangible outcomes 🤔
However, structured facilitation unlocks, expands, extends and refines knowledge. Sometimes we call the combination of knowledge and facilitation the “Process of Education”.
Creativity also plays a crucial role in bringing value to life and commerce. Creativity without facilitation is what we could call “abstract”. It may be nice to look at, but it has little use bringing it in abstract form into a real world use-case.
In Legal, there is the added focus of generating efficiencies - where not only can we “create what we want with freedom” on no-code, but what we’re creating has the specific outcome of generating efficiencies (and therefore value) for the Legal business: both internally and externally.
For no-code platforms and technology companies to successfully penetrate the legal market, they need to focus on facilitation, creativity and the process of education to unlock the potential of something that is by design, unlimited in potential.
In other words, they need to learn how to “share the spade” in the sandbox they’ve made.
Legal Market Penetration for No-Code
There are different types of platforms that provide a no-code environment to achieve some form of efficiency. Here’s a list of a few I know:
I believe the fallacy for any of them is to try and “differentiate” in their market in the traditional business sense. Every one will have a different flavor to the way they develop their product by default. But a canvas is a canvas, a sandbox is a sandbox. What’s most important is the Facilitation and Education surrounding the platform, the experience they create and how quickly they get people onto platform and developing a solution.
Let’s look at some ways Facilitation, Creativity and Education can be achieved.
Templates
Templates are one way to facilitate “the potential of what can be done” in a sandbox environment. They immediately focus the user on a structure that allows for immediate use and guides them to an output.
This works as long as the creators of the platform are making the right assumptions about the potential use cases of their clients.
Guides
Guides or tutorials, especially ones that are integrated into the live platform and are responsive are one of the best ways to onboard and support people who wish to create using the software.
Pursuing this strategy aligns directly with a metric I believe is the most valuable in this environment (which i’ll explore a little later).
Community
Building a community around a technology, treating your platform and its users like a village is perhaps one of the most under utilised approaches for no-code and sandbox developers. Community built around a platform allows the outcome of interactions to be about the people, and the technology as the means.
Because sandbox environments like no-code platforms are so open-ended, there is so much creativity to bring people together to demonstrate, familiarise and most of all connect people together using the platform.
I have ventured to suggest to one of the above platforms to create a “trivia night” utilising the platform as the means to deliver entertainment, build community and gamify the interactions to demonstrate its capability. Inviting existing users to come along to this “event” where the parameters are familiar but the execution is new, also generates network effects: A trivia night assumes there will be teams, which also assumes there will be people who already are part of the community inviting others who perhaps haven’t joined previously to take part and enjoy the proceedings.
This brief examples shows how important creativity and structure applied to such a potent platform starts to generate traction and penetrate markets.
All of these examples are made in context of what I believe is one of the most (if not the most) important metric no-code platforms should consider.
The Most Valuable Metric
When we show someone something new, say a car for example, one of the most effective ways for them to be able to make a decision about whether it is for them - is how quickly they can go about doing what it is designed to do:
Drive 🚗🚗🚗
Soon after they’ll want to know other essential things: wipers, fuel, A/C, windows, locks etc. These are all treated as milestones in the journey to adoption. How quickly a person goes from looking at something, to playing and using it is a metric I call:
Time-To-Solution (TTS) or Time-To-Milestone (TTM).
The most well tuned no-code platform that focuses on TTS or TTM I believe will dominate the market across a normal business cycle. This is because a focus on getting people building in a environment where almost endless things can be built will be key to keep momentum.
Momentum, a sense of achievement and ultimately something deployable are what makes the user LOVE a no-code platform they have invested in.
The difference between Time-To-Solution and Time-To-Milestone targets are based on how complex the potential output might be. Developers should have time envelopes for simple and complex outputs to establish a baseline. From there they can tune their targets as TTS for simpler outputs and TTM for more complex outputs.
In the end this emphasises how important it is not to just build a sandbox no-code platform and dump an ungodly amount of money into advertisement, but to really cultivate an experience for the intended users and - in the best case scenario - a community around the platform to have your users advocate on your behalf.
As always, the future of law is in our hands 🔥
Q,
This was a free post from the #FutureofLaw Lab.
Here’s what you missed this month:
Learnings from the Lab #1 - a write up and video summary breaking down one of the live workshop sessions I recently ran with some Industry experts at FutureLab.Legal.
Complexity vs. Sophistication - The client wants sophistication, but does not want complexity. Technology and Magic demonstrate the difference between the two.
ContractBook - Exploring Strategies, Adoption and Stickiness and the significance of what’s happening at ContractBook with their new Gmail Importer Tool (just in time for their Series A announcement).
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