ElderCounsel helps legal practitioners streamline their elder law practices through a combination of specialized software, educational content and creating an active online community. Their flagship product is a document drafting software that can generate a wide array of legal documents related to elder law.

The challenge

ElderCounsel wants to modernize its flagship software and address many of the complaints and requests from its members. The new system would also allow them to expand their business by offering their members additional value-add services.

The leadership team worked hard over several years to define the scope of the new system and design the user interactions. They collected extensive feedback from existing members and had a clear vision of how to improve the member experience through this new system.

The new system is a fairly sophisticated piece of software. It has many integrations with 3rd party systems such as SalesForce and specialized CRMs that cater to law practices. It also needs to provide a simple process to onboard existing members and migrate their data.

Our journey together

I worked as part of the team that delivered the new system and was responsible for designing and implementing everything on the backend, including:

• Set up the AWS Organization, accounts, organization units and service control policies.
• Set up audit trails (through CloudTrail) and user access (with AWS SSO).
• Follow security best practices for managing a multi-account environment.
• Set up CI/CD pipeline for all environments.
• Built the AppSync API that supports the single-page application.
• Set up and configure the Auth0 tenancy.
• Implement the system (AppFlow, EventBridge and Lambda) for synchronizing user information between SalesForce and Auth0.
• Implement the system (Step Functions) for importing data from 3rd party CRMs and previous versions of the software.
• Ensure we have good observability of what’s happening in the application and are able to debug and troubleshoot problems quickly.
• Carry out load tests to understand the system’s bottlenecks and ensure it meets the project’s scalability requirements.

The team fostered a strong working relationship and was able to work through all the challenges it faced and deliver a working system on time and on budget.