By Associate Editor Caroline Hill
“NewLaw” providers often make up in marketing what they lack in substance but with NewGalexy, which has moved from straight LPO provider to this autumn launching two new cloud solutions, the more interesting chatter is behind the scenes. Founded by heavyweight former McGrigors senior partner and KLegal chief executive Robert Glennie, NewGalexy was seriously considered by BT as a replacement for its former LPO provider UnitedLex, a contract finally won at the start of this year by Axiom. NewGalexy still works closely with the telecoms giant on public sector work and if anything that relationship is growing.
In September 2014 NewGalexy look set to further shake up the market with the announcement that it is launching a new cloud-based document assembly system for corporate legal departments, called ContractPod, and a practice management system (PMS) for small-to-medium sized law firms called NewGalexy Practice League.
With a FTSE win for ContractPod already under their belt, the document automation system helps a company’s salesforce to generate their own repeat contracts, “freeing up their legal staff to do more complicated, higher value work,” says Glennie. The document template is scalable, with as many or few variables as a corporate requires and a governing law clause, and because it is cloud-based requires no implementation.
Meanwhile, the PMS, developed in conjunction with Uberall Solutions in Mumbai, operator of a widely used cloud-based PMS for Asian law firms, has been designed to be more intuitive than more traditional products, with a Windows-style interface. Glennie told the Legal IT Insider: “We were working with other people’s technology and began to find ourselves saying ‘this is terribly complicated, clunky and difficult to use.’”
NewGalexy Director Sarvarth Misra adds: “Lots of firms have got tech that their lawyers can’t use and is really complicated.” Misra and Glennie claim NewGalexy Practice League strips out the functionality never used in practice by law firms, can be implemented without lengthy training, and is compatible with most other enterprise platforms including SharePoint. It offers time keeping, invoicing, payment, collection and budgeting through to matter management, reporting, business analytics and CRM.
With law firm expansion back on the cards, Glennie says: “If a firm wants the product off the shelf they can use it next week.” Because it is cloud-based there is no software purchase or IT infrastructure costs and the pricing is openly published on NewGalexy’s website.
Both ContractPod and NewGalexy Practice League are hosted on the Microsoft Azure Cloud and Glennie says: “We thought long and hard before coming out with a cloud product but with Microsoft you can be assured that they spend much more on security than anyone else.”
Described as “exciting” by one General Counsel (GC), NewGalexy will nonetheless have to prove its scalability and ability to thrive independently of Glennie’s heavyweight reputation. The signs so far are positive. Glennie adds: “The take up has been good, including another GC who said ‘Wow!’”
www.newgalexy.com