Jarvis Legal saves law professionals three hours a day with integrated email and calendar functionality

With the Nylas Email API and Calendar API, Jarvis Legal empowers law professionals to be more productive, ensures GDPR compliance, and drives upsells.

Introduction: 

Jarvis Legal is a legal practice management software company that provides an automated, centralized way for lawyers to gather and manage client information for stronger collaboration and client service. The software provides a cloud-based solution for managing everything from documents, emails, calendars, tasks, billing, and more so lawyers can focus on their core business practice and expand their services.

As an all-in-one application, Jarvis provides out-of-the-box features such as a bi-directional email and calendar integration, simplified time-tracking and billing, task management, email sync and filing, and performance monitoring. These features save lawyers and firms both time and maintenance costs while empowering them to work more closely for the benefit of their clients.

Challenge:

Lawyers historically struggle with adopting and implementing the latest technologies. Many legal practice management systems are extremely outdated, creating major productivity bottlenecks and cumbersome user experiences. This makes it difficult for lawyers to innovate, cater to their clients, and provide new services. Jarvis Legal’s mission is to simplify and automate the day-to-day operations of law firms and legal departments with a software solution that makes the lives of legal professionals easier.

To fulfill their mission of building a modern, user-friendly platform, the first step was to securely establish strong email integration capabilities. “We knew from the start that we had to somehow find a solution to integrate email because 80% of information exchanged between lawyers and their clients is by email,” said Alexandre Yeremian, CEO of Jarvis Legal. “We knew that email was an essential feature for our users.”

In addition to email capabilities, the team at Jarvis also sought to support calendar integration and synchronization. “A unified calendaring experience is essential for lawyers to definitively know what event happened for what client at what time. They need to be organized and they often rely on shared calendars,” Yeremian said. Managing shared calendars across Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and other providers is a key pain point for many lawyers. Jarvis wanted to provide robust, singular calendar services within their platform to solve for this challenge.

Solution:

Jarvis first developed an add-on for Outlook, the preferred email provider for most law professionals. However, their developers weren’t familiar with Outlook’s unique schema and programming language, requiring them to invest considerable resources in building and maintaining the add-on. As different versions of Microsoft 365 were released, the team would waste even more time and maintenance costs to continue supporting this integration. Jarvis quickly realized an add-on was not the best way to introduce and maintain email synchronization.

The company then attempted to build out email and calendar features on their own using open source software and email editors. However, the solutions they built didn’t provide nearly enough functionality for their end users, and the approach still proved too difficult for many customers to use. 

Luckily, the third time proved to be the charm when Jarvis enlisted Nylas. Using the Nylas Email API and Calendar API, Jarvis established a secure, bi-directional sync between all major email and calendar providers so they wouldn’t have to build support for individual providers and one-off updates. With Nylas, this crucial infrastructure was built twice as fast as it would have taken Jarvis to build on their own, saving four months of engineering work. It also lessened the resource burden on their developer team.

From a security standpoint, data management and privacy was also top-of-mind for Jarvis given the sensitive nature of information that lawyers and firms handle. As a French company, GDPR compliance was of particular concern. Nylas’ API solutions have global, enterprise-grade security certifications including ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC 1 Type 2, SOC Type 2, and GDPR compliance. These credentials afforded Jarvis the peace of mind they and their end users need in terms of data protection and privacy.

Results:

With embedded email and calendar functionality in place that connects to and supports all major service providers, Jarvis is succeeding in its mission to make the lives of law professionals easier. Users can now easily access, send, receive, and edit everything from emails to calendar events to billing notices natively in the Jarvis app. 

Working with Nylas also helped Jarvis sell 15% more services to its customers by providing high-value email and calendar features to users, affording them a clear marketplace advantage. “It is necessary to have this kind of synchronization, this kind of service for our users,” Yeremian noted. “Not having it would be really awful in terms of sales. Every other solution is providing this kind of service so you have to offer that to your clients.”

Most significantly, the time-savings enjoyed by Jarvis’ end-users thanks to Nylas’ APIs are a real gamechanger. “It really saves legal professionals significant time because of course you have all your emails in one place, but you can also use the email feature to send bills to your clients or documents you can create within Jarvis,” Yeremian said. “I would say it’s saving three hours a day [for our users].”

In the future, Jarvis hopes to leverage Nylas’ Contacts API to integrate contacts data into their app – an important and requested feature by lawyers – as well as more robust online scheduling and booking capabilities so their clients can more quickly and easily set up meetings. With these plans in mind, Jarvis should have no problem achieving their end goal of becoming the number one software for legal professionals.