Legal 500 Architecture

The Challenge

While Spork was focused on redesigning the new Legal500.com UI, the Spork team quickly recognised that an overhaul of the technical architecture would be necessary to support it. Years of fragmented legacy systems and patchwork solutions had created inefficiencies, dependencies, and missed opportunities for innovation.

Some of the key improvements we wanted to make:

• Decoupling systems: Legacy systems were tightly coupled, which made upgrades and changes difficult and risky.
• Improving agility: We want to transition internal processes and technical architecture to support experimentation and lightweight development.
• Integration gaps: Existing systems, spefically their CRM and CMS, didn’t communicate effectively with one another, making future upgrades and integrations cumbersome.
• Resilience improvements: As the incumbent site naturally grew in sophistication, data synchronisation solutions – often in the form of off-the-shelf plugins – were added in an ad-hoc manner. This led to data sometimes going missing, causing perceived outages on the site.
• Put data at the heart of Legalease: We want to make critical data a ‘first-class citizen’ and make it the starting point for the design and development of products, features, the API, and other digital services.

It was clear that the new architecture needed to do more than meet today’s requirements – it had to future-proof the Legal 500 digital ecosystem, supporting product development ambitions for years to come.

The Work

Spork collaborated closely with Legal 500 to design and implement an architecture that was as forward-thinking as it was practical. We started with a clear set of goals:

• Prioritise Digital Data: Build products, features, and APIs with data as a first-class citizen.
• Decouple Systems: Ensure systems were independent, resilient, and easy to replace or upgrade.
• Support Agility: Enable lightweight experimentation without the need for major structural changes.
• Focus on quick recovery: “Mean Time To Recover” (MTTR) over extended uptime predictions – “Mean Time Between Failures” (MTBF).
• Integrate Seamlessly: Incorporate current systems while preparing for future ones like SSO and AI.

Our solution? An event-driven architecture. Working with Legal 500's newly formed tech team, we mapped out a system that centred on an event store – a dynamic core for capturing and propagating changes across various systems. This approach created a foundation for seamless integration, adaptability, and resilience.

We implemented:

• Event-Handling Frameworks: Off-the-shelf tools to track system changes and share updates across downstream systems.
• Incremental Development: A phased approach to deliver immediate value while maintaining flexibility for future demands.
• Future-Proof Philosophy: “Store critical changes in their simplest form now; figure out how to query them later.” This kept the architecture lean and adaptable to unknown future needs.

The architecture transformation was structured into three distinct phases, each delivering tangible results while setting the stage for long-term success:

Phase 1: Organise Data (3 months) We started by defining a core business data model and ensuring reliable, consistent data delivery to the new web database. This laid the groundwork for features that supported immediate business needs while enabling future use cases.

Phase 2: Connect Systems (2 months) In the medium term, we focused on unifying backend data systems to create a business-wide platform. This included automating workflows, supporting multiple digital products, and preparing the architecture for evolving requirements beyond the website.

Phase 3: Enable & Evolve (Ongoing) The final stage ensured the architecture could scale and adapt to growing business demands. Key developments including cross-departmental workflows, event-driven sagas, and enhanced resilience, security, and scalability.

The Outcome

Legalease now has a modern, flexible architecture that:

• Supports quick experimentation and agile development.
• Recovers from failures rapidly, minimising business disruptions – MTTR over MTBF.
• Seamlessly integrates existing systems while preparing for future innovations.
• Provides a robust foundation for automation and large-scale data processing.

With this transformation, Legalease isn’t just ready for the present demands of the site that Spork designed – they’re primed for their future ambitions too.