Mashups to Re-Map the Legal Tech Market?

location based services

Take one of the industry's oldest matter management software packages, combine it with cutting-edge, Internet-based mapping technology, and what do you get? The first commercial legal-tech mashup.
Synaptec Software, the 25-year-old, Denver-based maker of the venerable Lawbase software suite, has integrated the 10.5.5 version of its flagship product with Google Maps. That integration brings an emblematic Web 2.0 buzzword to a market that has yet to feel much of an impact from the new Web-as-a-development-platform IT paradigm. (Emphasis on "yet.")
"We do think this is the first one," says Phil Homburger, the company's founder and president. "But it sure won't be the last. Once people start figuring this thing out, it's going to grow exponentially."
Mashups are Web application hybrids, seamless combinations of content and services from unrelated, even competing, Web sites, brought together to create a new service. The term comes from the world of popular music, where "bastard pop" artists mix and match digital song samples to create new songs.
Synaptec added the Google Maps connection to LawBase about two months ago. Homburger says he got the idea when he saw a mashup of Flickr, Yahoo's online photo management and sharing application and the Google Earth virtual globe program.
"It's part of my job to keep an eye out for new technologies that might give our customers an edge," Homburger says. "When Google Maps began providing the satellite views, everybody thought it was cool to fire up the browser and look at their house from space. I did, too. But when I saw this Flickr-Google mashup that linked photos with maps of the locations in which they were taken, a light went on."
The LawBase-Google Maps mashup is more than just a cool app. The connection allows LawBase to tap into Google Maps functionality to display its data visually in a geographic context, revealing potentially important patterns that might not be readily discernable in other formats.
Homburger cites several examples of the potential of this added capability: Utility and insurance companies might use it to track claims resulting from natural disasters or contamination. Government agencies might use it to better detect fraud. Prosecutors might use it as an investigative aid. Corporate legal departments might use it to track, say, expiring leases as they plan facilities consolidations.
"The saying is old, but a picture is worth a thousand words," Homburger says. "People look at a map and instantly recognize relationships they might otherwise miss."
Mashups -- which are a type of composite application built in a rich user environment -- are the most visible evidence that the Web has become a platform, explains Neil Macehiter, research director at Macehiter Ward-Dutton. "Because you now have a set of standards-based services delivered on the Web through freely accessible application programming interfaces (APIs)," he says, "people can combine different services to create new capabilities. And if there's something people can do, you can bet they will."
Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via publicly available APIs. The latest list of top APIs for mashups posted on ProgrammableWeb.com includes Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, Yahoo Maps, del.icio.us, Virtual Earth, Yahoo, 411Sync, Yahoo Geocode and eBay. The current crop of mashups is heavy on mixing data with mapping/geographic functionality. The new "platform" providers (Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and MS), which also support commercial application development, typically offer free APIs to facilitate noncommercial mashups. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (RSS or Atom) and JavaScript.
The Google Maps API is far and away the most popular; it's part of roughly half the known mashups. The API is designed to make it easy for others to embed the popular maps app in their own Web pages with JavaScript, and include many of the same features, including map overlays (markers, polylines) and display shadowed "info windows." The basic Maps API is a free beta service, which Google makes available for any Web site that is free to consumers.
It's still early days in the Web 2.0 world, and so far, mashups have been primarily a consumer and hobbyist phenomenon. Among the most popular examples are Virtual Places, Celebrity Maps and Weather Bonk. But for a toddler trend, the mashup has ranged remarkably far and wide, from FlickrSudoku, a mashup of a popular online sudoku player and Flickr, to The Bible Mapped, which mashes Google Maps and the ESV Bible lookup Web service to show locations of 200 places mentioned in the Bible.
And the Web 2.0 crowd hasn't been ignored the legal space. Todd Levy's Supreme Court Zeitgeist, for example, is a news and information-source mashup of data about the U.S. Supreme Court's activities. The so-far noncommercial site uses several free APIs and RSS feeds to draw information from Google News, del.icio.us and Technorati to provide news, tags and blogs all in one place. It won first place in SEOmoz's 2006 Web 2.0 Awards.
Another example is the Track Eminent Domain Abuses, which mashes the Ontok address plotter with Google Maps to track reports of eminent domain law abuse in the United States. It also provides pinpoints for related rallies, meetings and protests.
But the LawBase-Google Maps integration may well be the first mashup enhancement of a commercial legal-tech solution. In fact, it seems to fall into a brand new category, which industry watchers are calling "enterprise mashups."
"Consumers have been out there doing funky things with their browsers, and we're calling those things mashups," says ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg. "What's interesting to us about this phenomenon is how mashup capabilities are being used in businesses to leverage services in the context of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). We're calling those apps enterprise mashups."
ZapThink views the emergence of Web 2.0 as a natural evolution of the SOA, in which loosely coupled software services provide the business processes. Mashups that meet business needs will require SOA, Bloomberg explains, and the SOA infrastructure is necessary to guarantee the loose coupling. "Without that loose coupling, mashups are little more than toys from an enterprise perspective," he says.
An SOA provides another critical enterprise component: governance. "Mashups today -- what you might call public mashups -- are inherently ungoverned," Bloomberg says. "How many businesses are going to risk allowing their employees to assemble and reassemble business processes with no controls in place to ensure that the resulting apps follow corporate policies? Companies have to worry about privacy rules, Sarbanes Oxley, confidentiality -- all these policies that a business user has to follow. There's no way a company is going to let mashups into the organization unless it can make sure that people are following those kinds of rules."
Industry David Cearley, who covers emerging trends and Web technologies for Gartner Research, agrees: "Mashups will become a dominant way that companies build composite applications over the next five years," Cearley says. "However, that will happen within an SOA context."
Gartner listed Web 2.0 among the top technologies in its latest hype cycle report. The "hype cycle" looks at new technologies that are gaining attention and predicts a pattern of hype/disillusionment/adoption for each one. Among the most influential models under that rubric were mashups, which Gartner expects to reach maturity -- in other words, to transcend the hype -- in less than two years.
Given what the analysts are predicting, it seems a foregone conclusion that other legal tech providers will be (probably already are) exploring the brave new world of Web 2.0. But they should proceed with caution, says Bloomberg. The SOA picture is far from complete, and the risks to an enterprise of relying on a hunk of someone else's software over which they have no control are just too great.
"People are still struggling with SOA," he says. "They're still struggling to get the services to be loosely coupled, still dealing with security and governance and organizational issues, still coming to grips with the implications of reuse. So there are still a lot of nuts-and-bolts issues that companies still have to deal with."
"People are definitely taking this seriously," Cearley adds, "but mashups are still in the experimental stage right now. Enterprises are showing a lot of interest in the capability, but there are significant security, privacy, scalability and quality-of-service concerns that are significantly limiting the scope of mashups that people are willing to do today."
None of which is to say that there's any significant risk to the end user of a mashup like the LawBase-Google Maps integration, Cearley says. "The mapping mashups don't inherently have any security risk," he says. "There's some risk that the service might be unavailable at some time -- though that's very low with a large and popular application like Google Maps -- but even that wouldn't suddenly make the law library piece unusable."
And perhaps the status of Google Maps as the most mashed hunk of software on the planet is what led the company to introduce a new commercial mashup model. Google Maps for Enterprise makes the company's world famous map app available for commercial distribution with a full enterprise license and support. "With Google Maps for Enterprise," the company writes on its Web site, "businesses can integrate data and seamlessly build maps into applications of all types to create a high performance mapping experience."
"Google Maps is a great starting point for the mashup world," Bloomberg says. "But a few years down the road, people will be saying, Oh, do you remember the old days of Google Maps? The power of the mashup idea is far broader than just maps."
John K. Waters is a freelance journalist and author based in Silicon Valley. He serves as senior correspondent for Application Development Trends magazine. His books include "The Everything Computer Book," "John Chambers and the Cisco Way" and "Blobitecture: Waveform Architecture and Digital Design."
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