Legal Consulting Portal Processing 2,000 Requests Daily

Client

The Client is a legal consulting company.

Challenge

With large volumes of data on legal issues, the Client wanted to provide an online service for free and paid legal consultations that would feature the existing content and enable dynamic interaction between users and legal consultants. They commissioned ScienceSoft to create a web portal supporting the following functions:

• instant submission of questions on legal issues by any user
• expert consultations on the issues submitted by users
• ability to register as a legal advisor and provide answers to submitted questions (for those competent in legal issues)
• moderation of questions and answers
• tracking statistics

In addition to providing legal consulting, the portal was supposed to generate leads and promote involved experts as they give relevant advice. In the course of the project, more ideas were developed and implemented to expand the portal’s functionality.

Solution

ScienceSoft’s team was engaged in the project to deliver a WordPress-based web portal with custom modules. Apart from the required functionality (question submission, expert consultations, moderation of questions and answers, tracking statistics and registration of users and legal advisors), ScienceSoft also succeeded in implementing the following ideas for the Client:

• more features for paid consultations, including instant billing and support of a range of payment methods
• smart live chat available on every portal page
• Apache Solr-based search engine supporting automatic display of relevant answered questions under every new article posted
• API integration with another service of the Client
• a cross platform app on Ionic and Cordova, as well as an iOS based app
• a WordPress plugin for tight integration with the Client’s mobile apps
• mobile functionality for push notifications
• e-mailing capability based on Amazon SES

Results

As the project is completed, ScienceSoft keeps introducing new features to the portal as part of the maintenance phase to enhance functionality and improve user experience.

Currently, the system processes more than 2 thousand requests on a daily basis. The user base is continually growing, and thanks to the introduction of a new live chat, the number of leads generated by the portal increased by around 5 times compared to the previous version.

For now, the Client’s cooperation with ScienceSoft is in its 5th year.

Technologies and Tools

WordPress, PHP 5, Ajax, JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL, Amazon SES, Apache Solr