The excitement was palpable at the project kick-off meeting. After all, it was a hard-won project. Experion’s first opportunity to build an end-to-end solution in the legal domain for a premier law firm based out of no-nonsense New York. The client used a legacy application that had many challenges in scaling up based on their current business requirements. They approached Experion to develop a new solution by leveraging our competence in re-engineering complex legacy systems.
As the call progressed, the client laid out their objectives and requirements, and it went something like this:
“The module should allow us to capture depositions, and as the case progresses, we need to be able to record subpoena related documents too, if any.”
Deposition? Subpoena? Latin had always seemed like a useless, dead language to our young, enthusiastic team of engineers. Until today, that is.
As the call progressed, the conversation continued to be peppered with Latin terminology that nobody in the team could understand. The project team, especially the Business Analysis (BA) team, was in deep trouble.
Realizing the anxiety that was threatening to overwhelm his team, the Senior Project Manager at Experion, in a stroke of genius, found an unconventional yet perfectly efficient solution. The best way to learn these Latin words, and understand how to use them in context, was to hear it being used in its home ground – an American courtroom. So as part of the homework for the project, everyone on the Business Analyst team was instructed to watch the NETFLIX Drama Series Suits.
Suits is an American legal drama television series, and it turned out to be the perfect classroom to understand the American legal system, as it follows the journey of an attorney who starts working for a New York law firm.
Watching Suits helped Experion’s business analysts grasp a better contextual understanding of words such as subpoenas, deposition, affidavit, class action, and discovery in the context of an American courtroom. This helped the team comprehend almost all the common legal terminologies used by the client with relative ease. Armed with the understanding gathered from watching SUITS, the Business Analyst team’s confidence improved dramatically (don’t mind the pun). Interviews and brainstorming sessions with the client stakeholders during the requirement elicitation phase of the project became easier than what the BA team expected after that first call.
This helped Experion’s project team to swiftly develop and deploy the web-based legal process management solution.As the project closed its first major phase on a triumphant note, the end-users were thrilled at how easy their lives had become with this solution in place. The attorneys’ promised drinks and dinner for the team when they came to visit New York.
Who’d have thought that something as inconsequential as watching a TV show could have a butterfly effect on so many lives? This only goes to prove how a little bit of unconventional thinking can yield spectacular results!