Customer Case
Norton Rose Fulbright is no ordinary law firm. With over 4,000 employees worldwide, NRF provides legal and technical services across multiple global industries - and in recent years, the pressure to innovate has never been higher.
But behind the scenes, the way applications were being built wasn't keeping up. Business departments communicated their needs to IT, who developed solutions in isolation - far removed from the people actually experiencing the problem. The result was slow development cycles, high resource costs, and applications that didn't truly solve the issues at hand.
The challenges were clear and new approach to application development was needed:
Under the guidance of Al Hounsell, Director of Strategic Innovation & Legal Design, NRF left traditional development methods behind and formed a fusion team for low-code development. By bringing together employees from various departments - legal professionals, business users, and IT - into a single collaborative team, NRF ensured that the people closest to the problem were empowered to build the solution.
Using Betty Blocks, the fusion team adopted agile development - conceptualizing, building, and launching applications rapidly as Minimum Viable Products. This meant issues were caught early, iterations accelerated, and development risk was eliminated.
The results spoke for themselves. NRF's most recent project - a client-facing application for a large financial institution - automated the drafting of legal documents across hundreds of loan profiles. Each profile previously required more than 20 legal documents and took lawyers an average of 30 hours to complete manually. Together with the client, NRF built a fully validated prototype in the first week and delivered a working application in just two weeks.
NRF needed more than a development tool - they needed a platform that could empower non-technical legal professionals to build enterprise-grade applications, safely and at speed. Betty Blocks delivered exactly that.
With Betty Blocks, NRF is able to exceed client expectations on timing and delivery, easily onboard new developers, and integrate all applications with core business systems through seamless API connectivity.
The platform's low-code foundation means business users are fully in control of development, while IT maintains the governance and oversight they need. Rather than outsourcing innovation to a disconnected IT department, Betty Blocks gave NRF's fusion team the power to build solutions that map directly onto real business problems - fast, flexible, and without technical debt.
