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Legal Tech Stack Architecture for Firms: Reference Model, Integration Patterns, and Governance

Design a resilient legal tech stack with clear layers, data contracts, and governance. We cover DMS/CLM/KM, integration patterns (events, APIs), identity, observability, and lifecycle management.

Legal Tech Stack Architecture for Firms: Reference Model, Integration Patterns, and Governance

Most firms evolved their tech stacks organically—useful, but brittle. A reference architecture aligns systems, data, and governance so you can scale innovation without introducing operational risk. This tutorial provides a pragmatic, CIO-ready model for legal tech stacks that balances productivity, control, and cost.

Reference model: layers that scale

1) Experience layer - Microsoft 365/Word with add-ins, email, Teams/Slack, CLM UI, eBilling portals - Firm portals (client-facing) and matter workspaces - Principle: keep attorneys in familiar tools; integrate workflows in-context

2) Application layer - DMS/ECM for documents and records - CLM for contract lifecycles and playbooks - Practice tools: eDiscovery, litigation support, IP management, entity management - Finance: time/billing, WIP, AR, pricing, profitability - Knowledge: search, precedent libraries, expert finders

3) Data and intelligence layer - Enterprise search and vector indices for RAG - Data warehouse/lakehouse for analytics - Feature store for ML, evaluation stores for AI quality metrics - MDM for clients/matters/parties; taxonomy/ontology for legal domains

4) Integration and automation layer - Event bus and durable queues; API gateway; ETL/ELT pipelines - Orchestrators (Temporal/Airflow/Step Functions) for long-running workflows - iPaaS for low-code connectors where reasonable - Policy decision points for routing and guardrails

5) Platform and security - Identity (SSO, MFA, RBAC/ABAC), secrets management, KMS - Observability: logs, metrics, traces, SIEM - FinOps: cost allocation, autoscaling policies, capacity planning - [Compliance](/legal-technology-solutions): retention, legal hold, eDiscovery, DLP

How BASAD helps: BASAD delivers reference architectures and turnkey integrations for legal environments: layered stack design with data contracts and taxonomy/ontology, event-driven integrations, idempotent APIs, and In-Word/CLM extensions, security architecture (identity, KMS, DLP), observability packs, and SLO dashboards, model governance and RAG pipelines with measurable quality.