We are pleased to announce that in August 2020 the new, refreshed economic information system Beck KRS, which we were creating for the Polish branch of one of the largest and oldest legal publishing houses in Europe, C.H.Beck, had its premiere.

Case study

Beck KRS: https://testuj.legalis.pl/beckkrs/

Solution type: legal tech data platform

Year released: 2020

Project duration: 14 months of intensive work in close cooperation with the client

Client

https://www.beck.pl/

C.H.Beck is a renowned European publishing house, currently operating in Poland, Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania. It was founded in 1763, and its Polish branch was established in 1993. It cooperates with over 3,000 authors and experts, publishing publications in the field of law, taxes, economics as well as academic, application and foreign-language literature.

C.H.Beck is also well-known as a leader in legal tech solutions – the flagship solution of the Publishing House, Legalis Legal Information System, of which Beck KRS is a specialist module, is currently actively used by over 40,000 Polish judges, attorneys and legal advisers. The Legalis system is widely used not only in law offices and companies, but also in courts, ministries, public prosecutor’s offices and central offices.

Legacy system problems

The Beck KRS system was created in 2010 and for those times it was a leading solution on the market. Its primary source of information were the announcements of the Court and Economic Monitor (MSiG).

However, a decade is a long time both when it comes to IT and e-governance. The technologies in which the system was written became obsolete and hindered both the module’s compatibility with the entire Legalis System, as well as significantly complicating its development – connecting additional data sources, such as e-KRS and introducing new functionalities. Moreover, the system generated errors that cost a lot of effort and resources to fix.

As a result, the technological debt of the once very good system began to build up.

Customer expectations

Focused on the future, C.H.Beck was well aware that in place of the legacy system, it needed a completely new system – written in modern technologies, fast, reliable and extended with data from the National Court Register KRS.

The emphasis was also placed on creating a uniquely functional way of illustrating personal and capital connections with the possibility of viewing historical changes and entering further levels of relations between entities. The new Beck KRS was also supposed to have a more accurate, user-friendly entity search engine and a refreshed interface, as well as better integration with the entire Legalis System.

Solution 

What have we done?

The new version of the Beck KRS system was created based on the hexagonal architecture, the modularity of which allows for flexible changes in the future, while ensuring very fast and reliable communication. The backend of the application was prepared in the latest version of PHP 7.3, and VueJS is responsible for frontend support. To maximize the speed and accuracy of the search engine for entities, people and document content, we used a proven and battle-hardened full-text search technology based on the Apache Lucene engine – it gave reliability and great possibilities in terms of query configuration and the volume of searched data.

We have implemented a completely new way of downloading data, expanding the list of sources used by the platform. The new Beck KRS aggregates data not only from the MSiG itself, but also from e-KRS (excerpts from the National Court Register and financial statements), thanks to which the current system includes absolutely all entities registered in the National Court Register. In addition, the system has been enriched with information on EU subsidies and public procurement, as well as information on the VAT status and debt exchanges.

The biggest challenges of the project

Technologies

Client about cooperation in the project

“We evaluate the cooperation with Transparent Data very positively and we hope that it will be continued in subsequent years. In the project, we combined the knowledge and product experience of C.H.Beck with Transparent Data’s competences in the area of ​​aggregation and processing of economic data.

The team from Poznań showed the technical skills and flexibility necessary for such the synthesis might work. As an additional advantage, I consider the flat team structure and direct contact with programmers. “

Paweł Oleszek – Legal Tech Manager, Wydawnictwo C.H.Beck