New Zealand Law Society Modernising New Zealand’s legal registry

The New Zealand Law Society (Te Kāhui Ture o Aotearoa), founded in 1869, is the national regulator of the legal profession in New Zealand. Headquartered in Wellington with 13 regional branches, NZLS provides support, training, and education to lawyers nationwide.

Throughout the project, Fujitsu employed Azure DevOps pipelines to streamline development and ensure quality through comprehensive performance testing. While the underlying technologies were overhauled, the user interface remained unchanged to avoid disrupting the established workflows of both internal and external users.

The implementation was carefully managed by Fujitsu to minimise the impact on daily operations. “The migration was well-managed and conducted outside of business hours, so there was no disruption for any user,” said Hunter.

The New Zealand Law Society’s registry system is accessed annually by over 17,000 lawyers to manage their certifications and pay fees. However, the system, built in 2007, posed significant challenges due to its ageing infrastructure.

Running on legacy frameworks such as Java 7, Spring 2, and Hibernate 2, the application could not integrate with modern cloud services and there were increasing security risks due to its unsupported components. The system’s database had grown to over 800GB, causing backups to take up to 16 hours. This affected operational efficiency, especially during peak periods when lawyers needed to renew their practising certificates.

When Kevin Hunter joined as IT Manager in 2021, he quickly uncovered these challenges and more. “There was no application and strategic management,” he said. “The IT environment was in a bit of disarray and security was an immediate challenge.”

Role-based access control was non-existent, allowing Law Society staff to access records that were out of bounds to them. Potential data breaches were a growing concern, with incidents of documents being accidentally sent to the incorrect recipients. The system’s password system had no multifactor authentication, and lawyers could set passwords with minimal complexity.

“The internal staff also did a lot of firefighting because the system’s reports were not validated,” Hunter said. “They were not getting the correct data they needed, for example, the number of lawyers by region and role. Sometimes, it would be days before we’d actually get the numbers.”

The situation was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted a hasty migration to the cloud. “The data was lifted from the on-premise Fujitsu data centre and put into Azure with no real planning or controls,” Hunter said.

The Law Society worked with Fujitsu to give the registry a complete makeover. The Fujitsu team first created a proof-of-concept to demonstrate performance improvements, then executed the modernisation in three strategic phases.

The first phase focused on upgrading the core application to modern frameworks, including a transition to Java 11 and Spring Boot. “This would give us the ability to start doing a lot more reporting, to be able to get data into our Microsoft Dataverse application to make it easier for reporting,” said Hunter.

The second phase involved migrating to Azure SQL, incorporating blob storage for attachments which reduced the database size by 90%. Blob storage is Microsoft’s object storage solution for the cloud and is optimised for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. This change eliminated the backup job conflicts that had previously plagued the system and reduced the backup time from 16 hours to just one hour.

The final phase enhanced security by deploying Azure Active Directory B2C, a Microsoft customer identity access management solution that takes care of the scaling and safety of the authentication platform. It monitors and automatically handles threats like denial-of-service, password spray, or brute force attacks.

Throughout the project, Fujitsu employed Azure DevOps pipelines to streamline development and ensure quality through comprehensive performance testing. While the underlying technologies were overhauled, the user interface remained unchanged to avoid disrupting the established workflows of both internal and external users.

The implementation was carefully managed by Fujitsu to minimise the impact on daily operations. “The migration was well-managed and conducted outside of business hours, so there was no disruption for any user,” said Hunter.