Case study · Legal tech
From hours-long releases to five-minute deploys
Attorney Share is the marketplace where US law firms send, receive and track case referrals. CoNDENSE.tech rebuilt the AWS platform underneath it while it stayed live: containers, infrastructure as code, and a production-like environment for every change.
400 ms
p95 response time, down from 1.5 s
<5 min
from merge to release, down from hours of manual work
<10 min
to bring up a production-like environment for a pull request
100%
infrastructure availability in the first three months live
Attorney Share production platform, measured after the 2024 rollout.
The challenge
A growing marketplace on a release process that couldn't keep up
Attorney Share matches each case to the right firm by practice area and jurisdiction, and keeps its status in sync with the case management systems law firms already use. The platform is built on Directus, and as more firms joined, traffic grew with them.
The application ran on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Every release needed a developer to build, package and deploy it by hand, which took hours. There was no redundancy, so a single failure could take the platform down, and response times climbed as usage grew. Changes moved through fixed dev, staging and production environments one after another, so features queued up waiting for a place to be tested.
The brief was to rebuild the infrastructure for scale and reliability, and to give the team a release workflow closer to what platforms like Vercel offer. The platform was in production throughout, so none of it could interrupt the firms using it.
The solution
The same platform, rebuilt underneath while it ran
Elastic Beanstalk gave way to containers, every resource was described as code, and the fixed chain of environments was replaced by one that appears when a pull request opens and disappears when it closes.
1
Containers on ECS Fargate
Directus and its background tasks run as containers on ECS Fargate, with autoscaling that follows traffic and no servers to patch.
2
Everything as code
The whole platform is defined with AWS CDK. GitHub Actions builds, tests and releases both the infrastructure and the application, so a merge is a release.
3
An environment per pull request
Every pull request gets its own production-like environment, with its own address and database. Two Lambda custom resources let them share one load balancer and one Aurora cluster, so costs stay flat however many are open.
4
Built to stay up
Aurora PostgreSQL across Availability Zones with automatic failover, a Redis replication group, data services in subnets with no internet route, and Cloudflare in front with stricter WAF rules.
Production moved over incrementally, with each step verified before the next one started, so the firms on Attorney Share never saw the switch. Attorney Share's developers were part of the work throughout, so the team owns the new workflow as much as the infrastructure.
CloudWatch alarms watch the application, the database and the background tasks, and post to the team's Slack and Discord. Since the rollout the infrastructure has been run under a maintenance agreement, kept current as the platform grows.
Releases holding your team back?
CoNDENSE.tech modernizes AWS platforms in production, from the first assessment to infrastructure your developers ship on every day.