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CASE STUDIES
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Magiclist
Automating Document Organization and Triage: Engineering Magiclist's Next Stage of Growth
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OVERVIEW
Turning Days of Document Work Into Minutes
Magiclist is a Canadian legaltech platform that automates one of litigation's most time-consuming tasks: generating a List of Documents for discovery. The platform automatically renames uploaded files with legally descriptive names, detects duplicates, and produces a shareable document package with one click, recovering days of lost productivity for law firms across Construction, Personal Injury, and Commercial Litigation.
After gaining initial traction, Magiclist needed a new technical partner to take ownership of the platform and push it forward. SYNQ Labs came in to assess the existing codebase, clear the backlog of high-priority improvements, and build the infrastructure needed to onboard new law firms at scale.
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CHALLENGES
The Bottlenecks Holding Back Growth
The platform had outgrown its original architecture. The existing Django codebase was accumulating technical debt, making new feature development slow and risky on a system actively used by real law firms.
Law firm users also needed more control over how they navigated and managed their documents. The existing interface didn't have the depth required for firms handling heavy litigation workloads.
The most pressing growth constraint was operational: the team was manually creating accounts for every new client. Every law firm onboarded required direct intervention. That model had a ceiling, and Magiclist was approaching it.
How do we modernize a production legal platform without breaking it, while simultaneously shipping the features that unlock the next stage of growth?
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SOLUTIONS
The Bottlenecks Holding Back Growth
Codebase Restructuring and Frontend Migration: We started by auditing and restructuring the existing Django codebase, then led the migration to React, establishing a modern, scalable frontend foundation that dramatically improves development velocity and positions Magiclist for long-term product growth.
Matter Management UX: With the foundation solid, we shipped a suite of improvements that gave lawyers meaningful control over how they organize, navigate, and manage large document sets across matters, addressing the friction points that their most active users had surfaced.
Multi-Tenant User System: We designed and built a full role-based access control system with four permission tiers. Law firms can now manage their own teams, creating matters, inviting clients, sharing and revoking access, and organizing work by company, all without requiring any intervention from the Magiclist team. This transforms Magiclist from a tool they operate into a platform that operates itself.
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RESULTS
A Platform Built to Scale
Taking ownership of an existing production system is never simple, but the outcome speaks for itself. Magiclist now runs on a modern, React-powered frontend that gives the team the velocity to ship features fast. Law firms can onboard, manage their teams, and organize their work entirely on their own, with no manual setup required on Magiclist's end. The platform went from a single-firm tool to one that can serve an unlimited number of firms simultaneously, each with their own users, matters, and access controls.
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Unified, scalable platform
4-Tier
Permission system for full firm self-management
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Days saved per matter on document production
My company retained SYNQ Labs to build out legal SaaS features to streamline our client intake and document management. The SYNQ team has very strong technical skills and ensured all new features were properly tested before they were rolled out. Highly recommended.
Ouran Li
Principal Lawyer
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CASE STUDIES
