Apple macOS 10.13 ships with both a recent version of Apache (2.4.x), as well as PHP (7.1.x), so you’ll just have to install MySQL and go through a few steps to get everything up and running.
Apache
First, you have to create a web root in your user account:
mkdir ~/Sites
Then add a configuration for your user:
sudo tee /etc/apache2/users/$USER.conf <<EOF
<Directory "$HOME/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
EOF
Now we have to make sure that our user config above actually gets loaded:
sudo tee-a /etc/apache2/other/$USER-settings.conf <<EOF
Include /private/etc/apache2/users/*.conf
EOF
If you want to use vhosts, you’ll also have to make sure that the vhosts config gets loaded:
sudo tee-a /etc/apache2/other/$USER-settings.conf <<EOF
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
EOF
After that, configure vhosts as necessary in /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf (don’t forget to remove the examples in there).
It seems that mod_rewrite no longer gets loaded by default, so we’ll also add that to our config:
To activate these settings you have to restart Apache:
sudo apachectl restart
MySQL
MySQL is not shipped with macOS, so we’ll have to install that manually. Instead of going for an installer package, we’ll use Homebrew. Once Homebrew is installed, installing MySQL is as simple as:
brew install mysql
If you want to start MySQL automatically, run:
brew services start mysql
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This post originally appeared under the title “The rise of ‘LegalTech’: a German market overview” on June, 24th 2016 as a guest post at tech.eu. The latest version of the LegalTech landscape has its own page.
Everyone in tech has heard about banks getting disrupted by - or more recently trying to partner with - startups in the FinTech space. A somewhat similar, although still much less visible, development is happening in the legal market - another highly regulated industry. Meet LegalTech.
Until very recently “tech” seemed to be something evil and awful that most lawyers wanted to beat with a stick. But very recently, at the 67th Conference of German Lawyers in Berlin, the so-called Anwaltstag, something unexpected happened: it was decided that the conference next year will take place under the motto “LegalTech and Innovation”. This year’s motto wasn’t about tech, but there was a panel discussion with the title “LegalTech versus Lawyers?”.
Looking at the title, especially the word versus and the question mark, this was maybe a little prelude for next year. There was heated discussion and some skepticism. Among others, lawyers were wondering if LegalTech might lower quality compared to tailor-made legal advice, how clients would still build trust in their lawyers if the personal interaction between them is partly replaced with tech, if tech-driven legal advice will negatively affect their compensations, and if the brand-building and valuable client relationships might shift from law firms to LegalTech companies.
But there also seemed to be genuine excitement from a few lawyers. If you look at how tech is currently used in many small and medium-sized law firms, that already is progress. Many firms still do not have computers on the desks of their professionals, case files are not digitized, and lawyers carry huge stacks of paper to court, rocking their fax machines like back in the Nineties, and instead of typing their legal prose into a text processor themselves -or at least using speech recognition-, they record audio cassettes and have staff to type it out - something that virtually every other industry has gotten rid of.
More often than not, these drafts are circled around for a few rounds if there are corrections - which are often also recorded onto an audio cassette and then typed again. If the lawyer is lucky then at some point there is a version that they sign and that can be sent with one of those fancy fax machines or via snail mail. Naturally nothing just magically happens in a law firm - if lawyers are finally happy with a draft and want to sign and send it, they have to decree what should happen next, which is a fancy way to say “Add a piece of paper for their assistants” which says “print the final version and two copies, bring them back to me for signature, put them into an envelope and mail them to the court, then put the whole file into a folder and put it back onto my desk for review in 4 weeks”. If this sounds ineffective and like a lot of wasted time to you, that’s because it is.
So what is LegalTech and why does it matter?
Legal Technology, also known as LegalTech, refers to technology and software that makes lawyers more efficient. But LegalTech does not stop there. Traditional law firms are confronted with an ever-growing number of startups working on specialized legal products, that are directly competing with law firms.
Just like traditional banks are under attack by FinTech startups that are unbundling banking, the same development is happening in the legal industry. LegalTech is still in its infancy and will evolve. It will also without doubt change the legal market forever. This is my attempt to categorize the current German LegalTech landscape:
A core motive is automating things that can be automated. So at the core of LegalTech are attempts to provide technology-based and standardized legal advice products for well-understood problems occurring in great volume. Instead of lawyers providing expensive hand-crafted legal advice, clients almost exclusively interact with software, handling the case intake, managing the whole process, keeping the client informed and generating the necessary documents. If anything, lawyers take care of handling exceptions and signing documents.
Tech companies offering such services, but also businesses in general with regular need for legal advice, will have need for LaaS (Lawyers-as-a-Service). Such legal process outsourcing, or LPO for short, is offered both in Lawyer-to-Lawyer (L2L) as well as Lawyer-to-Business (L2B) flavors and sometimes less (perconex.de, tools4legal.com, xenionlaw.com) and sometimes more technology driven (edicted.de, jurato.de). As companies keep pushing at optimizing their internal processes, LPO will most probably get more and more technology-driven. We’ll also see an “API-fication” of these services, which will enable to directly integrate them into other applications and automate processes that require legal advice.
Another exciting category is AI and eDiscovery. Companies in this space are trying to reduce the workload for lawyers when working with massive amounts of data and documents. Examples are products that automatically analyze contracts to allow risk assessments without having lawyers read through thousands of pages (leverton.de) and products that help lawyers to structure documents and create links between them (lexalgo.com, knowledgetools.de, normfall.de). Larger law firms are also conducting their own experiments in this category (e.g IBM Watson at Baker & McKenzie).
Gone are the days when law firms only worked cases in their geographic vicinity; that is where platforms come in that allow lawyers to find other lawyers to send to their court appointments (advoassist.de). With higher workloads and more competition, optimizing processes inside a law firm is also critically important, e.g. with easy billing and reporting software (busylamp.de) or effective hiring of legal talent (lawyered.me, legalhead.de, talentrocket.de). Most communication with clients still happens face to face, via phone, fax or email – so WebRTC-based video chat including features to exchange documents via the browser is a somewhat fresh approach (klientus.de). An applicable label for this category is maybe tools, because products in this category are used by lawyers and inside law firms.
Somewhat tangential is legal practice management (LPM) software. LPM solutions are the central hub of a law firm where case management, client management, billing, reporting, assigning tasks to staff, and potentially in the future also integration of other legal technology will happen. Current legal practice management solutions are still somewhat dated desktop applications – at least in Germany the shift to cloud-based solutions has yet to come. LPM solutions are also primarily used by staff today, but as these tools get more powerful and deal more with actual casework, future lawyers will start interacting much more with these applications themselves.
Still the most important tool for lawyers today though and among the first to go digital is the legal content itself. Legal databases offer the various legal texts (buzer.de, dejure.org, gesetze-im-internet.de), regulations (verwaltungsvorschriften-im-internet.de), case law (openjur.de, lexetius.de, rechtsprechung-im-internet.de), as well as a combination of those including legal handbooks and secondary literature (beck-online.de, juris.de, jurion.de). The shift towards open data is also in full swing in the legal industry, so more and more of this content will be freely available in the future, lowering the barriers to building services and applications around this content, but also affecting revenue streams of the established providers.
Sometimes all that is needed is a good contract. Companies in the smart contracts category are trying to cover this with varying levels of smartness (agreement24.de, formblitz.de, janolaw.de, smartlaw.de, synergist.io). For well-defined problems, smart contracts are a promising alternative, but as with technology-based and standardized legal advice products in the foreseeable future lawyers will still have plenty of work whenever things are a little more complex.
Somewhat similar to the previously mentioned legal process outsourcing solutions aimed at lawyers (L2L) and businesses (L2B) there are also Lawyer-to-Consumer (L2C) companies. These consumer legal advice products range from generic question and answer portals that connect consumers and professionals from various areas (justanswer.de), over specific legal question and answer portals (123recht.de, anwalt.de, anwalt24.de, escherhilft.de, frag-einen-anwalt.de) to companies offering legal advice packages for defined problems at a fixed price (advocado.de, legalbase.de).
There are exciting times ahead, both for lawyers and tech folks diving into LegalTech. I for one am looking forward to our lawyer-automation overlords. ;-)
Did I miss any german LegalTech companies? Disagree with the categorization? Should there be additional categories? I’d <3 to hear from you.
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OS X 10.11 ships with both a recent version of Apache (2.4.x), as well as PHP (5.5.x), so you’ll just have to install MySQL and go through a few steps to get everything up and running.
Apache
First, you have to create a web root in your user account:
mkdir ~/Sites
Then add a configuration for your user:
sudo tee /etc/apache2/users/$USER.conf <<EOF
<Directory "$HOME/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
EOF
Now we have to make sure that our user config above actually gets loaded:
sudo tee-a /etc/apache2/other/$USER-settings.conf <<EOF
Include /private/etc/apache2/users/*.conf
EOF
If you want to use vhosts, you’ll also have to make sure that the vhosts config gets loaded:
sudo tee-a /etc/apache2/other/$USER-settings.conf <<EOF
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
EOF
After that, configure vhosts as necessary in /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf (don’t forget to remove the examples in there).
It seems that mod_rewrite no longer gets loaded by default, so we’ll also add that to our config:
MySQL is not shipped with OS X, so we’ll have to install that manually. Instead of going for an installer package, we’ll use Homebrew. Once Homebrew is installed, installing MySQL is as simple as:
brew install mysql
If you want to start MySQL automatically, the Caveats section from the output of the following command will show you how:
brew info mysql
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Like previous versions of OS X, 10.11 also ships with PEAR, but unlike previous version (e.g. OS X 10.10 and OS X 10.9) it’s currently not possible to install it, due to permission issues. These issues seems to be caused by the new System Integrity Protection/rootless feature of El Capitan and are a known issue at Apple (rdar://problem/22294777).
I’ll update this post if I come across any new information about this.
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Amazon Web Services makes it quite easy to replicate MySQL instances running on their RDS service - but sometimes, you’ll still have to do things manually.
Migrating an unencrypted RDS instance into one that uses encryption (or vice versa) is such a case, because you (currently) cannot use an unencrypted snapshot to create a new encrypted instance and you can’t create an encrypted read replica of an unencrypted database.
Migrating an instance into the Frankfurt (eu-central-1) region is another example, where RDS currently won’t help you as you (currently) can neither copy snapshots into the Frankfurt region, nor create a cross-region read replica there (As of 2015-09-21 cross region read-replicas are supported in eu-central-1).
This post explains how to migrate using MySQL replication.
Disclaimer: This post is still a work in progress, I published it regardless to force myself to actually finish and polish it. So until you see this warning here, you should take everything with a grain of salt… well, you should do that anyway with everything you hear or read. ;-)
Overview
We want to migrate from a source RDS instance to our target instance. You should definitely practice this process if you are trying to migrate a production database without downtime.
To do this, we’ll have to go through the following steps:
Create a read replica of the source instance (in the same region as the source instance).
Use the read replica to extract a full dump of the source database (without putting heavy load on the source instance).
Spin up a new RDS instance as the target instance.
Import the dump from the source database.
Set up manual replication between the new target instance and the source instance.
Wait for replication to catch up.
Once replication finally catched up (and you’ve reconfigured your application to use the new instance), we’ll do some cleanup and get rid of the read replica we’ve created in step 1. as well as the source instance.
1. Create a read replica of your source database
You can do that via the aws cli or the web console.
2. Extract a database dump from the read replica
First, you’ll have to stop replication on the read replica by running the following SQL statement:
CALL mysql.rds_stop_replication;
Now we’ll have to figure out at which position we’ll later have to continue replication, once we’ve imported the dump again with the following SQL statement:
SHOW SLAVE STATUS;
Write the following values down, you will need them later:
Master_Log_File
Read_Master_Log_Pos
Next, prepare the database dump:
echo "SET autocommit=0;
SET unique_checks=0;
SET foreign_key_checks=0;" > source_dump.sql
Then create the actual database dump with mysqldump (it’s highly recommended to run your dump in a screen session; depending on your data, you may have to set --max_allowed_packet accordingly):
Creating the dump will take quite a while. Good night and see you tomorrow. ;-)
3. Start a new RDS instance as your target instance
You can do that via the aws cli or the web console.
4. Import your dump into the new target instance
To speed up the import a bit, you should set innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2 for the target instance.
Once that is done, it is time for importing the dump into the new instance (it’s highly recommended to run your import in a screen session; depending on your data, you may have to set --max_allowed_packet accordingly):
mysql -h target-db.region.rds.amazonaws.com -u username -p password < source_dump.sql
This will again take quite a while.
5. Set up manual replication between the new target instance and the source instance.
To set up replication, you’ll first have to create a replication user on the source instance:
GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE on *.* to 'username'@'%' identified by 'password';
Then head over to the target instance and configure replication (you’ll now need the values for Master_Log_File and Read_Master_Log_Pos that you wrote down earlier):
Now, we’ll start replication by running the following SQL statement on the target instance:
CALL mysql.rds_start_replication;
You can check if replication is actually running with SHOW SLAVE STATUS; on the target instance (slave_io_running and slave_sql_running should both be YES).
6. Wait for replication to catch up.
Once replication catched up, you should set innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit back to 1 again.
You’ll probably also want to migrate your db users from the source instance. You can get a listing of them on the source instance with:
SELECT user, host FROM user;
Next run the following statement for every user you want to migrate on the source instance:
SHOW GRANTS FOR 'username'@'%';
Then run the output of those queries on the target instance to create the users there and run FLUSH PRIVILEGES; after that.
Final steps and clean up
Now you should set your application into read-only mode or take it down for a little while (e.g. if you use auto_increment you don’t want duplicates because you already had writes into the new target instance, but are still replicating writes from the source instance with the same record id).
Configure your application to use the new target instance.
Make sure that replication fully catched up with SHOW SLAVE STATUS; on the target instance.
Stop replication by calling CALL mysql.rds_stop_replication; on the target instance.
After you’ve verified that everything is as it should be:
Bring your application up again or disable it’s read-only mode.
Terminate the read replica you used for dumping.
Terminate the source instance.
Disclaimer: This post is still a work in progress, I published it regardless to force myself to actually finish and polish it. So until you see this warning here, you should take everything with a grain of salt… well, you should do that anyway with everything you hear or read. ;-)
Any comments? Ping me on Twitter. 👉🏻 Get my newsletter for occasional updates. ✌🏻
