Cordell Practice Management Group


Cordell Practice Management Group (CPMG) maintained multiple external websites pertaining to men’s divorce as well as an internal-facing website that allowed Cordell and Cordell lawyers to enter client information, track their billable time, produce invoices, and track lawyer performance through client surveys and post-litigation feedback. There were also multiple background processes, written in multiple computer languages, and other backend 3rd party applications that were a part of the record-keeping activities and required two-way communication with the internal front-end website. When I first started, most of the development activity was occurring directly in the production environment, which proved problematic and in need of change. Upon my departure, four separate environments had been established with consistent database naming conventions throughout, environment-specific variables had been separated from the executable code and stored in separate configuration files, and guidance had been given on steps to continue that design. This setup allowed them to promote code from one environment to the next without any modification or “localization” of code. There were also measures being taken to control access into the TST and PRD environments so that code promotion could be better regulated.


My Responsibilities, as Lead Developer, included:

  • Leading the development team in the modification of the internal website and background jobs.
  • Fulfilling the duties of Scrum Master and lead twice-weekly standup meetings with members of the development and data services teams.
  • Mentoring junior developers and technical support team members in an effort to identify software bugs.
  • Assigning the project manager role for identifying and prioritizing the almost 200 items on the company’s project backlog which was reduced to under 100.
  • Working with multiple department heads to more accurately define the level of effort, impact on business, and priority of the top 50 projects on the backlog.
  • Identifying 500+ TODO items within the physical JavaScript and Angular code.
  • Modifying the biweekly billing template to coincide with the new billing cycle.
  • Modifying PERL scripts used in background and backend credit card processing.
  • Documenting basic development standards that members of the dev team would need to follow.
  • Creating CPMG specific Non-Functional Requirements, Software Requirements, and Technical Specification documents to accompany the Business Requirements Document so that future development activities could be better documented and development cycles could be shortened.
  • Developing the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to capture the data from the web services and display that data on the target platforms.

Cordell PMG