Rocket Lawyer Delivers Agile, Secure and AI-Powered Legal Services at the Edge

Key results

• Achieved zero-friction backend and CMS migrations that remain entirely invisible to end users

• Centralized edge security with Next-Gen WAF, proactively blocking threats and offering virtual patches for CVEs like Log4j before they reach vulnerable systems

• Eliminated engineering silos by allowing developers to seamlessly collaborate on and deploy infrastructure-as-code updates

• Enabled instant configuration pushes, rapid cache purges, and immediate rollbacks without waiting on operational delays

• Empowered content teams to autonomously manage routing and cache updates, removing infrastructure bottlenecks

The challenge

Rocket Lawyer is an online service helping everyday people and small businesses with their legal needs. Because users often turn to the platform in high-stakes moments—like generating a medical power of attorney from a hospital room—reliability and customer experience are critical.

As Brion Moss, Director of Cloud Engineering at Rocket Lawyer, put it: “We're a service that people use because they need it now. The last thing they want is to watch that browser spin.”

To elevate the experience, the company introduced Rocket Copilot, an AI-powered legal assistant that delivers instant answers, flags contract risks, and generates business assets—with the option to connect to an attorney via video or phone for deeper counsel. Running this AI-and-human hybrid demands a network where speed, security, and uptime are non-negotiable.

Prior to partnering with Fastly, Rocket Lawyer was held back by legacy infrastructure that slowed development speed. Configuration updates and rollbacks were a constant source of frustration, with the team stuck waiting on dragging purges from their former CDN.

Furthermore, traditional setups forced the infrastructure team to silo operations away from developers. To support dynamic, compute-heavy capabilities like their generative AI tools and automated features, Rocket Lawyer identified a clear need for a flexible, developer-friendly solution that moved at the speed of their business. 

The solution

Fastly provided the precise technical toolkit Rocket Lawyer required. “With Fastly, it’s infrastructure as code first, it’s API first, it’s something you can manage programmatically,” Moss noted. “You can tell that it was built by developers for developers from day one.”

This design allowed Rocket Lawyer to deeply integrate the platform into how they run and deploy applications. 

• Breaking down engineering silos: With an API-first framework, the cloud engineering team opened up their infrastructure-as-code patterns to the broader development group. Developers can now write their own VCL changes, submit pull requests, and collaborate as true technical partners. 

• Dynamic routing for seamless migrations: Fastly acts as the critical outer edge routing layer. During complex backend transitions—such as API rewrites to support new AI functionalities—Fastly allows the team to slice traffic at a fine-grained layer. “Fastly gives us a smooth way to transition our customers from one experience to another without any friction,” Moss said.

• Empowering content teams: The infrastructure team handed routing capabilities directly to the content team via Fastly dictionaries. Content creators can now update entries to push new pages live, and instantly self-purge the cache without requiring dedicated engineering support. 

Security: High efficacy without emergency 

Security and privacy are non-negotiable for an online legal platform handling sensitive contracts and confidential AI-assisted conversations. Rocket Lawyer transitioned to Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF to centralize their security posture at the network edge, filtering malicious traffic before it ever reaches the core application layer. 

Rocket Lawyer uses the Next-Gen WAF to proactively mitigate threats ranging from OWASP-style attacks to high criticality 0-day CVEs.. “When Log4j came out, two things became clear,” Moss said. “One, we were absolutely vulnerable. We had application code that was vulnerable to the Log4j exploit. And two, we didn't need to care because the Next-Gen WAF blocked it.”

“We were able to treat the Log4j exploit with urgency, but not as an emergency because we already knew we had that protection in place,” he added.  This immediate protection allowed via the Next-Gen WAF’s virtual patches them to patch their internal systems securely without experiencing an active operational crisis.

Key takeaway

Instead of a forced methodology, Moss noted, Fastly provides a well-stocked toolbox for Rocket Lawyer to solve performance and security problems on their own terms. 

“With Fastly, you get the flexibility to run your business the way you want to run it and to build your applications the way you want to build it,” he said. 

As Rocket Lawyer continues to grow, rewrite APIs, and evolve its application stack to support advanced AI capabilities like Rocket Copilot, Fastly remains integral to its architecture. By cleanly hiding backend complexities and ensuring seamless transitions, Fastly empowers Rocket Lawyer to focus on its primary mission: delivering flawlessly executed, AI-accelerated legal support to the people who need it most.