Lawyer Accounts
Launching a lawyer-facing product
As a contractor, I helped legal tech CrowdJustice launch their first true lawyer-facing product. In my efforts, I helped design new onboarding, verification and referral flows. Additionally, I revamped the UI of the existing alpha version of the platform.
CrowdJustice
Product Designer
January 8, 2018
Legal-tech startup CrowdJustice had revolutionised the legal industry by applying the Crowdfunding model to the legal system. CrowdJustice's vision is 'to make the law accessible to anyone'. People who previously couldn't afford to receive legal advice or raise cases can now make their cases publicly known and win cases.
The overarching goal for CrowdJustice was to scale its business. For CrowdJustice, scaling the business meant increasing the user base and amping the velocity of new cases on their platform. To achieve that goal, CrowdJustice had up until recently focused solely on attracting serving Case Owners. That decision had left the company underserving their perhaps most influential customer group: Lawyers.
At the time I came in the picture, one of CrowdJustice's main issues was that the company didn't have any direct product offering for its lawyers. All business processes involving lawyers were manual and labour intensive. Thus, not scalable. Everything from onboarding to verification to ongoing case management happened via phone calls and emails.
When I took over the project, the team at CrowdJustice had deployed a working version of Lawyer Accounts to a test environment. Large parts of the platform's core features were already in place but need some work still. More specifically, they hired me to work out ways to help automate onboarding and verification processes and to update the UI.
Note. My research processes on the Lawyer Account were rather unusual compared to conventional human-centred design methodologies. Lawyers are quite a difficult group to get to for a couple of reason 1) They’re extremely busy, 2) They charge a hefty fee by the hour meaning interviews were particularly costly to engage in (for both parties), 3) CrowdJustice was, at the time, a mostly sales-driven business with cold calls at the centre of company growth. In that environment, each ‘touch’ with a lawyer were prioritised towards sales rather than research. As such, I had to rely mostly on internal interviews with people who knew the lawyers particularly well. Luckily for me, a couple of CrowdJustice’s employees were lawyers themselves or came from a legal background.
For the initial research phase, I got access to a test version of the Lawyer Account to analyse. That helped me get an understanding of how everything was structured and to gauge how complex my task might be. I wanted to triangulate the constraints and opportunities by looking at the problem space through the lenses of Business, User and Technology.
I did initial project briefings with the Head of Product and talked through the company's business model. We talked about the company's quarterly targets and OKRs and how my work aligned with the overall company vision. I also interviewed people from the Operational team (Ops) as they were dealing with lawyer onboarding and verification daily. I’d have them walk me through their current work processes, sitting next to them while they were performing the tasks we were aiming to automate. Together with the Head of Ops, we developed a flow chart for the entire process, revealing a labour-intense journey with more touchpoints than needed. The Ops team let me know their frustrations with the emails back and forth, and the inevitably chasing down busy lawyers who didn’t provide the correct documentation.
Additionally, I set up interviews with people from Sales to get a clearer picture of the lawyers’ pains and motivations regarding CrowdJustice. I also got to sit in on Sales calls and attended a couple of sales meeting with them. I learned that the lawyers we were dealing with had rather conservative compared to users I've met in other industries. For example, many of them preferred paper-based workflows. Also, they were somewhat risk-averse and quite detail-oriented compared to other users. This proved which proved challenging to Sales - The mere concept of crowdfunding was foreign to most lawyers!
Finally, I interviewed the Head of Engineering so I could gauge the technical constraints and understand with the process that happened on the backend to register a new layer to CrowdJustice successfully. Together we discussed and agreed on the absolute minimum security measures we should include in the onboarding process.
By talking to the different stakeholders in the organisation, most of the arguments for launching the Lawyer Accounts were grounded in an inside-outside perspective.
From CrowdJustice’s perspective, the reasons why they needed to launch the product were clear:
But before I could feel confident in engaging with designs, I wanted to get clear how we helped the lawyers (or at least, how we thought the platform would help). Since I didn’t have access to the direct end-users, I turned to the management so we could define answers to some deceptively simple questions: Why would a lawyer sign up for an account at CrowdJustice in the first place? What pains are we aiming to relieve for our users?
We landed on the following value propositions that would allow the lawyer to:
A lot of my work consisted of mapping out current workflows to brainstorm over new, more effective flows. I created multiple iterations on the same journey, exploring different steps and channels. I found these maps were a great way to get feedback from the team and consider obstacles upfront before jumping into pixels. I would evolve and correct these maps as the projects progressed.
A good part of the pixel-design work consisted of overhauling the User Interface. In my estimation, there were a couple of key points I found wasn’t working visually in its current form: The visual hierarchy was off, layout and spacing seemed inconsistent, and pages contained unnecessary elements.
Elements were disproportionally large compared to their importance, and they all seemed to scream for attention. Most parts looked flat and blocky.
Elements seemed to be spaced with any transparent system or sense of rhythm.
Remnants of the consumer-facing site were present in the Lawyer Account. The whole product felt like it had been ported the content area of one of the marketing pages. This was problematic for a couple of reasons 1) Users could accidentally click out of the platform via the top nav 2) It created the conflicting navigational patterns, top nav for the marketing side, the embedded in the UI, the Lawyer account-specific navigation.
I deemed that the platform would benefit from UI updates and agreed with the management to implement a fresher design language on the platform.
In hindsight, my approach to reworking the UI back then wasn’t as methodical as it is today. I didn't set up meticulous type or spacing scales or developed a scalable colour palette upfront. Instead, I approached the task on an intuitive level, re-designing components as I worked through the flows.
The Lawyer Account was announced via email to a small, select group of lawyers who previously had run successful campaigns on CrowdJustice. Initially, the uptake was small, but the user base was also rather narrow (3 within the first of the week, 15 within the next two).
While I didn't get to see massive growth in Lawyers signing up, I did know how the platform opened up for new ideas and discussions about product development. Now, new features and initiatives target at lawyers could be confidently grown from the Lawyer Accounts.
A couple of months after my contract ended, I checked back in with CrowdJustice to hear how the platform was performing. The team were really excited to report great news about it. Mainly people from Sales had found the Lawyer Accounts to be a handy tool when dealing with new lawyers. With the new onboarding flow, Lawyers were now able to sign up during the sales call.
This meant 1) better business growth and 2) the labour-heavy signup processes went down significantly. Sales would report audible excitement from lawyers as they saw the interface for the first time. In their world, clunky software tools were the norm while CrowdJustice offered a sleek, modern product to fit into their workflows.
