Habitat
CRM platform to manage project workflows and client relationships
Client
LegalVision
Team
Lawyers (inc. head of legal)
CTO
Product manager
Engineers
🔍 Background
I joined LegalVision as their first designer. My mission was to help our lawyers fulfil the promise we made to our clients: to deliver cost-effective legal services with a high standard.
As a law firm, LegalVision operates across 3 jurisdictions, accommodates over 100 lawyers, and specialised in 18 legal areas. This diversity has influenced the various ways of working and managing legal matters across different teams.
📌 Problem
Current off-the-shelf software is hard for lawyers to use and difficult for developers to customise.
📣 Objective
Build custom software ‘Habitat’ to accommodate all the functionalities that our lawyers need to complete their work, with a focus on improving case productivity and management.
🙌 My role
🚀 Business Impact
dashboard
Simple kanban overview for complex work and management
Modern-day law practice still heavily relied on tools like Microsoft Office, Google Drive, but there was almost nothing in the market to support high-level practice management.
While one might assume lawyers were all verbal thinkers, my finding was that visualisation helped them work more efficiently. In fact, many were using Trello to fill the gap, which led to the idea of a kanban-like dashboard.
To go beyond a typical kanban, I integrated the key client communication process into the workflow, so that lawyers were able to seamlessly manage client relations while working in cases.
Visual backlog
Key data highlight
Process control by volume
Milestone indicators
Traffic light measure
Billing
Visualise boring billing process
Our lawyers used to utilise separate software to bill their activities. They were more complex than necessary, and more importantly, not legal centred.
In Habitat billing had two steps: time tracking and invoice generation. Time tracking was embedded as a global feature in the top bar, allowing lawyers could access it anytime without navigating away from current view. To better manage capacity, there was an option to visualise it in a calendar view. Lawyers generated invoices in a dedicate view where they could choose to bundle work by projects or clients, which ensured no work left unbilled.
Lawyer activities in calendar view
Capacity management
Invoice work by projects or clients
Overview to ensure no work left unbilled
Records list and details
Access to key information in an ocean of data
Besides many features Habitat offered to streamline legal work, my priority was to address the issue of messy data hierarchy in current off-the-shelf software. One of the keys to success came down to how accessible the data is. Some solutions include:
Table has first column and header fixed, providing reference during scrolling
Previewing record in list view enables lawyer to toggle records faster
User can have quick glance at critical record information in the header of the details view
Data is categorised into related groups, allowing it to be filtered
Lawyer oversees communication with external and internal stakeholders through a slide-in chatbox
Responsive table
Nimble record preview
Page header to access key information
Data group filter
💪 retrospectives
Building products for a startup usually does not follow any particular route or well-defined design process
Work environment in LegalVision was fast-moving and ever-changing. The deadline was tight, and as the sole designer, I needed to prove myself as outcome-driven, prioritised delivery while influencing the team with design thinking. There was no rigid UX process, just swift product strategy.
Stakeholders management is the key to success
The main stakeholders for this project were the in-house lawyers. This might sound approachable, but they were always busy, and usually did not understand the value of design. As many times as I could recall, I had to avoid the collaborative workshops from turning into a brief-giving session. Users needed to see proposals closed to the end product in order to give feedback. Once we found consensus, I started gaining valuable insights from their expertise, which drove the project to ultimate success.