Habitat
CRM platform to manage legal practice and client relationships
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Client
LegalVision
Duration
1.0: 4 Months
2.0: 2 Months
Team
Lawyers,
Head of legal,
CTO,
Product manager,
Engineers
👀 Background
LegalVision, as a law firm, operates across 3 jurisdictions with over 100 lawyers specialising in 18 legal areas. This diversity has resulted in a wide range of inconsistent processes. At that point, lawyers were using multiple tools for their work, primarily a customised SugarCRM.
📌 Problem
📣 Objective
Build custom software to accommodate all the functionalities that our lawyers need to complete their work, with a focus on improving case productivity and management.
🙌 My role
As the lead designer for this project, I led all design initiatives and navigated the process from 0 to 1. Collaborating with in-house subject matter experts, I designed a platform that completely transformed how lawyers work.
🚀 Business Impact
Discovery & Ideation
Existing system evaluation
Conducting a thorough analysis of the customised SugarCRM helped me identify obvious issues, which could be validated through further research.
User interviews
I interviewed 14 lawyers of varying seniority levels across 7 practice areas. Here are some of the key issues that emerged:
Related information is displayed on separate pages, the interface lacks structure
Processes are all over the place, lawyers need multiple tools to complete tasks
It’s hard to get an overview of what rest of the team is doing and what tasks are in my backlog
Business model mapping
One of the fundamental issues that kept coming up during the interviews was the difficulty of discovering information. To build something intuitive for users, I needed to understand how the business works:
The operation of the firm is supported by two pillars of client bases – Leads (new clients) and Opportunities (existing clients)
From there, legal cases are managed through this structure: Account > Project > Work Unit > Lawyer Activity
Information architecture renewal
I realised this was going to be a data-heavy piece of software. To ensure it made sense for lawyers from different practice areas with varying needs, I had to rethink and balance how the data was displayed.
Wireframing
Based on past experience, lawyers are not very open to change. The team wanted stakeholders to feel a sense of ownership with the new platform from the beginning, so I proactively created wireframes and gathered feedback as often as possible.
Usability testing
I categorised the testing feedback, some of which indicated that there were usability issues to fix and features to add before moving the design to high fidelity:
Is it possible to integrate client relationship management into the matter management
Tracking and billing work could be task repetitive and time consuming, we often lose track with traditional accounting software
Navigating from case to case and data to data is challenging, and being able to find information is key.
Delivery
Be productive and efficient
Modern-day law practice is still heavily focused on getting the job done, but there is almost nothing on the market to support high-level matter management.
While one might assume that lawyers are all verbal thinkers, my finding was that visualisation actually 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 board, I integrated LegalVision's key client communication process into the workflow, enabling lawyers to seamlessly manage client relationships while working on cases.
Case management
Visual backlog
Key data highlight
Process control by volume
Client Intake
Milestone indicators
Traffic light measure
Legal centred tracking and billing
Our lawyers used to rely on separate software to track and bill their work. These tools were overly complex and, more importantly, not tailored to legal workflows.
Tracking and billing are essential—lawyers want to be paid for their work. In Habitat, time tracking is accessible from two places: a global feature in the top bar and a dedicated calendar view. This allows lawyers to record work whenever and wherever they need to. Invoices are generated in a consolidated view, where lawyers can see related projects and clients, ensuring that no work is left unbilled.
Tracking
Lawyer activities categorised by type
Capacity management
Billing
Invoicing work by projects and clients
Overview to ensure no work left unbilled
Interactive and responsive data view
Besides many features Habitat offers 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 comes down to how accessible the data is. Some solutions include:
The table has a fixed first column and header, providing reference during scrolling.
Previewing records in list view enables lawyers to toggle between records faster.
Users can quickly glance at critical record information in the header of the details view before scrolling.
Data is categorised into related groups, allowing it to be filtered.
Lawyers oversee communication with external and internal stakeholders through a slide-in chatbox.
Records List
Responsive table
Nimble record preview
Record Details
Page header to summarise key information
Data group filter
💪 retrospectives
Startup does not follow well-defined design process
The work environment at LegalVision was fast-moving and ever-changing. With tight deadlines and limited resources, I needed to be outcome-driven and delivery-focused while influencing the team through design thinking. There was no rigid UX process, so I had to know when to conduct research and when to rely on gut feeling.
Good stakeholder management boosts teamwork
The main stakeholders for this project were the in-house lawyers. While this might sound approachable, they were always busy and often did not understand the value of design. On many occasions, I had to prevent collaborative workshops from turning into mere brief-giving sessions. At some point, I realised that users needed to see visual proposals in order to imagine possibilities and provide meaningful feedback. Once we reached consensus, I was able to gain valuable insights from their expertise, which ultimately drove the project’s success.
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