Habitat
CRM platform to manage project workflows 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
🙌 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.
🔍 Background
I joined LegalVision as their first designer, with a mission to help our lawyers fulfill the promise we made to our clients: to deliver cost-effective legal services at a high standard.
As a law firm operating across three jurisdictions, with over 100 lawyers and expertise in 18 legal areas, LegalVision's diversity has shaped a wide range of workflows and approaches to managing legal matters across teams.
📌 Problem
📣 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.
🚀 Business Impact
Research
What are the lawyers expecting
I interviewed 14 lawyers of varying seniority levels, asking key questions related to their current and future states. Here are some key takeaways:
A lot of related information is displayed on separate pages
The interface lacks structure, resulting in low usability
It’s hard to get an overview of what rest of the team is doing and what tasks are in my backlog
Lawyers need multiple external tools to complete tasks
Explore LegalVision business model
LegalVision operates on two pillars: Growth and Legal. The former focuses on customer acquisition and retention, while the latter is responsible for providing legal advice and managing legal projects. By integrating this structure into the system, Habitat is better equipped to support the teams in doing their best work.
Solution
Be more productive and efficient
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.
Matter management
Visual backlog
Key data highlight
Process control by volume
Client Intake
Milestone indicators
Traffic light measure
Make tracking and billing legal Centred
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, we want to be paid for our work. In Habitat, time tracking is accessible from two places: a global feature in the top bar and a dedicated calendar view. The former allows recording without navigating away from current view, the latter provides an overview categorised by activity type. Invoices are generated in a consolidated view, where lawyers can see related projects and clients, ensuring 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
Data-heavy platform should be Interactive and responsive
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 before scrolling
Data is categorised into related groups, allowing it to be filtered
Lawyer oversees communication with external and internal stakeholders through a slide-in chatbox
Records List
Responsive table
Nimble record preview
Record Details
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.
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