Project Blackbird

Background

Software competitors have key footholds either as legal research platforms or document management systems in the law firm or in-house legal markets. As these competitors gain market share, the cost and difficulty of entering the market will each increase. Cost will increase because new entrants will need a larger feature set to meet table stakes and difficulty will increase because competitors are clearly seeking to tie their contracts products to their other established offerings. This means fewer opportunities for "new" sales and that displacement would mean displacing both a contracts life cycle product solutions. Consequently, there is urgency to enter this market with a new legal product offering.

My Role

As the sole UX Manager and UX lead, I consulted and facilitated workshops with a team of business strategists, engineers, and legal subject matter experts over the last few months. Based on feedback from senior leadership, customer interviews, and competitive analysis from marketing research, I iterated on wireframes and prototypes in order to define and design a a MVP for a new platform for legal professionals.

Product Definition

Driven by marketing research, the team developed a working hypothesis, identified assumptions and then defined a value proposition to focus the design and development of the MVP.

A collaborative contract tool that helps corporate counsel go from chaotic contract generation and opaque obligation tracking to streamlined, insightful management of contracts.

Hypothesis

The in-house contract lifecycle management industry is rapidly consolidating around four large, established participants. The window for entry is rapidly closing.

Assumptions

Users will have their data stored locally or in another solution. We will need to migrate this into our solution.

Project level collaboration with outside counsel is a pain point

·this is a stand-alone business

· The rate of adoption for this mirrors legal products and will be slow

Value Proposition

A collaborative contract tool that helps corporate counsel go from chaotic contract generation and opaque obligation tracking to streamlined, insightful management of contracts.

Personas

At the beginning of the project workshop the team identified end users in the legal profession that would be considered the primary users of the legal platform. In order to focus the MVP so we could learn fast and pivot if necessary, we decided to focus on transactional attorneys as the initial persona.

End Users

Final MVP Features

After multiple customer interviews, market research and leveraging of in-house proprietary software development, the team was able to iteratively define what would be the MVP feature set. As the feature set was defined it was ranked by our customers through a survey and I created this word cloud to represent the features in terms of their popularity with our customers.

Story Map

One of the critical foundational documents I needed to compose was story map of features for the end user to successfully complete the features defined for our MVP platform. This story map allowed the team, to carefully approved all of the user stories before the design and prototyping stage began . It also allowed the development team to define what was needed in terms of security and system features.

User Flows

Though the platform has many features one of its core feature utilizes AI functionality which allows algorithms to be trained to extract the terms of a finalized agreement between two parties. As I began sketching for the prototype is was important for me to create diagram flows of the more complicated AI driven features like Terms Extraction and Clause Analysis.