Legal Services │ Service Design

Reimagining an AI-Powered Legal Intelligence Service

A modernized user experience and product vision that brings the power of AI to a legal search service

“Wovenware unleashes the power of AI and redesigns the user experience to help our partner compete in a competitive marketplace.”

Identifying opportunities together

Legal professionals with busy caseloads and schedules don't always have the bandwidth or resources to spend inordinate amounts of time looking up key legal information, but it’s essential to their profession.

Our client had created the leading legal intelligence and search platform for several Latin American countries. But over time, user expectations had changed, and large players like LexisNexus were growing, with new features, functionality and services that appealed to users. Also, searches were increasingly being done using free services like Google. Our client’s customers were canceling subscriptions, as they turned to these new options.

Our client’s goal was to increase usage, by providing a superior way for users, such as lawyers, judges, government officials, and non-legal people, to easily find the latest relevant information related to any legal matter in the most accessible, fast, and reliable way. And, the platform needed to be customized, so that users felt that it was made especially for them.

Wovenware was asked to help in two ways: first, to explore ways to overhaul the search technology, looking at things like visual search and search taxonomy. Second, to help reimagine the overall product and redesign the user experience in ways that leverage their strengths and address emerging user needs.

Setting a goal for success

We reached into our business and service design toolbox to develop a rapid 8-week Sprint, combining human-centric design and requirements gathering. We started with two online sponsor sessions created to help our client share relevant data on the business and platform performance, as well as to create a better challenge statement to guide our efforts and define key issues to be addressed and opportunities to be explored.

Our challenges and learnings

We then shifted our attention from inside knowledge to an outside-in focus as we engaged current, past and potential users of our clients’ platform in one-on-one interviews to understand current usage of the platform, user needs and tasks. In parallel, business designers and technical leads researched competitive and comparative experiences and emerging trends in legal intelligence and search services as well as concepts around successful search taxonomy and specifically, visual search.

The Wovenware Approach

Several things became clear in our design research. First, several patterns of searching emerged each with different user intentions and needs. For example, users sought to have ways to save searches and easily go back and forth in a search without losing progress or their starting point. If they went down a wrong path they wanted to be able to backtrack. Secondly, having the ability to see search results visually would give users greater context in a search and help them refine searches by seeing relevant associations. Finally, while the search was the primary value of the platform, other services, such as continuing education, were of interest to users and in need of a redesign.

We synthesized findings into a Journey Map with highlighted areas of opportunity along with three key personas critical to success. We also ran a workshop to brainstorm ideas around several challenge questions. This resulted in 30+ new concepts put into a Future State Journey and prioritized it against business objectives and technical difficulties. As part of the deliverables, we also created Hi-Fi wireframes as part of an interactive redesign of the proposed website, for the client to evaluate and get a complete sense of what a new branded experience would look like. Additionally, we created a high-level systems architecture designed for a better legal intelligence system addressing usability and navigation issues.