Designing a focused workspace for document-heavy case review
I translated discovery findings from a fragmented legal filing process into journey maps, workflow requirements, and an evolving case-review prototype for attorneys and operations teams.
Status: In progress — mid-fidelity workflow development
- Client
- Confidential debt-purchasing and legal-operations company
- My role
- Primary product designer responsible for research synthesis, journey mapping, workflow definition, interaction design, prototyping, and the product-specific design library
- Team
- Product manager
- Stakeholders
- Represented through the team: CEO, CTO, and attorney-management lead
- Users
- Attorneys
- Status
- In progress
- Confidentiality
- Company, legacy platform, data, and interface details are anonymized
On this page
Overview
Attorneys were moving cases through a process spread across legacy software, manual entry, paperwork, and operational handoffs. The primary case tool was slow, inconsistent, and difficult to learn. New attorneys spent about a week onboarding to it and continued discovering unfamiliar behaviors after they were already using it.
I joined after the initial discovery workshops. My responsibility was to turn the research into a usable product direction: synthesize the findings, map the journeys for different tasks, define the requirements the interface needed to support, and design the interactions that would connect the process.
The work is still in progress. I am currently using low and mid-fidelity prototypes to test the attorney review workflow before the team commits to detailed visual design and implementation.
Why the work mattered
The case filing process contains many documents, rules, and possible paths. Attorneys do not necessarily remain in the platform all day. They need to enter, understand the current case quickly, complete focused work, and leave. A tool that displays every available detail at once may be complete, but it can make the immediate task harder to see.
How I made sense of it
The central design question
How might we give attorneys enough space to focus on the document or decision in front of them while keeping the rest of the case only a few intentional actions away?
The working hypothesis is that a stable workspace that progressively reveals supporting information will help attorneys orient themselves faster than a dense interface that keeps all case information visible at once.
That is a hypothesis, not yet an outcome. The prototype review is testing whether hiding secondary information supports focus or removes context attorneys need.
Designing for focus without removing context
I did not optimize for the fewest possible clicks. I focused on whether each action moved the attorney toward the task without forcing them to reorient. Supporting information could move out of the way during document review, but it needed to remain predictable and close enough to retrieve without breaking concentration.
Adding AI without removing attorney responsibility
The team is considering AI support for a few tasks:
- Ask questions about the current case
- Compare the case with past filings
- Retrieve relevant rules and regulations
- Autofill selected information
Whatever is built, the attorney stays responsible for the filing. The design has to:
- Make the source of an answer or autofilled value visible
- Distinguish retrieved facts from generated interpretation
- Let attorneys review and edit information before submission
- Never imply that the system has completed legal review
- Preserve a record of what was suggested, changed, and submitted
- Define what happens when sources conflict or no reliable answer is available
These are requirements, not confirmed features. I’m not presenting any of them as final until requirements and technical feasibility are confirmed.
Validation and iteration
Reusable system
Outcome and status
The work is in progress. The current milestone is a complete attorney workflow, with approximately 90 percent of requirements represented in mid-fidelity prototypes by September 30, 2026. Backend development is expected to begin around mid-October 2026.
I don’t have results on attorney speed, accuracy, or onboarding yet, so this page doesn’t claim any.