Legl – Simplifying Legal Services
Our mission is to make the law work better for everyone. From making client onboarding delightful to facilitating faster payments and seamless workflows throughout the client lifecycle – Legl’s tools are built specifically to help law firms succeed in a digital-first world.
Product Design + Strategy + Leadership
Head of Design
8.2021 - 11.2022
Lead Product Designer
10.2019 - 8.2021
View Legl.com
What started as a payments solution has evolved into a single platform for payments, onboarding, and compliance – providing a “single source of truth” for law firms. Our user-centered focus has enabled us to continue to scale modular, flexible workflows that give firms — and clients — a delightful experience.
Joining as the sole product designer in 2019, I helped to establish a collaborative EPD mentality – ensuring Engineering, Product and Design were balanced and represented equally represented from ideation through G2M and beyond. Through the journey from Series A and B, as the Head of Design, I have scaled the design team to 5 and maintained our principles, processes, and focus bringing both qualitative and quantitative data forward to build delightful products for our customers.
Establish Design Culture & Ways of working
When working on a feature, product, hiring, or a team decision – keeping our values front of mind (staying collaborative, agile, no-egos, and ambitious) are what keeps us united across teams and everyone focused on our mission.
From concept to early scope planning, market evaluation, testing and rapid iterations – a Design thinking mentality was established early in our company development across teams.
Establishing and facilitating:
Team hiring, planning, tooling, etc.
Weekly 121s focused on the “present” and monthly 121 focused on “personal development”
Monthly design retros to evaluate our design ops, projects, and goals
Weekly “Design Power Hour” with all designers to bring projects for creative critiques and to ensure consistency and a holistic customer experience
Our tech stack: Slack, Miro, Whimsical, Figma, Maze, EasyRetro, Google Drive, Shortcut, Notion
Design System
When joining CrowdJustice and the evolution into Legl, the need for a cohesive brand ethos, voice and style became more clear by the day. I worked to design and implement a design system and establish processes that would enable us to scale as we built.
Today, the design team continues to expand the LDS (legl design system) as our teams and needs scale. The tech stack today sits between Figma, Zeroheight and Storybook.
We have a bi-monthly meeting with the “Design System Council” which sits across product design, brand, product marketing and front-end engineers.
Less work, more flow – a better picture of clients and interactions
Our goals with the Engage and Contacts products were to create a central place where law firms could understand their client base, onboard them consistently, and have all interactions at a glance to make data-informed decisions.
Working with firms across the UK to understand their current onboarding processes, disconnected software platforms, and areas of manual efforts – we were able to identify clear pain points to focus on.
The result was rich, configurable workflows that drive a better client experience, compliant KYC and AML, faster onboarding, and better consistency firm-wide.
** Please note that by the nature of the work, many designs can be discussed, but not shared **
Scaling teams and refining processes
After raising our Series A (18 months after starting, with a team of 12!) we began to scale the team. As headcount across timezones increased, coupled with COVID-19 lockdowns as did the formalizing of processes both internally and externally. [and Series B]
Establishing ways of working remotely across teams, we invested time early in building a culture that was inclusive of work/life balance while also trying to replicate as many of the “in-person” opportunities that were possible. Starting with the design team (beta testing) with things like Remotion to bring the “tap on the shoulder” to the remote office, and visibility of who was online across the teams was later rolled out company-wide. Other async ways of working such as Loom as well as peer designing and programming have been very effective.
Other areas I focused on while growing the design team were meeting cadence, mapping the product development lifecycle end<>end to surface status, and actions needed across all teams, review timings for leadership reviews (Notion with some finesse 😊), and developing a process to maintain a fully interactive (Figma) demo of the entire platform weeks/months ahead of build to test our G2M and enable commercial teams to demo unhinged from build times.