Reminders for lawyers

This project was developed for a desktop application called Linte Hub, created by Linte, a startup (lawtech, B2B), and is aimed at legal sectors. In it, users create and respond to legal demands, in addition to creating and managing contracts. The core of Linte’s business is contract lifecycle management.

The problem

In order for the management of a contract to be efficient, lawyers must be aware of renewal dates, renegotiation, revision of values, termination of the contractual term, and many other dates and contractual obligations.

Losing control of contractual obligations, made companies pay fees and lose clients and credibility. Also, legal departments face the pain of being seen as a sector where work stagnates.

The current functionality that Linte offered, where alerts were automatically created, linked to the expiration date of the contracts, did not solve the problem, since companies often deal with contracts with indeterminate terms.

Objectives

We needed to understand the real problem,observe how they solved (and if they solved) the problem currently, and develop a solution that would make the system help lawyers not to feel bad and be seen badly.

I conducted interviews, analyzed data to generate insights, and made proposals in the ideation phase. For delivery, I helped define the interaction flow, built prototypes, handoff screens and components for the design system.

In this project, I've worked with a very focused project manager, with a lot of product background, and very smart front and backend developers. As always, I've talked with two other designers, for design critique and alignment about design system components.

How are people on the legal teams currently managing their contracts?

Hypothesis

We believed that providing people who use the system with a way to create custom alerts, on a contract basis, could ease the pains of managing contractual obligations.

Journey of the lawyer in managing deadlines

We mapped the journey of lawyers who were managing contractual obligations to discover where the pain points were, in an organized way. This journey was made based on research nuggets (previous interviews), customer success team feedback, and clients' complaints in support.

Pain points

Some lawyers don't control deadlines and they are missed frequently. If they wanted to do this, it was necessary to use other tools (Outlook, Excel, Google Calendar). As a consequence, companies pay fines for unfulfilled contractual obligations and the legal department is seen as disorganized.

Regarding efficiency, legal people carried out the manual control of contractual obligations and couldn't use the product they use for contract management to keep an eye on contracts' due dates.

Benchmarking

We looked at how other contract lifecycle managers and task management software were handling reminders and alerts. For the survey, PandaDoc, ClickUp, Juro, Gmail, Teamwork, TrackaDo, among others, called our attention.

We learned that there were several ways to control dates, but most of them involved letting the user take control and custom their own alerts, with properties such as frequency, messages, and even color labeling.

Sketches

We made some sketches, and I contributed the ideas below, according to the raised pains and the benchmark.

The solution

From now on, lawyers can create custom alerts. A reminder tab was added to a contract page interface because during the interviews, people said it was essential to see the contract when creating an alert to consult information.

Alerts have been separated into categories: Standard Reminders and Custom Reminders. We didn't immediately replace standard reminders with custom reminders so as not to cause a sudden change in routine for people who already use them.

So that they could include responsible areas and people in the control of obligations, people could add people in a custom reminder, as well as a message for directions and instructions about the contract.

With the lessons learned from the prototype and interviews, we built the components and screens in high fidelity.

New UI components

We made new components for this release, such as date pickers, button cards and the cards themselves that represent the alerts created by the users.

Date pickers were made to give users the option to select periods like they do in other applications.

Button cards were created as big as card reminders, as they were a pre-state of a new custom reminder. Card reminders had the resumed alert information, based on the main points said by users during interviews.

In creating this experience, we follow that giving freedom for people to use the system as they need can solve a lot of pain.

We saw people who, even paying for the product, still used Excel spreadsheets to control deadlines, which made us realize even more the need to make their routine more efficient, and to empathize.

The previous solution was assertive for some time, it was done in order to reduce the delivery time, but left room for other problems.

About the interface design, designers and developers had a lot of work creating a Date Picker component, which required study, so that it could always show users the reflection of what was happening when they were choosing the dates.