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From Paper Trail to Smart Contracts: Streamlining the Future of Legal Contracts
Empowering businesses with AI-Powered efficiency, collaboration and smart contracts
OVERVIEW
My Pocket Counsel, a legal tech company recognized the widespread challenges of inefficient legal contracting processes hindering business agility and legal team efficiency. This sparked a mission to develop a groundbreaking solution, Vega now called Lawyered up.
Learn more about lawyered up formarly vega
The primary goal of the project was to design a user-centric legal contracting software, Vega, that revolutionizes the way businesses manage their agreements. This platform aims to streamline the entire contracting process by leveraging AI technology.
ROLE
User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing
Sole Product Designer
PROJECT TIME
4 weeks (before handoff to development)
The Problem
In today's fast-paced business environment, traditional contracting methods create a bottleneck for everyone involved. Manual drafting, inconsistent formats, and limited visibility into the contracting process plague businesses of all sizes. These inefficiencies lead to wasted time, potential errors, and delays in deal execution.
Research shows that manual contract creation can consume 25% of a legal team's time, while delays due to slow approvals can lengthen sales cycles by an average of two weeks. These issues frustrate legal teams, hinder sales cycles, and ultimately impact overall business agility.
The Solution
The solution to the widespread challenges of sluggish contracts, inconsistent formats, and limited visibility came in the form of Vega, MPC's flagship legal contracting software.
This user-centric platform leverages AI automation, standardized templates, and real-time collaboration to streamline the entire process. But Vega doesn't stop there. It empowers legal teams with built-in task management, keeping everyone on track. And for specialized needs, Vega integrates with a legal marketplace, ensuring you have the right resources at your fingertips.
With Vega, legal teams can ditch the paper chase and focus on strategic work, while businesses gain a secure, efficient, and fully-equipped contracting experience.
The Design Process
Vega’s design process involved a holistic approach, from understanding user needs and industry challenges to iterative design, development, testing, and continuous improvement. The focus on user feedback and an agile development mindset ensured that Vega evolved into a user-centric platform that effectively streamlined legal processes.
Understanding the user
As the sole product designer on the Vega project, understanding the user experience was paramount. My mission was to create a platform that empowers businesses and legal professionals with smart contracts and automated efficiency . To achieve this, I embarked on a user research journey that allowed me to truly step into the shoes of those who navigate the complexities of legal contracting.
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I conducted research interviews and surveys with our primary users (businesses and legal teams) to uncover any pain points that they were experiencing with traditional and complex legal processes.
Surveys and Interviews
For our initial approach, we selected a quantitative survey as our primary data collection method. Surveys are efficient and scalable, allowing us to reach a larger number of participants.
I formulated questions for an online survey that was answered by 128 people (about 55% legal practitioners, and 45% business owners) within a day. This survey was invaluable in identifying the most prominent themes and pain points.
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Based on the responses received from the survey, I conducted interviews with 7 business owners and legal practitioners. Interviews offer a depth of qualitative data that the survey alone fails to capture, and they allow us to delve deeper into the topics the survey responses brought to light.
Interview Questions:
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Walk me through a typical contract from initiation to execution in your department. What are the key steps involved and how do your teams interact with the process?
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What are the biggest frustrations you encounter when dealing with contracts in your role?
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How does your organization currently collaborate with teams (e.g., legal, sales) on the contracting process?
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Imagine a legal contracting software solution designed to streamline the process for all departments. What features would be most helpful for your specific role?
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Has your organization or team used any legal contracting software in the past? If so, what were your experiences?
Findings from the interviews and surveys
Our in-depth interviews with legal professionals and business owners revealed their pain point and fustratons. Here's a summary of the key findings from our interview and survey.
1. Time-Consuming Contract Creation:
Manual drafting and revision of contracts were identified as major time sinks for legal teams
2. Inconsistent Language and Format:
The lack of standardized templates led to inconsistencies in contract language across departments, causing negotiation delays and potential legal risks.
3. Limited Visibility and Tracking:
Scattered documents and manual tracking systems made it difficult for users to track contract status, revisions, and deadlines.
4. Strained Legal Team Resources:
Lawyers were bogged down by administrative tasks, limiting their ability to focus on strategic legal advice and high-value initiatives.
5. Limited Collaboration:
Inefficient communication and collaboration between legal and other departments impeded the contracting process.
Building empathy
Using the quantitative and qualitative data from interviews and survey results, I defined the two target group profiles, Saint (business owner, 34) and Sarah (Lawyer, 28) to better empathize with my main user groups and prioritize goals according to their needs.
Empathy Map
Empathy map bridges the gap between the technical aspects of legal contracting software and the human element. By prioritizing user understanding through the empathy map, Vega can become a user-centered solution that empowers business owners like Sarah to achieve faster deals, reduced errors, and a more efficient contracting process.
The Solution
Idea 1 — Auto-Generating Contract / Agreement Creation Wizard, Powered by AI
The contract generation process starts with a user-friendly questionnaire. As the user answer questions specific to their agreement (e.g., NDA, Sales Agreement), details like party names, and service descriptions, a real-time preview of their contract populates on the other side of the screen (within the same page). This allows the user to see the full contract as it develops, ensuring clarity and avoiding potential surprises.
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Behind the scenes, Vega's AI engine goes to work. It leverages the user's answers to intelligently select relevant clauses from a library of pre-approved legal templates. These clauses automatically populate the corresponding sections of their contract in the preview. This ensures their contract incorporates essential legal language without the need for manual searching through generic templates.
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Once the contract is generated, users can easily edit any section or clause directly within the user-friendly interface. If the users need further clarification, the trusty chat-bot is available to answer their questions about the legal language or provide relevant explanations., Vega's built-in file manager allows for secure cloud storage, enabling users to access and manage their contracts at any time, from any device.
User Flow
The process of creating a contract or agreement
This shows the task flow of how a user can easily create a contract or agreement on the Vega platform.
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The Process of adding task and managing tasks
This shows the task flow of how a user can easily add a task on the Vega platform to aid productivity. From the flow below, it shows that:
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The user inputs tasks and a schedule is generated
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The user assigns team to the tasks
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The user can edit schedule or ask to regenerate
Wireframing the Solution
Creating a textual representation of a low-fidelity wireframe can help outline the basic structure and layout of the Vega platform. I quickly mocked up some basic wireframes to gather feedback from Product, Engineering and the users on the overall layout and structure of the wizard form. This involved establishing a standardised visual hierarchy and layout for contract generation.
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Clickable Prototypes
To ensure Vega's contract creation process addressed user needs, I conducted usability testing sessions with our primary target audience: business owners and legal professionals. This involved creating a scenario that mirrored real-world use cases and observing user interaction with a prototype of the platform.
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We provided our user with a script outlining the scenario: finalizing a watertight NDA with minimal time investment. The script included specific steps within the Vega platform:
1. Selecting "Create New Contract" from the dashboard.
2. Choosing "Non-Disclosure Agreement" from the contract type options.
3. Entering basic contract details in the user-friendly wizard (e.g., counterparty name, term length).
4. Reviewing the AI-generated draft NDA populated with relevant clauses.
We observed that the usability testing session yielded positive results because the design of Vega's contract creation process proved successful in addressing user needs. Compared to traditional methods, Vega offers a streamlined, user-friendly experience that empowers business owners and legal professionals to create accurate and efficient legal agreements.
Visual Designs
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Live Demo of the Product, Vega
Conclusion
The development and testing of Vega has demonstrated its potential to revolutionize the legal contracting landscape. By prioritizing user needs and leveraging AI technology, Vega offers a streamlined and efficient solution for creating accurate and secure agreements.
Usability testing confirmed a significant reduction in effort and errors, while also highlighting the value of user control through customizable AI-generated drafts. These findings validate the effectiveness of Vega's design in addressing the pain points of business owners and legal professionals.
Moving forward, the project will explore iterative refinements based on user feedback, an expansion of pre-approved templates, and the integration of collaborative features. Marketing initiatives and user onboarding resources will ensure widespread adoption and maximize the impact of Vega within the business community.
Overall, Vega represents a significant step forward, empowering users to navigate legal agreements with confidence and efficiency, ultimately freeing them to focus on core business activities.
Learnings
1. Take small steps, because big changes can not be brought overnight, especially not just by an application alone. Accordingly, develop more strategically meaningful and realistically applicable tools that steer in the intended direction.
2. Understanding and empathizing with users is fundamental. The personas and empathy map helped identify user needs, pain points, and motivations, ensuring that the Vega platform is designed with the user in mind.
3. Looking back, I would rebuild the interviews differently as I used too many questions where interviewees should imagine what the optimal solution might be