Designing a flexible document organization workflow for estate* lawyers
0-1 application
founding designer
documents
LawyerDoneDeal is a company building legal tech products that optimize workflows for lawyers and law clerks in Canada.
As the lead designer and product owner, I designed a document organization workflow for estate* lawyers.
* the type of law has been altered as a result of a NDA
TEAM:
1 product designer
1 developer
8 legal consultants
role
I was the sole designer for this project, creating a document organization workflow for lawyers.
I owned the legal research and design end-to-end, independently interpreting and navigating the provincial and federal legislation to transform a complex financial disclosure process into an intuitive experience.
This project is part of a larger 0→1 app that I joined during the proof of concept phase and currently working on refining functionality for launch.
IMPACT
Scaling with Volume
Lawyers did not have a tool that connected disclosure to a compiled, court-ready brief. Each one was built by hand moving through Adobe and Word. This feature reduces the manual steps required per document from 4 to 1, a 75% reduction in manual actions needed to compile a court-ready brief.
At scale, this gap compounds: a 10-document brief requires 40 manual actions under the legacy process versus 10 under the current design.
Industry Validation
In monthly presentations to Ontario estate* law firms and associations, lawyers described the workflow as a "major time saver" and enhanced ability to focus on billable hours. It has now received institutional attention at the firm and judicial level ahead of launch.
* the type of law has been altered as a result of a NDA
problem
To verify their client's net worth, estate* lawyers require collecting a large volume of supporting evidence. Failure to provide complete information has previously been nicknamed the “cancer of family law litigation” by the Supreme Court of Canada.
When I spoke with 8 lawyers and their clerks about this process, everyone mentioned organizing support documentation as the most important step in their workflow, but also the most tedious. The process is uniquely challenging due to strict court regulatory frameworks and administrative burdens. It is manually intensive and time consuming to organize supporting evidence (disclosure) and ensure they are court-ready.
key challenge
Court submissions require a fixed set of categories, but no two firms collect and organize documents the same way. The system had to support both. This meant that I had to simplify the organization process to be easier regardless of firm, but ensure the final output would remain the same.
workflow exploration
To simplify the current workflow, I decided to explore linking uploaded documents to a pre-determined, court-compliant folder on the backend. By pre-organizing, this would help shorten the lawyer's workflow considerably, allowing more time to audit for any changes necessary.
By mapping uploaded documents into pre-determined court-ready folders, this would shorten the lawyer workflow organize support documentation.
• design exploration 1
In my first design, at the point of upload, each line item is automatically linked to a specific court folder as each value a client reports require a supporting document. When lawyers compile a brief (summary) for court submission, all uploaded documentation are already grouped categorically by court name.
Each document has already been mapped relationally to a folder at the point of upload.
Lawyers can upload documentation per line item. Each uploaded document has been mapped to the related court-ready folder.
Each document has been categorized into court ready folders, ready for brief (summary) creation.
Although this design was received well by consultants, this 1:1 relational mapping design did not support nested folders and a more elaborate folder hierarchy structure. After discussing the programming constraints with the project developer, we decided to move the folder structure to Microsoft Sharepoint, which would handle both parent and child folders.
• design exploration 2
On Microsoft Sharepoint, we were now able to pre-define uploaded documents to both parent and child folders. However, this relational mapping disallowed user choice and agency. Lawyers are limited to organizing their documents to our definitions. Which begs the question,
"What if users wanted to upload a document and store it separate from the pre-defined folder?"
If a user created their own folders on Sharepoint, their uploaded documents would not be mapped to the folder we have stored in the backend.
Reframing the Problem / Addressing Earlier Assumptions
I worked through various design options and realized the issue was the assumption I had made at the start: lawyers only want to organize documents the same way the court requires them.
Although the court output is required at later stages, lawyers may not want to organize documents in this strict manner throughout. Forcing this early structure to an everchanging process was the primary cause of the friction.
This meant treating organization and output as two separate concerns, where documents are structured in the way the lawyer works in, and the court format is only applied when a brief is compiled.
Current design
Users have full freedom in creating and naming folders however they want, with no forced mapping to court categories. When it's time to compile a brief, users select the folders they want to submit, download as a complete .docx file and edit as needed to ensure court compliancy.
By adjusting the mapping process to be user-centric, we changed the data model underneath the design, and helped freed the early stages of the workflow from the court's structure.
Revised and current workflow
Users have full freedom in creating and naming folders however they want, with no forced mapping to court categories. When it's time to compile a brief, users select the folders they want to submit, download as a complete .docx file and edit as needed to ensure court compliancy.
By adjusting the mapping process to be user-centric, we changed the data model underneath the design, and helped freed the early stages of the workflow from the court's structure.
User selects which folder to map uploaded document to.
Briefs (summary) can be created regardless of which folder has been selected. All selected items are compiled into a Microsoft Word ouput.
Once downloaded as a .docx file, users can edit headings and text to ensure all items are court compliant.
next steps
This app is set to launch February 2027 and is currently being evaluated at the court and judicial level. At scale, this platform has the potential to meaningfully reduce the administrative overhead while providing smaller law firms another avenue to provide their clients with access to justice.