Legal process and documentation in Nigeria is still largely manual and tedious.  Many of the day to day task of a legal practitioner are repetitive. As a result, lawyers in places like Nigeria get bogged down on simple tasks and end up passing the cost to clients.
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- Decrease the high cost of getting legal support by automating simple tasks like document sourcing, hiring, financing, etc.
- Provide a central repository for companies to store their content in a way a lawyer would manage their documents.
- Simplify document workflows by managing everything on the LAAs platform.
- Be ready for due diligence and other regulatory events by having everything labeled and sorted.
- Provide a platform for lawyers to make a stable income outside of their 9-5 job.
- Provide a potential community for organisations that are serious about growing and building great companies.

How do we streamline the legal process with technology and reduce the overhead expenses of manual and repetitive tasks?"
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There are many challenges and pain points in the current management of legal systems and cases. I made some research to know them and focus our energy to creating solutions that solves some of these challenges. The challenges are:

- Information is currently disorganised in people’s brains, documents, emails, phone calls, etc. People are wasting time (mostly billable time) looking for emails/ conversations, documents corresponding to what they are working on.
- Teams are slowly embracing remote works and there’s no way to keep everyone on the same page. As a result, clients/teams/lawyers are stuck wasting more time on bringing everyone up to speed.
- Currently no transparency on current work products. Besides informal updates, there’s no transparency to the client or internal team.

The goal is to create a platform where small and medium-sized businesses can have the legal tools they need to help operate their company in Africa.

I conducted user interviews with people that work or are involved in legal processes. This process was necessary to allow me understand what the day-to-day activities of a legal practitioner and the experiences of clients. We also discussed pain points in their day to day work and the present solutions they have on ground to ease these pain points. The result of this process was a better understanding of how legal practitioners and clients operates and what might help to ease their day-to-day workings.

General Counsel at a company
Most likely has management over several areas of law. Has specific people working in particular areas.

Team member/Legal professional
‍Most likely in charge of managing the day to day of projects portfolio. Most likely to setup a project or lead a particular case or manage a group of lawyers.
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3rd party/ client
‍Most likely a person who is working with lawyers or needs information / needs to be kept in the loop on a project but not directly responsible.

Guests
A person that is given limited read access to legal information but does not necessarily have to register on the platform. These categories of users cannot be audited because they are not registered and thereby has access to very limited information.

After the user interviews, I created the user personas that embodies the 3 types of users that will make use of Vazilegal.

User personas

To better understand the legal landscape, I scheduled a zoom meeting with a managing partner of a legal firm in Nigeria. The goal was to get a good understanding of what is done everyday and in a legal firm to find opportunities for what can be automated.

Secondary research
To further understand the kind of product we are trying to build, I looked at popular task and project management platforms. I was able to identify some of their core features, what they were missing, their UX flow.

With the help of my team, I came up with the workflow feature. The workflow is a combination of needed components that is used to see a legal process through.

The data and information I was able to gather from my research and study of how legal processes worked opened up an opportunity that would help define the solution Vazilegal will be built around.

With the help of my team, we came up with the idea of the workflow. The workflow is a combination of preset components that is used to see a legal process through. These components can include forms, documents and tasks needed to get a legal process done. The workflow will allow legal practitioners to create preset legal processes that can be re-used and assigned to legal practitioners.
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These workflows can also be used by clients to get an overview of the current process and all the needed information related to a legal case.

With the primary and secondary research made, I created a user flow and information architecture that shows the pathways various user types take to interact with the product and complete different actions. This flow shows the pathway a user takes from signing up to creating workflows, joining a project, managing tasks and reporting. 

From the information gathered through earlier processes, I designed the core screens of the platform taking into consideration only the most important features necessary for a user to complete core actions. These wireframes were made in mid – fidelity prototypes to facilitate further usability testing to get feedback for the next iteration. I used Figma to make the mid fidelity wireframes and prototypes.

Some of the wireframes I worked on for Vazilegal

I conducted a remote session with our previous tester to better information necessary to iterate on the next version of the wireframes. Some of the key information I was looking for were:

- Does it really solve the users pain points?
- How complex is it for users to understand what is going on the screen?
- What suggestions do users have to make the experience smoother and more enjoyable while still been able to complete actions?

Many legal practitioners are not techy!
- Some parts of the wireframes looked to complex at a glance. Users wanted to be able to understand each screen contextually in as little time as possible.
- Users preferred to be able to schedule and accomplish repetitive tasks easily.
- Users raised the question about document flow and trail not being in accordance to real life legal process.
- Data displayed on the reporting page looked too complex

Iteration
With the information I had at hand after testing it with a user, I started iterating on the design to address the issues. Document trail was added to adapt the documenting process to a real life equivalent as much as possible. Descriptive information were added to some screens to enhance contextual understanding of them. The reporting page was also simplified to simple bar graphs accompanied by a text based table structure to ease understanding of reporting information.

I created some mood board which contains visual elements to determine the visual direction of the platform. The mood board at the top was agreed on by the client and I as the visual direction to aim for.

After many iterations, comments and brainstorming, I applied the Visual identity to the design to produce high fidelity mock-ups of what the actual product will look like. I came up with few variations of the high fidelity design ranging from a very modern  and sophisticated look to a simple and corporate look. After iterations and brain storming with colleagues, we went for the simple and corporate look because it fits more into the vision of what the final product looks like and the purpose it will serve. Through the high fidelity Design process, good information hierarchies with the proper use of fonts and colours were taken into consideration to ensure important information are easily seen before secondary information. Colour contrasts were also tested on the go to ensure visibility. 

Some of the high fidelity pages I designed

This is just the first step of a long design process of research, iteration and design to make Vazilegal as close to a perfect product as possible. Further iterations will show the designs of other features mapped out but was cut because of time. It will also be helpful to strategise and design ways with which Vazilegal can integrate with existing platforms like Google docs, spread sheets and other platforms that can enhance the functionality of Vazilegal.

This process was an exciting one and was sometimes tasking. Learning about legal processes, their day-to-day activities and other details I was completely new to was an eyeopener for me about how diverse users can be. Research information gotten also brings up the question if a digital legal management platform can completely replace the manual way of doing things especially in the legal system where it is very important to keep records for as long as possible. The process of smoothly linking a new digital process with the already established manual way of doing things without breaking information flow or totally losing information is also a question to be thoroughly pondered upon. It is also not far fetched to think about the ideal marketing strategies to make legal firms adapt the process of a digital legal management system. In conclusion, this project has opened up a lot of personal thoughts about digital solutions that can be provided to ease operations of legal firms and how to conform these solutions to already existing processes to reduce resistance and encourage a smooth transition into digital processes in Africa. It also begs the big question; how much of legal processes and operations can be made digital?