Thank you!
Your submission has been received!
Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
I embedded with Smokeball's design and product teams, led UX on priority initiatives and built their first Figma style guide. Legal software carries decades of process assumptions; the job is knowing which are regulation and which are simply habit.
Lawyers bill by the six-minute unit, so any feature that adds a minute per matter quietly gets abandoned. Data entry is the real burden and nobody has designed for it. Firms want your product but the migration from what they have looks terrifying, so they stay put.
I worked with Smokeball's design and product teams on legal practice management software, including building a product for a segment they hadn't served. Legal software has a particular economics: the user's time is directly billable, so friction has a price they can calculate.
That reframes almost every decision. Features justify themselves in minutes saved per matter. Automation of document assembly and data capture matters more than a better dashboard. And the switching cost from an incumbent system is often the actual product problem, not the feature comparison.
Small-firm legal is also its own market. A three-partner practice buys, configures and uses the software with no IT function behind them.
Four to eight weeks for a focused piece; longer if migration or a new product line is in scope.
Do you need legal domain knowledge?
Some, and it's learnable. What matters more is talking to the people doing the work — usually the paralegals and legal assistants, who know where the time goes.
Have you built for small firms or large?
Mostly small and mid-sized practices, where the buyer, admin and user are often the same handful of people.