Legal Advice

"Legal stuff is hard!"

—Sarah, user testing subject

When faced with a legal problem, the general public and small business owners often find themselves dealing with something they have no clue how to navigate. These people are intimidated by the idea of dealing with lawyers, whom they associate with high costs and negative feelings. Compound this with the stress of their legal problem, getting sound legal help is overwhelming, difficult, and requires a lot of time and effort.

What the general public may not consider is that lawyers are regular people too and very often are also small business owners who run their own practice. Attorneys have spent lots of time and money learning about the law and how to interpret it in order to make it work for their clients. They are the complex legal system’s subject matter experts and advocates for the people they represent.

The UX goal of the legal advice product at Rocket Lawyer was to lower the barrier of entry for regular people to get expert help from lawyers and eventually lead to building meaningful relationships between those who need help and those who can help.

Building meaningful relationships between those who need help and those who can help.

About the Company

Rocket Lawyer is a platform for consumers and small businesses to solve and manage their legal problems with DIY legal documents and quick access to legal advice from lawyers. The company’s mission is to make the law affordable and accessible to everyone.

Business Goal of the product

Integrate a question and answer legal advice product from an acquired company into the Rocket Lawyer platform to acquire new users that are looking for legal help.

Identify Target Audiences

Customers

Individuals with legal needs

Lawyers

Subject matter experts

Customer Service Reps

Ensures the quality and speed of legal help

Research & Discovery

In user testing, we discovered that most people start their own legal research by reaching out to their social network. Sharing their problem with friends, family, or co-workers hoping to find someone who has experienced the same situation. They might know someone who is a lawyer, but most likely that person does not practice law in the area they need help in.

This first step may lead them in a more firm direction of a resolution, but if not, they turn to Google hoping to find something that can help them understand how to solve their problem.

This is the gap the legal advice product team hope to fill.

Post user testing analysis. Seeking trends in the notes from testing observations. So. many. post-its.

Defining Product Goals

Each audience member has different needs and motivations. To solve for these aspects our team needed to plan for and create experiences based on those needs. We started with some assumptions and defined the goals we thought these experiences needed to accomplish for each user at different points in the product flow.

Customers with questions:

Make it easy for people with questions to ask them quickly while still providing enough details to connect them with a lawyer who can help
Communicate to the question askers that their question will be answered by a licensed attorney within 24 hours to set product expectations and instill trust in the product

Attorneys answering questions:

Notify attorneys of a new question waiting to be answered
Give attorneys an experience that clearly communicates their work flow for answering questions
Include high level information about the question to help the lawyer avoid a conflict of interest in existing cases
Provide the ability to accept or decline a question task assigned to them
Display the timing for how long the attorney has to answer the question at all points of the process
Allow the attorney to access past questions/answer and understand if their response was helpful
Create a mobile-friendly experience so lawyers can answer questions from anywhere at any time

Customers receiving answers:

Indicate the status of the activity within the user’s account
Notify the customer that an answer has been received
Mobile first design — customers will be notified by email when a question has been answered, our high open rate of emails on mobile devices indicated a need for a great mobile experience
Allow the user to learn more about the attorney who responds in order to assess credibility and reliability of response
Allow for follow-up questions to the lawyer in order to create a dialogue and possibly lead to a consult and representation
Provide the ability to rate the quality of the answer in order to track lawyer network performance and quality of advice given

Customer service reps:

View of all questions asked and the status of the questions/answers
Allow for re-assignment of question to a new lawyer
Allow for updating of operational status for escalation needs
Allow for indicating that a lawyer has been paid for an answer provided

Design Solutions

Over the course of one year, I worked closely with a cross-functional team consisting of myself as the product design lead, a product manager and engineering lead. I followed a strict design process and gathered user feedback along the way to ensure I was on the right path with my decisions. Some of the final experiences were brand new to the Rocket Lawyer platform, some had to be integrated into existing parts of the Rocket Lawyer experience and platform.

For new customers asking questions:

A simple 4 step flow*

*Designed before I took over the design responsibilities for the legal advice product

For attorneys answering questions:

A clearly defined taskboard utilizing a card-based UI

User Flows

View user flows

Wireframes

View wireframes

Final Design

Explore prototype

For customers receiving answers:

A mobile first, single page experience that allows for follow-up questions to the lawyers and rating the quality of the advice given

User Flows

View user flows

Wireframes

View wireframes

Final Design

Explore prototype

For customer service reps:

Unfortunately due to project timeline limitations, no formal product was designed.

An engineer under the guidance of the product manager created the tool customer service representatives now use. After launch we spent some time understanding the reps’ workflow in order to make improvements to the experience they had to work with.

View full user flow

Learing From The Results

Despite all of this thought and hard work, the product failed at acquiring new customers as well as the business hoped that it would, but we did discover it flourished as an engagement product. We learned that the single landing page was not fulfilling the SEO or SEM needs of the people turning to Google for legal help. The team is now in the process of developing a product and experience to address this problem.

Lawyers, however, loved the experience we gave them. Of course they had a lot of feedback post launch which we worked into future iterations. For the most part they said it was intuitive and easy to use.

In terms of the success of the product as an engagement feature, 90% of people who come to Rocket Lawyer do so for the DIY legal documents. Once engaged with the Rocket Lawyer platform, these “document” users discover the Legal Advice product and we found that 80% of our questions were coming from these users. Users who asked a question and get an answer are more likely to convert from a free trial to paying members and stay as paying members for longer. Further indicating the value of the relationships we are building between our customers and the attorneys in our lawyer network.

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