Spoke
Spoke is a legal tech marketplace, run by flexible legal resourcing company LOD, for the best freelance commercial lawyers and blue chip clients to get legal work done. I led a cross-functional team, with key responsibilities for product design and branding, to take an idea from concept to launch.
The Problem
The legal resource market has undergone massive change over the last 10 years. Where once the idea of a successful law career was to join a grad scheme at one of the few huge law firms and slowly work your way up the ladder, now the smart lawyers are taking their careers into their own hands and working in flexible ways, picking and choosing clients and projects, more akin to freelance designers than dusty old lawyers. But while attitudes towards careers have shifted massively, the mechanisms by which this new generation of lawyers find work are still very much in the old world of networking, fancy lunches, and good ol' fashioned nepotism.
Product Discovery
The end-to-end process of matching clients with suitable lawyers is long and complicated affair, with the three main actors of a classic marketplace - the client (the buyer), HQ (the platform), and the lawyers (the seller). As this was my first foray into legal resourcing, my first port of call was a literature review of articles and reports concerning the state of lawyer resourcing more generally, followed by a set of initial user interviews, conducted face-to-face, on-site, with clients, HQ, and lawyers to get under the skin of the process from each of their perspectives, and, most importantly, identify some underlying motivators and pain points.
Persona mapping workshop - Understanding typical current users and how they interact in the process
User Story Mapping exercise with key stakeholders
User interview process notes
Current (offline) task process flow between Client > Marketplace > Lawyer when gathering requirements for a new project instruction
Ideation - Rapid prototyping
I ♥ prototyping. It's the purest moment of problem solving in the product design cycle, when possibilities are endless and prior research, conversations and fragments of ideas are distilled down into workable, usable, testable solutions. After sitting down with a handful of General Counsels and Heads of Legals (getting these guys' time is hard), the overarching take away was that they value time above all. The current (mostly) offline process of trails of phone calls and emails was a serious pain-point for people who are used to being hihgly productive and charging for every minute of their time. The new process needed to be quick and simple, getting to relevant, matched lawyers within a few clicks.
Initial UX sketches and ideas
Our first lo-fi wireframe prototype explorations were based on a chatbot/messenger experience where the conversation and lawyer finding happens in real time, with a chronological message trail that's easy to go back and scan through.
Clients would enter a couple initial key details - type of lawyer, how much help they needed - and would then be dropped into the messenger experience to be matched with lawyers and a member of the HQ team who they could talk to in real time.
Invision + Sketch clickable prototype v3
The prototype initially tested well with a small group of lawyer users, however it was felt within the stakeholder team that it could be a little complicated as an experience, with too much cognitive load to learn how to use. Baring in mind users wouldn't have been using the platform on a daily or even weekly basis, the team felt that a more traditional, simple approach to the interface would allow users to quickly submit their instructions, without needing to learn a system.
N.B. This was a point of contention and was more of an overriding stakeholder decision, than the clear result of testing. An important takeaway for me personally from this was to be firmer with senior stakeholders to follow evidence and not their intuition.
Live data prototype testing and value testing
Taking what we'd learnt from feedback on the lo-fi prototypes, we moved to build our first live data prototype with the help of product agency Simple Web.
The intention was twofold; build a stable enough system that we could publically invite lawyers on to the platform to begin filling one side of the marketplace, and match lawyers well enough that we could get time with Heads of Legal and General Counsels who run legal teams in some of the countries biggest companies to run real value prop tests.
The lawyer launch went incredibly well - within a month, we'd amassed the largest pool of high-end commercial lawyers anywhere online. Anyone with experience of marketplace dynamics knows that this is a big win - we had the sellers, now we needed the buyers.
Initial high-fidelity UI design concepts for the lawyer finder
Initial high-fidelity UI design lawyer profile search concepts
From the 5 GC's we got time with (we would have loved more, but finding willing participants was a constant stuggle), 3 wanted to proceed interviewing the lawyers the system had selected for them - a clear sign of intention to use the service. Specific usability feedback aside, it looked like the system for finding and matching lawyers to the clients need was generally a success.
Live data prototype value test clip with IDEO in-house GC
Market testing and launch
Teaming up with product marketing firm Ideas Made, we set out to validate marketing channels. Paid media generally isn't where I like to start with market tests, if you can generate some virality via referrals it's a much clearer indicators of customer intention, but being a B2B proposition, and the GC population of the UK being fairly small, Ideas Made felt we needed a more direct strategy. For the initial run of ads, I wrote and designed a short explainer video, along with animator Bora Demirbilek, that could be seeded out via Linked In, Facebook and Twitter.
Ultimately, marketing is where the project stalled. It proved very difficult to reach GC's in sufficient numbers to make the business viable. We had a huge network of lawyers, and a good number of jobs being submitted to the platform, but mostly from consumers looking for personal injury lawyers, rather than blue chip corporate teams. We just couldn't find a channel that worked reliably enough before the stakeholders got nervous and stopped development.
Spoke is still live and taking instructions, but isn't being developed further. It's a good lesson about validating marketing channels early, and the politics of spinning out a start up from within an established business that doesn't fundamentally understand the build > measure > learn product development cycle.