Early-stage startups are different from established products and brands. The work is fast and always changing. When I came on board, we didn’t know who our customers would be, we didn’t have a clear product vision, and we didn’t know whether we would be B2B, B2C, or both. We didn’t know if we would serve small businesses or enterprises and we didn’t exactly know what headaches we were solving for our (potential) customers. We knew we had a great tool that could read a contract and identify which legal concepts were contained in each paragraph of dense legal language. Here is a short case study of how I approached the first version of the LawGeex report (now called the Action Center) before LawGeex changed focus to a business solution rather than a consumer product.
A Consumer Product
Early on, LawGeex was meant to provide general legal knowledge for consumers about their contracts. Simple contracts like employee agreements and NDAs were analyzed and each legal concept was ranked as common, uncommon, or missing.
The leadership decided to pivot from a consumer product to a contract review tool meant for lawyers.
Research and Persona Building
Because LawGeex was created for consumers and not lawyers, the first step in identifying the difference between them was to speak to lawyers. During the process I identified 2 main personas for the product.
The Reviewer, an in-house counsel for a medium-large business.
And a Policy Maker, usually the general counsel for medium-large companies.
The Reviewer - Pain and Opportunities
- Deep knowledge of law and legal concepts
- Very familiar with typical contracts
- Review 20-30 contracts a month
- Need to know if the contract complies with their company’s legal policies
- They review a lot of the same kind of low-risk, high-volume contracts (like NDAs)
- They would rather be involved in strategy as opposed to contract review
- Their corporate legal knowledge is not written down or codified
- Corporate counsels are not paid by the hour - efficiency is important
I also identified three main points that helped us to optimize the review tool for these lawyers:
- They read contracts from top to bottom
- They highlight what is wrong and come back to it later
- They use Microsoft Word
Sketches
