authorDOCS is a Microsoft Word Add-in that was developed to assist lawyers with reading legal contracts. Allowing lawyers to quickly and efficiently identify key commercial issues, search for clauses and legal details and easily draft from their Clause Library.

Over the course of the app’s development, I was responsible in tandem with our product team for identifying key user concerns, workflows, and personas. I was also responsible for wireframing, prototyping, user testing, and taking the app to the final product. Inclusive of this was the development of a full support portal with documentation and user tutorials.

In-house legal teams and law firms face increasing pressure to take on more work while reducing legal spending. A big part of this is reducing financial risk across low-end contracts that never even make it to the legal team’s desk and increasing productivity and efficiency around contract reviews that are on the legal team’s agenda.

In-house and legal counsel usually have a ‘playbook’ of legal issues they look for in particular legal documents. If shared across a team these playbooks usually reside in spreadsheets, word documents, emails or worst-case scenario in the lawyer’s head.

Traditional methods of reviewing legal documents involve having the document open on the screen, with a second copy printed on paper and a copy of the playbook close by. Highlighter in hand, the lawyer will then laboriously read through the contract highlighting sections of concern.

Traditional processes are slow and cautious. Our challenge was to simplify the document review process in a way that didn’t ask users to change their usual workflow. Allowed them and their team to access their playbook within Word. And reduced workload while engaging trust in the product’s legal accuracy.

In the legal industry adoption of technology has been slow. The legal ramifications of providing incorrect advice are huge. Trust thresholds that legal technology will provide the correct advice, in an open and easy to explain fashion is low.

This means that any technology needs to be an open box with easy to explain reasoning. It also means that most users do not have a high comfort level with software usage.

With authorDOCS we allowed legal teams to build the rules for their document reviews in an online console. Allowing them full control over what was looked for and why, and what advice was offered in any type of document review.

We also worked to make AI corrections simple and easy to perform. Mindful that incorrectly identified or missing document content must be as easy to correct as tagging a friend in Facebook. Anything more than one or two clicks to correct, removes user willingness to participate, and negatively impacts the user’s perception of the product’s accuracy.