Infrastructure for Legal Tech

When a client's needs fell outside what ODL could directly serve, admins searched an external database, retrieved contact details, and manually reached out by phone, email, fax, or post. Every referral was logged by hand. I was the sole designer—I drove research, defined user flows for both sides of the marketplace, owned all interaction design, and managed the client relationship through reviews and testing.

Attorneys are bound by the California Rules of Professional Conduct. Sharing client information across a network triggers obligations around confidentiality, informed consent, and the duty to prospective clients. A California attorney reviewed the proposed system and issued a formal ethics opinion before we could ship.

Informed consent had to be built into referral creation. Data visible to receiving organizations required explicit scoping. The simplified conflict check was deliberately limited to three fields: first name, last name, and date of birth. The templated outbound client summary only auto-generates after a clean conflict check clears.

ODL's funding comes from grants—each with unique reporting requirements. Grant administration was a convoluted, multi-step process: manual onboarding, monthly reconciliation across disconnected reports, and significant manual assembly for funder reports. The risk isn't inefficiency—it's reporting inaccuracy and compliance exposure on renewals.

The brief: redesign grant management in Salesforce to reduce administrative overhead by 90%, with as little burden on line staff as possible. The Beneficiary junction object—connecting contacts, grant activities, intakes, cases, and time forecasts—was the architectural linchpin that unlocked per-funder reporting without manual reconciliation.