Transforming a law firm into a legal-tech digital products company - with first product out in 4 weeks

Client: N.Law
Industry: Legal-tech
Duration: 4 weeks
Deliverables: Product strategy, Customer research, Product sprint, Tech prototype

The challenge

A young innovative law firm, looking for ways to digitize their business, identified a change in their customers’ needs following covid-19 first wave and wanted to explore whether they could help by offering them new legal services that would be relevant to their clients during the epidemic and the economic fallout.  The founder partnered up with d.labs to develop a product proposition and help them find first buyers.

The product

The founder has used the d.labs Recon, a rapid research & discovery product for venture builders, to develop and validate a viable product idea the shortest possible time, followed by d.labs Product Sprint, a rapid prototyping process whereby we create a prototype products experience we can test with potential users. The  prototype was functional just enough to get an authentic response from potential customers and validate our solution hypothesis.

The process

We have started from an intuitive product idea, identified on our initial ideation session. However, early customer insights gained from in-depth interviews with potential users from our targeted customer segment showed us our original product idea was not viable. We quickly learned that the companies were already effectively solving crisis-related issues and there was no budget available for such a specialised service. This was a crucial step that helped us mitigate the value risk and do a sort of due diligence before incurring further cost and engineering effort.

These same interviews did however help us identify specific customer pains and desired gains when it comes to general client-law firm relationships, which inspired and led our future sprint. We took this as a baseline for a new product hypothesis.

We used:
• Customer journey mapping
• Value proposition definition
• User stories
• Wireframes and design principles
• App architecture and lean tech stack  
• Rapid prototyping
• User testing

There was a pattern in the customers’ responses that pointed to a broken client-onboarding experience across a range of law firms. So instead of pursuing the original idea, we have pivoted and started working on a prototype that would showcase a game-changing client experience by using a  digital tool. We tested that with actual customers on active cases.

The outcome

In 4 weeks we have:
• helped the founder quickly invalidate a non-viable business idea, saving them from wasting further time, resources and money.
• used a proven process of d.labs Product sprint to successfully navigate through a customer need pivot and created a path to prioritise solutions, that the team hadn’t previously considered
• shipped a software prototype in just a matter of weeks, and provided the client with a low-risk way of testing the solution hypothesis on real-life cases with early-adopter clients.
• enhanced the client’s positioning as a digitally-native law firm, by providing their clients with a solution for a personalized, digital-first experience when interacting with their law firm

We helped create a baseline for new legal venture by identifying a viable channel to scale this product globally - the Clio marketplace.



Want to chat more about validating your business idea? Get in touch at sales@dlabs.io.