Making the law work for you

Udaly is an online legal marketplace that helps consumers connect with the right lawyer for their specific needs.

It provides better qualified client leads for lawyers, allowing them more time 
to focus on delivering better client outcomes.

This website is currently in development.

It can be difficult to find the right legal professional with the right advice for your specific needs. The legal system is intimidating, complicated and difficult to know where to start from.

Lawyers want to reduce time and money vetting incompatible clients, which they hope will result in better qualified leads. Our challenge was to find a way to make the law easier to navigate for consumers and bridge the gap with lawyers.

It was important for us to understand our competitors to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and to uncover areas of opportunity. I compared their key services, features and highlighted pleasure and pain points in detail.

We interviewed lawyers to better understand how they currently engage with customers and what their most important challenges were. They waste a lot of time vetting customers unaware of costs and those who simply don’t know who to talk to for their particular needs.

We then approached customers directly outside the Magistrates court. We discovered first hand how difficult it was to find the right legal advice. The law was seen as complex, overwhelming, expensive and intimidating.

Our findings further validated our hypothesis.

By understanding the type of information we sought, my role was to outline the goals and create the open-ended questionnaire.

I facilitated an affinity mapping session with people representing both consumers and lawyers to better understand their respective needs and pain points. We uncovered key themes that would impact the design going forward: barriers to seeking legal advice, shifting the perceived balance of power between customer and lawyer, varying legal services, help for customers seeking to better understand the law.

A customer’s primary task was to search for and contact a lawyer. From home screen we would offer a way to search, view results, then choose and view a lawyer or practice. The second key journey would take lawyers through the main benefits of the platform, and encourage them to create their basic profile.

We established several key personas, two of which are shown below for a consumer and lawyer. Many of the difficulties in finding the right legal advice were reflected by lawyers whose common dislike was ‘time wasters’ or people who don’t understand enough about their legal situation to talk to the right lawyer. It showed us a clear gap between the two groups that could be addressed with our proposed platform.

The legal system is conservative, unapproachable, stuffy and perplexing to many. We wanted to create a brand that empowered people by helping them make informed decisions to take control of their own legal affairs.

My aim was to create a friendly yet professional, knowledgeable and trustworthy brand. It would represent a confident, vibrant and approachable concierge available to assist 24/7.

Functionality is imperative for an online marketplace. But, that doesn’t mean it can’t be delightful and engaging. It was important to present a large amount of information clearly whilst retaining hierarchy.