Multicolor designation highlights
csDISCO 2023-2024
This case study represents a comprehensive rework of highlight UI mechanics in DISCO’s Case Builder deposition management platform. The work will enable effective trial designations and a host of other complex litigation workflows. Far more than basic digital highlighting, this work represents a nuanced reinvention of a critical litigation workflow tool which hadn’t been holistically reconsidered in the last sixty years of legal practice.
This work shipped to customers in the second half of 2024. More details about this work will be shared publicly soon. In the meantime, I’m happy to speak with interested parties to describe the collaborative, tactical methods my team has employed while conducting discovery, designing the feature, and beginning implementation.
- I led Case Builder design for two years, with top-to-bottom ownership of this and all other designed initiatives—for this work, I conducted all research and design discovery, working closely with engineers throughout the design process.
- This work required a close working relationship with a broad cross-functional team that includes product managers, multiple engineers, and legal domain experts. As with any comprehensive work, I also collaborated with others in the design function to refine the solution and contribute back to our design system.
Setting context
Depending on your level of familiarity with depositions and the legal technology landscape, explore the accordions below to gain context for the work that follows.
About Case Builder
Understanding designations in deposition management
History of highlights in legal technology
Old world challenges
More information is coming soon.
- Although Case Builder has become a mature deposition management platform, it currently lacks some fundamental utility in the realm of highlights—complex multicolor highlights are an overdue but widely misunderstood product gap—and users possess strong biases about how they should work.
- User needs have evolved alongside the product, outpacing the need for basic highlighting. Unlike most new feature sets, this one must serve a variety of complex use cases from the moment it ships.
New world incentives
More information is coming soon.
- Trial designations are identified, gathered, and manipulated using unique methods in any given court, district, state, and at the federal level throughout the US legal system—our solution must strike a balance between being opinionated with clear affordances, and highly flexible for diverse workflows.
- Case Builder’s transcript viewer is a unique digital environment that scales in complexity as users progress through case strategy. Alongside annotations and other work product, users require layers of overlapping highlights—each tied to distinct work product, offering granular visibility control, and capable of being exported into an analog format for use at trial.
Market signal, conducting early research and ideation
Information is coming soon.
Collaborative cross-functional process
Developing this feature for long-term success required deep collaboration with cross-functional partners. Design should almost never be working in isolation—these are the functions with whom I collaborated most often, and whose involvement spanned all phases of work. Expand each accordion to learn more about how I worked with these teammates.
Planning with Product Management
Building and ideation with Engineering
Consultation with Legal Domain Experts
Designed solutions
Information is coming soon.
Interaction nomenclature
Front-end behavioral logic
Developing an accessible highlight palette
Nuanced interactive state requirements
Adjustments for parity in exported artifacts
Updates to surrounding interactive patterns
Eyes ahead: Building upon this work
Information is coming soon.