jusbrasil-doctrine

Question

How can we build a systematic legal doctrine product that can help users find the content they want?

Solution

Designing a digital library where lawyers and law students can find the most relevant content in the most granular part of a legal doctrine.

Brazilian Legal Doctrine search is still an outdated process in Brazil. And finding it on the internet is not for everyone.

Learning

Challenge

In 2020, Jusbrasil set up a team, which I was part of, to shape new products for giving a vision of the future to the company and help it consolidate Jusbrasil as the main Brazilian Legaltech. And one of these products was the Jusbrasil Doctrine.

Jusbrasil Doctrine is a partnership with Thomson Reuters and the product's main goal is to help lawyers and law students to find legal content easily and increase user retention for Jusbrasil.

Discovery

This project started with the possible partnership between Jusbrasil and Thomson Reuters which is one of the most valuable legal publishing companies in America. Until then it was not a deal yet but it shortly became an opportunity when we started to learn about what this new product could be.

Talking to the possible final users every week.

In order to have the most agile process we could, we planned to talk to as many lawyers and law students we could. Our strategy was to be available whenever these users want because for these users time is literally money. So to reduce time:

• Open Calendly link with our availability;

• Recruitment through WhatsApp groups;

• A shared script pre-set so everyone on the team could have the guidance to research.

After an intensive initial user research phase we noticed some main pain points for these lawyers and law students. And they were categorized into physical books and web content.

Physical books = Legal doctrine is too expensive.

They pay a lot of money for a legal book. This kind of content is not that accessible yet in Brazil so there are many people that can't afford buying some legal books.

Physical books = Quickly outdated content.

Brazilian law is constantly updated over a year. Only in 2021, more that 70 laws have changed and what once was a valid law in the past year may not be valid anymore in the next one.

Web Content = Can't find content.

We don't have many websites with legal doctrines available. And when they find one is only accessible through an expensive subscription.

Web Content = Very bad user experience

According to the people we talked to, these websites that make this content available don't offer a good user experience. Either finding or reading the content is not a good experience.And among all of these "pain patterns" the most relevant one we found that would guide our development from now on is:

Lawyers and law students don't actually need a book to either build their legal argument or study. In fact they need only the most relevant piece of content so they can either read it or copy and paste into their pleadings and study work.

Research key learnings as cross company collaboration.

Everything we learned from the user research needed to somehow be prioritized and turn into valuable content.

But after talking to many stakeholders about it, we noticed that these learnings could be related to cross-company-product-outputs. And an intense but really valuable cross company collaboration movement has started.

• If users currently pay too much for legal doctrine > Then Jusbrasil Pricing Squad needs to act in a monetization system that needs to be precisely and fair.

• If physical book content is quickly outdated > Then Jusbrasil Crawler Squad must actively work on updated content.

• If users can't easily find content on the internet > Then Jusbrasil Search Squad has to prepare the search engine.

• If users have a bad user experience on current websites > Then Jusbrasil Design Squad needs to actively act as a pillar for the product's success.

• If lawyers and law students need the relevant piece from a doctrine > Then Jusbrasil Search Squad has to be aligned with what is relevant content.

Designing the MVP solution

End of the initial discovery, now it was time to start putting all the pieces together, prioritize them and design the solution.

Use Cases

A lot of functionalities and user interactions to be prioritized and also stay in the backlog.

User Flow

Before going to high fidelity interfaces we set up a board with possible user flows for the MVP.

High Fidelity Interfaces

We did an extensive interface study before rolling out. We set up a process to have Design Critiques twice a week in order to have both feedback and alignment with other squads.

And we also maintained the discovery user centric approach by applying usability testing weekly with users.

And after all of this design process we got to the final interfaces we have today.

We have previously selected 200 beta testers to experience the product so we can learn from them before releasing it to all users.

Here you can check the live product.

Don't forget to check the live product.

Next steps

Unfortunately I'm not able to track this product anymore. I'm no longer a Jusbrasil employee so I'm not able to access the product's performance since I left the company right after the product release.

Learnings

1. Finding legal content in Brazil is still a big issue even for those who work with legal matters or are somehow involved in it.

2. A partnership with some other company is actually a big opportunity to prove and apply collaboration and value to your company.

3. A product is never only about one squad. Sharing knowledge can engage other company areas to help with the solution.

4. Cross company collaboration is an amazing way to learn things outside of your squad.

Previous project

Kamion Pay

‍email.fernando.pereira@gmail.com

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‍@f_pereira

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