I have been collecting insights from my work with lawyers and law firms over the past 10+ years. I now have a practice supporting business units that are committed to making the firm’s investments deliver exceptional value every time.
Law firms from both sides of the Atlantic turn to me for actionable and insightful advice. I employ a systematic approach to problem-solving using ‘design thinking’ principles, that with my passion for a deeper understanding of our end users, and my willingness to experiment and learn, leads to a unique focus for the business of law.
Areas of Focus
My Story
1998 – 2003
My law degree and postgraduate course back in London, UK led me in those formative anything-is-possible years of the Web, to a career in online legal publishing rather than law.
I read Susskind’s Future of Law just as I was graduating and naïvely thought that the future really had arrived! It hadn’t. (And I still live in hope.) Online legal publishing however, was just kicking off.
Lawtel back in those dotcom-bubble years was revolutionizing the legal publishing model. While the traditional print publishers were still thinking that brochureware was the best use of the InterWebs, we were busily figuring out the challenges of online information design, usability and findability.
2003 – 2007
I earned my Legal KM stripes in the optimistic buzz of the new century. Two very different but equally forward-thinking firms wanted to take advantage of the best that this new field of digital design had to offer. Both Matrix Chambers and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer were looking at ways they could pool their knowledge and expertise somewhere centrally for the benefit of all their lawyers. Applying my experience from the digital publishing world, we created bespoke content-rich knowledge management systems.
As an Information Architect I learned to bridge the gap between the legal needs of the business and the IT department’s development realities – working to translate needs and requirements into actionable design deliverables.
2007 – Present
I crossed my fingers and made the leap into the world of freelancing and consulting with my company, Tangledom. Since then I’ve worked with a number of different digital design agencies, and been embedded into the worlds of some of the leading law firms in the UK and Canada. Having my feet in both Legal + Design has provided me with a unique toolkit of engaging techniques that brings fresh perspectives to the business of law.
I have thousands of hours observing lawyers interacting with technology. I’ve been gathering their mental models of how they work, and untangling the messy usage data and analytics to back up these insights. I now work with some exceptional law firms to embed these insights at the point of design, resulting in more users, finding what they’re looking for, more of the time. And I love it.
