Kolabrya

Legal AI Platform

A legal tech startup I joined as the sole designer. They wanted to ship one product across five different kinds of law, and they wanted it to feel like the AI was working for the lawyer instead of replacing them.

Role: Sole Designer (UI, UX, Branding, Website)
Year: 2024-2026
Engagement: Freelance Contract
Industry: Legal Tech, AI
Services: Product Design, UX, UI, Brand, Marketing Site
Deliverables: Web Platform, Brand System, Marketing Site

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Challenge

Five different kinds of law, five different vocabularies, and lawyers who do not trust AI that hides its work. Most legal tech I looked at felt designed for a generic SaaS user. A corporate litigator stamping document numbers on thousands of pages for a discovery hand-off and a personal injury lawyer reviewing 200 rows of a client's medical history are doing completely different jobs, and a generic "documents" table makes both of them slower. I had to design something that felt right inside each kind of practice without splitting the product into five separate apps.

Approach

The first thing I learned working with lawyers is that they actually want a lot of text on the screen. They want metadata, status, dates, source citations, names of people, dates of loss, version numbers, all of it visible. They do not want a clean dashboard with hidden states and aspirational whitespace. So I designed for density and on-screen evidence. Lawyers also need to put their name on AI output before it ships, so I made approval a real thing the user does, not a "review" button buried in a menu.

Outcome

Five workspaces that share the same login, the same brand, and the same approval pattern, but each one speaks the vocabulary the lawyer actually uses. The whole thing went into the founders' hands as a high fidelity prototype with no backend behind it, which let them put it in front of actual lawyers for feedback before anyone had to write a single API endpoint. The product moved from idea to investor demo without ever pretending to be more than it was.

Pick Your Practice

The first screen tells you what kind of product this is.

I wanted the product to feel like a tool that respects your time the second you log in. Instead of dropping you into a generic dashboard and making you set up a "project," you pick the kind of law you're doing. From that point on the language, the sidebar, the AI prompts, and the export formats are all calibrated for that practice area. The decision is up front because lawyers shouldn't have to fight the product to make it speak their language.

Workspace picker, five practice areas — Pick your practice area

Five Workspaces

One product, five different working environments.

Each workspace has its own sidebar, its own vocabulary, and its own AI surface. The big idea is that an investigator looking at allegations of harassment and a corporate litigator working a discovery production should not be using the same generic "cases" page. They are doing fundamentally different jobs, and the product reflects that.

Popular

Workplace Investigations

Internal investigators handling harassment, discrimination, and policy violations. Case overviews, an interactive map for tying allegations to evidence, and AI analysis with prompt libraries split between Personal and Firm.

Corporate Litigation

Discovery, document review, and case productions. A three-pane workspace built so the lawyer never has to switch screens. Annotation, redaction with reasons, and a four-step production wizard that exports privilege logs grouped by issue.

New

Personal Injury

Ontario PI lawyers building mediation briefs. The biggest deal here is that every AI generated chronology row has its own approve toggle with the approver name and timestamp stamped on it. Damages calculator, case law search, medical report builder, and a draft mediation tool sit alongside it.

Arbitration and Mediation

Running arbitration sessions, transcripts, and prep. The timeline view is the heart of it, because arbitrators think in chronology and evidence, not in tabs and tickets.

Vendor Management

Tracking vendor compliance against regulatory guidelines, with OSFI scoring built in. The workspace exists to prove the design system stretches past legal practice without breaking. Same chat and approval patterns, different language.

Spotlight, Inside A Case

Everything the lawyer needs on one screen.

The first time I sat with a lawyer reviewing a case in another product, they kept switching tabs. They opened the case in one tab, the people involved in another, the timeline in a third, and the case description in a fourth. They told me that was normal, that every legal product made them stitch the picture together themselves. So when I designed the case overview, I put everything they were tab switching for onto one screen.

The top half shows the case information panel with the name, type, location, department, when the allegations came in, the incident dates, the safety status, and the case description in full. To the right of it is a small timeline panel with the open date, the last update, and the investigation progress as a percentage based on verified evidence. Below it is People Involved, with everyone on the case grouped by role. None of this is hidden behind a button. It is all just there, because the lawyer is going to read all of it anyway and they would rather scroll once than click six times.

Case overview with information, timeline, and people on one screen — Case overview, designed for one scroll

Corporate Litigation three-pane workspace — Corporate Litigation, three pane workspace

Spotlight, Corporate Litigation

The reason it has three panes is that lawyers refuse to switch screens.

When I started talking to corporate litigators about how they work through a discovery production, the thing they kept saying was that they live in three things at once. They need their folders and binders on one side so they can keep their place in the case, the actual document in the middle so they can read it, and a coding panel on the other side so they can flag privilege and responsiveness without losing their spot. Splitting that across three different screens or making them open modals to code a document was a non starter.

So the workspace is three panes by default. The right panel swaps between annotations, the coding form, and the AI assistant depending on what the lawyer is doing in that moment. The coding form does not invent new vocabulary either, it uses the exact terms the firm uses, like Responsive or Not Responsive, privileged with a reason attached, Confidential versus Attorney's Eyes Only, and a custom Issues taxonomy per case. When they hit the four step document production wizard at the end, all of that coding flows straight through into the privilege log without anyone copying anything by hand.

Spotlight, Investigations

The dashboard is for managers, not for show.

Workplace Investigations is the one workspace where the lead user is often not the person doing the daily work. It is the HR lead or the head of investigations watching twelve cases at once, and what they need is a real read of where everything is sitting. So this dashboard is not a marketing dashboard, it is a working tool. The numbers across the top are not vanity metrics, they are the four statuses that map directly to the workflow the investigator uses. Active, Critical, In Review, Completed. The investigator and the manager are looking at the same vocabulary.

Underneath the stat tiles is the tool launcher. I made that an explicit row of named tools rather than hiding them behind a menu icon, because every legal team I talked to said the same thing. They forget what the product can do when the buttons are not visible. Putting Doc Enhancement, Audio Transcription, Document Assistant, Interview Assistant, Medical Chronology, and Resource Center all sitting on the dashboard means the manager can hand a junior investigator the link and say "go run that tool" without explaining where it lives.

Workplace Investigations dashboard — Workplace Investigations, Dashboard

Spotlight, Vendor Management

How far can the same system stretch.

Vendor Management was the workspace where I wanted to find out if the design system I had built could hold up outside of legal practice. The use case here is a financial company tracking vendor compliance against regulatory guidelines, which on the surface has nothing to do with how a litigator or an investigator works. But underneath, the moves are the same. You have a list of items with risk ratings, you have detailed records you need to read carefully, you have AI doing a first pass, and you have a human who has to sign off on whether the AI got it right.

Designing this workspace was the proof for me that the foundation was actually portable. The sidebar changed, the colour palette could swap, the language went from "case" to "vendor" and from "privilege" to "OSFI tier," but the chat patterns, the approval pattern, the table density, all of that carried over without a rebuild. That is the test I wanted the system to pass.

PI Law, More Of It

I named the tabs after what the lawyer actually ships.

This is the thing I am proudest of in the PI workspace. Most legal products name their nav after their database tables. You get a "Documents" tab and a "Notes" tab and a "Tasks" tab, and then the lawyer has to mentally translate that into the actual deliverables they need to produce. I named the tabs after the artifacts. Summary Viewer, Calculator, Legal Research, Medical Report, Draft Mediation. Each tab is a real thing the lawyer hands to a client or to opposing counsel. When you open a case and see the nav, you are looking at the shape of the work you are about to do.

PI Damages Calculator — Calculator, present value damages

PI Legal Research — Legal Research, Canadian case law

PI Medical Report — Medical Report Builder

PI Draft Mediation — Draft Mediation Brief

PI Analysis with Prompt Library — Analysis with Prompt Library

PI Case Open — Case overview, just opened

Investigations, More Of It

Six other places this workspace shows up.

Beyond the dashboard, the investigations workspace has a few moments worth showing. The interactive map is where the investigator turns a list of allegations and people and evidence into a structure they can argue from. The analytics page is configurable, so the head of investigations can build the view that matches their org, not whatever default I picked. The prompt library splits Personal and Firm because lawyers care a lot about who wrote the prompt, especially when they want to share it with the rest of the firm without losing their own version.

Interactive map of allegations and evidence — Interactive Map

Configurable analytics — Analytics, configurable widgets

Analysis with Prompt Library — Personal vs Firm prompts

Brand

Built to look serious without looking boring.

The colour palette is built around three blues. The navy is for the heavy structural moments like sidebars and headings, where I wanted the brand to read as confident and trusted. The primary blue is for calls to action and links, basically anywhere I want the eye to know it can act. The light blue is for surfaces and hover states, and it is the colour that does most of the warmth work in a product that is otherwise mostly text and tables.

#003864 Kolabrya Navy

#0068B4 Kolabrya Blue

#B2E6FF Kolabrya Light

100 Customers
on the prototype

0–1 Idea to product,
start to finish

5 Practice areas
under one product

The product moved from idea to investor demo without pretending to be more than it was.

Designing this taught me a lot about what serious working tools actually need to look like. Density over whitespace, vocabulary that matches the user, AI that shows its work. I take those lessons into every project now.