Company
Paladin, PBC
My Role
Validation Research
Prototyping
UX & UI
Product Scope
The pro bono world had no digital infrastructure prior to Paladin. Everything was run through spreadsheets, emails, and *gasp* phone calls. When we initially set out to build that infrastructure, a hard decision we had to make was which side of the marketplace to focus our effort on: those creating pro bono opportunities (Legal Aid Organizations), or those being recruited for them (lawyers at law firms). Our initial focus was on law firms, so when we finally got to shift gears to the legal aid side, we ran a blue sky discovery sprint to find what tools would create a step change to the way they worked. With this validation research we went wide on possible solutions, eventually leading us to identify both infrastructural changes (e.g. how we treat “external users”) and foundational new features (see below).
An actionable front door to justice
Rather than simply recreate the law firm admin experience, we played with a more content-focused approach for legal aid organizations. Here, we show opportunity listings with high level stats about engagement, opportunities for ML/AI to give performance insights, and immediate actions to dig deeper into how each opportunity is being shared and interacted with.
Status isn’t just about now, it’s about forever
Often legal aid organizations would share how difficulty with remembering the prior status of opportunities. When did I post this? Has anyone looked at it? Did someone else on my team edit this? Who has it been sent to? Putting all of this in a single view allows Legal Aid Orgs to quickly not only see their own history, but a reasonably anonymized view of engagement with law firm partners.
(Ballmer intensifies) Reporting! Reporting! Reporting!
We learned quickly on both the law firm and legal aids, reporting on performance MATTERS. Everyone wants to know their ROI on their good deeds. For this view, we wanted to give insight into how an opportunity is performing so Legal Aid Orgs could increase their engagement with lawyers. Besides someone eventually taking on an opportunity, Legal Aid Orgs are flying blind.
Baby steps into network effects
All connections in the pro bono marketplace of Paladin are manual. We onboard firms and legal aid orgs individually, and create the connections between them manually when those partners join. Instead, “how might we” enable firms and legal aids to connect to one another themselves, both at onboarding, and as new partners join? This creates a world where more lawyers are connected to more legal aid partners, and - theoretically - more and better pro bono can be done.