Legal Ease
Designing India’s first multilingual AI-powered legal platform, giving citizens access to justice through tech that understands them.
Designing India’s first multilingual AI-powered legal platform, giving citizens access to justice through tech that understands them.
This project began with a daunting truth—one in two Indians will face a civil dispute in their lifetime, yet most will struggle to navigate the system. The system that is tangled in complexity, language barriers, and an overwhelming lack of transparency.
Legalease is the response to that chaos. It’s a multilingual, AI-powered platform that simplifies legal collaboration between lawyers and clients—built to handle the messiness of real-world casework.
But this wasn’t just a design project—it was a systems challenge. One that required balancing human needs with the capabilities (and limitations) of generative AI.
My Role:
As the Product Designer leading this effort, I focused on designing for trust, confidence, and clarity in a system where most users—lawyers and clients alike—are still digitally averse and wary of AI.
I was responsible for:
- Conducting in-depth interviews with lawyers and clients to uncover pain points
- Mapping workflows and identifying where generative AI could genuinely assist—without displacing human judgment
- Designing interfaces for translation, summarization, and annotation that clearly signaled AI’s role and limits
- Prototyping cross-platform experiences that respected how people already work—in low-trust, high-stakes environments
- Building UI patterns and feedback mechanisms that helped
first-time tech users feel in control, not confused or overwhelmed
The two C’s are indispensable, where the outcome of a case often hinges on the ability of the parties involved to work together effectively.
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Legalese: informally refers to specialised terminology and phrasing used by those in the legal field and within legal documents.
The legal system, especially one serving over
1.4 billion people, is inherently complex.
While we aren't directly addressing these complexities, it was essential to understand them to develop a relevant solution.
We conducted desk research to
understand the context of the problem.
India's high courts face a massive backlog of 5.8 million cases, despite disposing of an average of 1.8 million annually.
The backlog continues to grow as new cases outpace resolved ones.
Despite various proposals for a dedicated infrastructure agency, India's judiciary remains technologically outdated.
The Chief Justice and the Supreme Court's e-Committee have called for such an agency, but no concrete action has been taken.
Despite budgetary allocations, India's judiciary often faces funding shortfalls. An analysis of central and state government spending found actual expenditures falling short of allocated funds in many cases.
Despite case management efforts, inadequate preparation and scheduling issues lead to time-wasting in Indian courts.
Computerization has been limited to process integration, not fundamental redesign.
That was a very very brief outline of some of the burning issues that the entire system currently faces.
I facilitated interviews with Lawyers to understand
the peoples' perspective.
"Breaking the fourth wall to say this is the part of design that makes me truly passionate. The ability to involve people through the design process, not just at the end for validation. Another aspect that I enjoy is the opportunity to learn about diverse fields from experts."
Lawyers must grasp and effectively communicate in the local dialects specific to the state or city where they practice. This poses challenges not only for communication within the courts but also for interaction with clients.
Even though the Indian government has launched a number of projects to digitize proceedings, lawyers have a bias for traditional processes due to the new processes being counter intuitive.
A lawyer's workflow usually comprises two parts: applying expertise to the work and managing the case process. Currently, administrative tasks like taking care of client paperwork (labour) often overshadow their core legal work (work)
Lawyers are faced with a series of problems in their day-to-day workflow, these revolve around lack of communication, clarity and collaboration.
I conducted interviews with people
that have filed civil suits to understand their journey.
Understanding the story from the other side was really important.
Court proceedings use complex jargon and legal terminology. If a lawyer fails to adequately address a judge's inquiry, the client often cannot provide assistance due to a limited understanding of the court proceedings and process.
Clients who speak local vernaculars are often left in the dark due to communication gaps with their lawyers and lack of any adequate translation support in the court. This often leads to miscommunication or missing information in the case.
The legal process, instead of being straightforward and clear-cut, is burdened with tedious paperwork, intricate procedures, and bureaucratic hurdles, resulting in frustration, financial burdens and emotional turmoil for clients.
Clients, not only face issues such as lack of understanding of the process, they also have to go through significant emotional and financial turbulence in the process.
To make sense of the research gathered in our secondary research
we created a map of the legal process - from filing to judgement.
Lawyers are faced with a series of problems in their day-to-day workflow, these revolve around lack of communication, clarity and collaboration.
Clients, not only face issues such as lack of understanding of the process, they also have to go through significant emotional and financial turbulence in the process.
Both parties would benefit from a more transparent and collaborative intervention, that educates, provides confidence and facilitates a mutually beneficial resolution.
With such a large population to consider,
our clients could be anyone.
Developing a user persona helped us approach this
diversity with empathy and understanding.
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We used this to map collaboration levels between the client and lawyer.
This map was a great way to synthesis the deep and vast learnings we had in the research phase.
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Central to our ecosystem are seamless handoffs, effective communication and overall clarity; in simple terms, effective collaboration.
Collaboration that is concentrated on human values and not quantifiable outcomes.
Our priority is user comfort and understanding. Consistent and clarifying language and interactions are central to effective communication and understanding.
The products we envision and the industry are both technical and complex, so our interfaces must be simple and clear. We focus on what's important. Our products must deliver a straightforward, meaningful experience.
The complexity of the legal world must remain in the legal world. We operate with compassion at the forefront of all our interactions. Nudges and notifications will never create anxieties.
Ensured that every AI-generated output, whether a summary or translation, was clear, traceable, and modifiable. Users needed to know what the AI did, why it did it, and how they could change it.
We explicitly defined what AI could do, and what it couldn’t. Clear system cues helped users understand when they were interacting with AI and when it was time to take over.
Ensured that every AI-generated output, whether a summary or translation, was clear, traceable, and modifiable. Users needed to know what the AI did, why it did it, and how they could change it.
In a space filled with legal anxiety, we used gentle prompts and non-authoritative language like “AI Suggestion” or “Edit & Verify” to make sure AI interactions never added pressure.
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- Clear explanation of court procedures
- Knowledge of legal terminology
- Guidance on witness preparation
- Practice sessionsInformation on courtroom etiquette
- Keeping the client informed about the progress of the case
- Addressing client concerns
- Providing guidance on how to prepare witnesses
Client can pick an avatar they feel comfortable with
AI avatars are personable with conversations available in multiple Indian languages
AI is used to examine the clients body language, tone, speech and can provide live feedback.
Learning sessions can be shared with the lawyer for further feedback
- Complex legal terms should be explained in simple, everyday language
- The client should feel comfortable asking questions and raising concerns at any time
- Client needs to understand what is being said during the court session, if it isn't in their language
- Should be able to communicate complex legal concepts in a clear and concise manner
- Should tailor their explanations to the client's specific needs and understanding
Client is able to use the tablet provided in the court to listen to court proceedings
English is translated into a language that the client can select.
Client can highlight questions to send to their lawyer for a later discussion
Ai provides guidance through the hearing.
- Integrity of provided documents should be upheld
- Documents must be saved securely by the lawyer
- Precise translations that preserve the meaning and nuances of legal terms
- Need the original document structure, formatting, and metadata to be maintained in the translated version
- Must be able to collaborate with the team on documents
A translation tool that is equipped to handle legal terminology. With a glossary of legal terms to ensure consistency and accuracy in the translation.
The translation tool preserves document formatting
Tools for in-line editing or comments where lawyers can make adjustments to the translated text, compare original and translated versions side-by-side, and track changes
Collaborative features where multiple users can access, comment, or track progress on translated documents
