A young innovative law firm, looking for ways to digitise their business, identified a change in their customers’ needs following Covid-19 first wave and wanted to explore whether they could help by offering them new legal services that would be relevant to their clients during the epidemic and the economic fallout.

Nejc, the founder, partnered up with d.labs to develop a product proposition and validate if there is a need for such services through customer discovery.

We have started from an intuitive product idea, that through the process of early customer interviews quickly turned out not to be viable. We learned that companies were already effectively solving crisis-related issues and there was no budget available for such a specialised service. This was a crucial step that helped us mitigate the value risk and do a sort of due diligence before incurring further cost and engineering effort.

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The customer interviews were exploratory in nature, which led us identify specific customer pains when it comes to general client-law firm relationships. In spite of invalidating the original hypothesis, these insights inspired and drove our future sprint. We took this as a baseline for a new product hypothesis.

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There was a pattern in the customers’ responses that pointed to a broken client-onboarding experience across a range of law firms. So instead of pursuing the original idea, we have pivoted and started working on a prototype that would showcase a game-changing client experience by using a digital tool.

We used the Minimum Viable Brand framework to develop an independent brand to stand out in the Clio marketplace - positioned as a SaaS, not a law firm. The brand's visual identity aimed to be simple, contemporary and professional.

By analysing the customer journey, we identified key brand touch points and created visual assets to best convey the brand's value proposition:

• Clio marketplace profile (awareness)
• Landing page (consideration)
• App UI (conversion)

We did several prototype iterations that we tested with actual customers on active cases. The feedback helped us polish the value proposition and user experience of the product.

Based on these learning we later developed a Single-feature MVP that delivered the core feature and launched the marketplace-ready product with a free trial.

We developed relationships with early adopter customers to gain feedback on the product's value and usability that helped us make improvements and a product backlog for future iterations. ‍

In 8 weeks we have:

• Helped the founder quickly invalidate a non-viable business idea, saving them from wasting further time, resources and money.
• Used a proven process of d.labs Product sprint to successfully navigate through a customer need pivot and created a path to prioritise solutions, that the team hadn’t previously considered.
• Shipped a software prototype in just a matter of weeks, and provided the client with a low-risk way of testing the solution hypothesis on real-life cases with early-adopter clients.
• Built an MVP that was released on Clio's App directory for European clients.
• Got early adopters to install and use the product and provide in-depth feedback.
• Created a new legal venture and identifying a viable channel to scale this product globally - the Clio App Directory.