Microsoft Contracts
Microsoft’s platform for managing over 1 million contracts had become outdated and hard to navigate, forcing teams to spend significant manual effort just to find what they needed. I redesigned the entire experience end to end and introduced an AI agent to make finding and managing contracts fast and intuitive, now serving 30,000 visitors a month.
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Years
- 2026
- Scope
- Strategy, UI/UX Design
Challenge
Microsoft Contracts was outdated and hard to use, yet legal teams relied on it daily to manage over 1 million non-revenue contracts. With no dedicated researchers, I had to learn complex legal workflows before redesigning it, understanding how teams actually worked before changing anything. The challenge was to modernize a deeply embedded, high-stakes system without disrupting its users.
Impact
0 Million+
Contracts Managed
0+
Monthly Visitors
Collaboration
As lead product designer, I collaborated directly with business stakeholders, PMs, and engineers from vision through execution, keeping design aligned with business goals and technical feasibility at every step. I also owned the research myself, ensuring the redesign was grounded in real user workflows rather than assumptions.
Designing for an Existing Userbase
Microsoft Contracts manages every non-revenue contract at Microsoft, and two groups do that work. Paralegals handle most of the daily tasks, while attorneys manage teams of paralegals, and the platform is designed around each of their workflows.
User Type 1
Paralegals
Paralegals carry the daily volume, drafting agreements, chasing renewals, and pulling terms for whoever asks. Their work is fast, repetitive, and mostly about finding the right contract quickly.
User Type 2
Supervising Attorneys
The attorneys managing those paralegals rarely open a contract themselves. They need the state of the whole book, what’s due, what’s stuck, where the risk sits, and how the work is spread across their team.
User Type 1
Paralegals
Paralegals carry the daily volume, drafting agreements, chasing renewals, and pulling terms for whoever asks. Their work is fast, repetitive, and mostly about finding the right contract quickly.
User Type 2
Supervising Attorneys
The attorneys managing those paralegals rarely open a contract themselves. They need the state of the whole book, what’s due, what’s stuck, where the risk sits, and how the work is spread across their team.
User Pain Points and Business Requirements
I interviewed users to understand where the previous platform failed them, and met with business stakeholders to collect all necessary requirements. I took both perspectives into account with every design decision as I pushed the project forward.
Sketches & Wireframes
I started with rough sketches to explore different structures, then progressed my preferred directions into low-fidelity wireframes. Along the way I reviewed the work with business stakeholders, validating direction while changes were easy and quick to make. By the time I moved into high-fidelity design, the direction and structure were already agreed on.
Key Features
Key Features
Dashboard
A summary of everything you own, status, spend, and upcoming renewals, with the contracts that need attention below. This is the view the old platform never had.
AI Contracts Agent
Ask a question in plain language and the agent finds, compares, or summarizes contracts, citing the ones it used. It replaces most of the manual searching that used to fill the day.
New Contract
New contracts start from a legal-approved template. The AI fills in details from a one-line description, and a pre-check flags issues before the draft is created.
Upload Contract
Brings existing contracts into the platform. The AI extracts parties, values, and dates from the document, and the user reviews what it found before adding it.
Emphasis on AI Experiences
The agent was the single most important goal for the business and the biggest addition for users, so it got more time and detail work than anything else on the platform. Most of that went into the output itself, how answers read, what they cite, and how they hold up when a paralegal acts on them. Done right, it saves hours of manual work.
Before & After
The old platform was outdated, slow, and hard to use, and people only kept using it because there was no replacement. The new one is everything the old one wasn’t, modern, fast, and far easier to work in. It addresses the pain points users kept running into while delivering what the business asked for, an AI-forward product on a modern foundation.
