Microsoft Legal Ease
Simplifying legal requests and review
Legal Ease is Microsoft’s internal platform for submitting and managing legal requests, handling thousands a year across areas like trademarks, marketing, privacy, and copyright. I designed the platform from 0 to 1 to primarily live as a Teams app, with intuitive AI validation preventing mistakes at intake and a centralized triaging, reviewing, and approving system for legal professionals. A process that took five to six weeks now closes in under one week.
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Years
- 2025
- Scope
- Strategy, UI/UX Design, Research
Challenge
Legal requests at Microsoft came in through a static form with poor context, nothing preventing mistakes, and were managed by legal professionals via email, creating delays and allowing things to get lost. The challenge was to shorten and simplify the process on both sides, reducing mistakes from requesting users and giving legal teams the ability to triage and execute requests efficiently.
Impact
$0K+
Saved Annually on Outside Counsel
0+ Hours
Estimated Annual Savings
Collaboration
As lead product designer, I collaborated directly with business stakeholders, PMs, and engineers from vision through execution, influencing product strategy along the way. I led the research and designed both sides of the platform, the requester and reviewer experiences, in parallel.
Designing for Different Types of Users
Any employee at Microsoft can file a legal request, and teams of legal professionals review and process each and every one of them.
User Type 1
Requesters
Any Microsoft employee can file a request. Examples include a marketing manager, someone from branding, or a PM naming a new feature.
User Type 2
Legal Reviewers
Attorneys triage and process all incoming legal requests. They either take the request themselves or assign it to paralegals in their work area.
User Type 1
Requesters
Any Microsoft employee can file a request. Examples include a marketing manager, someone from branding, or a PM naming a new feature.
User Type 2
Legal Reviewers
Attorneys triage and process all incoming legal requests. They either take the request themselves or assign it to paralegals in their work area.
User Research
Insights gained from hour-long sessions with paralegals and attorneys surfaced glaring pain points, workflow gaps, and shortcomings of the current system.
No Validation Before Submission
Requesters are given poor context and guidance around submitting the correct information. Their submissions are also not validated before getting sent to legal teams, leading to lots of unnecessary back and forth.
Fragmented Workflows
The entry points for the different legal request workflows lived in separate places. No central hub to make or manage pending requests. This led to confusion from potential users looking for these workflows.
No Centralized Home for Requests
Legal teams triage, track, and manage requests on their own using spreadsheets. Requests get forgotten, lost, and lots of time is wasted on the process instead of reviewing actual requests.
Everything Lives in Emails
All communication between requesters and legal teams happens via email, away from the request. Legal teams are fielding dozens of requests at a time, creating too many active email chains to accurately track.
Extremely Manual Review Process
Almost 40% of requests are very straightforward. The record is complete, the risk is resolved, and they are ready to approve. Legal teams are wasting time on these instead of other pressing requests.
Understanding the Workflow
Before designing anything, I needed to understand how a legal request actually moved from submission to decision. Understanding this process made the problems and inefficiencies easy to see.
Create Request
Review Request
Communication
Approve/Reject
- Created by MS employee
- Takes place in a classic form system
- No central location for forms
- No guardrails on what can be submitted
- Legal professionals review and evaluate request
- Requests are triaged and assigned internally
- Happens between requester and legal professionals
- Happens via email
- Relates to missing or incorrect info
- Request is eventually approved or rejected by the legal team
Often led to weeks of back and forth
Design Process
I explored the design for the platform in low-fidelity wireframes, then high-fidelity explorations, before landing on the final shipped design.
Wireframe
Final Design
Key Decisions That Shaped the Platform
Backed by what I learned from the research phase, these key strategic decisions shaped the platform and allowed our efforts to meet the business goals.
1
Central Hub for All Requests
One place for making and managing all legal requests. Applies to both Microsoft employees and all the legal teams.
2
Move All Communication
All back and forth between requesters and legal teams happens inside the platform. This improves organization.
3
AI Validation on Both Sides
Checks requesters’ answers before sending as well as submissions before legal teams see them. Identifies errors and missing info.
1
Central Hub for All Requests
One place for making and managing all legal requests. Applies to both Microsoft employees and all the legal teams.
2
Move All Communication
All back and forth between requesters and legal teams happens inside the platform. This improves organization.
3
AI Validation on Both Sides
Checks requesters’ answers before sending as well as submissions before legal teams see them. Identifies errors and missing info.
Feedback from Users
Not everything landed perfectly on the first design pass. When early feedback showed potential problems, I adjusted the design to fix them.
Form structure was overwhelming to users and led to lower quality, less detailed answers
Less of a cognitive load on users leading to better quality, more detailed answers
Before Feedback
After Feedback
Key Features for Requesters
Key Features for Requesters
Dashboard & Request Grid
The dashboard surfaces pending requests with their next steps and entry points into every flow. The request grid shows the full history of requests, including drafts.
Submission Form
The form is a guided experience giving the user plenty of context, and AI helps users draft the correct content along the way. The experience was built to prevent mistakes and incorrect info before submission.
Communication
Communication is tied to each request and lives entirely within the platform. This simplifies any back and forth between requesters and the legal team reviewing requests.
Key Features for Legal Teams
Key Features for Legal Teams
Triage Board
All incoming requests land on a single board, categorized by request type. Legal teams triage and manage everything from one place.
Request View
Every request opens with its data extracted and organized, any problems or missing info pointed out, and an AI classification that helps legal teams quickly determine next steps.
Assign & Approve
Legal teams can distribute review work amongst themselves and quickly approve requests deemed ready without having to manually review them.
Results After Launch
6 Weeks → Under 1 Week
Average Request Processing Time
0% Increase
Total Requests Processed Internally
Colleague Feedback
Feedback from leaders and partners I worked with on this effort, shared through performance reviews.
You are really good at thinking through complex problems in a productive, straightforward way. You cut through the noise and identify key needs, confounds and considerations. This skill is extremely valuable when working in the HR and CELA spaces.
Principal SWE Manager
Microsoft
People consistently rely on you because you bring clarity, steady momentum, and high-quality design craft. Your ability to navigate ambiguous problem spaces and still deliver grounded, thoughtful solutions is one of your strongest skills.
Product Manager
Microsoft
