Managing More than Matters

The innovative matter management system for both law firms and corporate legal.

Document Management System

Joinder, first known as ‘the dashboard,’ was first developed by Orrick as a DMS to handle the vast number of stored documents needed for their clients. The application was expensive to run and clunky, so a V3 was spun off as a startup. It was at this phase I was hired on as a hybrid Product Designer and Manager to improve the user interface and add new features such as Tasks.

Robust Document Features

Along with the storage of these files came the need to handle several file operations, from natively editing files, to versioning, to searching using OCR. This took shape as a triple-paneled interface to quickly manage switching between folders and files without needing to refetch data. Over the years came additional features to improve the user experience, like a grid view for making rapid changes to certain meta data. This remained the favorite place of many law firm users, since documents are where they tend to live.

Workrooms

All of these folders and files needed a place to call home, which came to be known as the Workroom. This enabled us to provide several features for improving productivity, such as customizing templates and connecting sets of Workrooms together. Joinder provided a substantial numbers of these to its users so they could jumpstart any operation.

Workroom Tasklist

A brand new feature took shape in tasks to handle the requirements side of any given legal case. This would be useful to law firms like Orrick, but also brought into our user base corporate legal departments. Complex matters and company operations require extensive task capabilities. I took inspiration from Asana by focusing on functionality, like keyboard shortcuts to ensure seamless use and analytics to measure progress.

Customizable Permissions

Joinder being built around security and confidentiality meant the need for competent permissioning. This required each layer of the hierarchy to both inherent its parent element’s access and be able to customize individually. Since legal professionals are at great risk of over-sharing, I designed the model to reinforce low or no access when any file or task was created. Workrooms, folders, files and tasks are all designed to provide impressive security.

Global Search and Indexing

With the heavy focus on DMS and file functionality, I account for these needs in one operation, from searching across the entire database, to viewing related excerpts, to filtering by any number of criteria. Global search enables the user to immediately locate that file they are looking for without having to go and find the client or workroom it belongs to. All file operations are retained, such as previewing or editing, without having to leave the search page.

Calendar Notifications

In order to meet the needs of the busy legal professional, we built a robust calendaring system that would expand the functionality of tasks. This came in the form of Joinder’s Calendar dashboard, where tasks with due dates land. Since legal professionals rely on their company calendars to tell them when work is due, Joinder needed a method for exporting task due dates and details. When enabled, tasks would populate the user’s calendar and automatically update them in email as updates are made to those tasks.

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