Bringing platform mechanics to a traditional legal practice
Aligned leadership, a tested platform direction, and new revenue streams identified
The challenge
A leading Nordic legal firm could see big-tech-enabled shifts coming to its industry and wanted to get ahead of them — prototyping a digital platform that could disrupt elements of its own service delivery model before someone else did. The ambition was twofold: productise and automate parts of the existing offering, and unlock new revenue streams by serving user segments inclined toward self-serve. The harder part wasn't the technology. It was that any platform play would collide with deeply ingrained legal workflows, professional culture, and the mindsets of the people doing the work.
Our approach
We worked alongside the firm's leadership and lawyer end-users on two parallel tracks. The first was cultural and behavioral — sitting close to ingrained workflows to understand their practical and cultural basis, and surfacing the internal frictions and enablers a shift to platform mechanics would run into. The second was the concrete product work: shaping the whats, hows and whys of the platform's feature set, then prototyping and testing the team's core hypotheses with the lawyers who would actually use it. Behavior design ran through both threads — because turning skeptical professionals into advocates is its own design problem, separate from the software.
The result
The work moved leadership and practitioners onto a shared vision of the platform, turning a meaningful share of internal skeptics into advocates for what it could do for efficiency and client service. It produced a tested core architecture with third-party integrations sketched in, and surfaced concrete opportunity spaces — tiered service packages, segment-specific offerings, cross- and up-sell paths into existing customers. The transformation belonged to the firm; we were glad to have helped enable the conditions for it.
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