Victoria Legal Aid (VLA) is a government-funded agency set up to ensure that people who cannot afford to pay a private lawyer can get help with their legal needs. VLA partnered with Portable to improve the digital experience of duty lawyers and their clients on the day of court.
Over recent years, VLA lawyers have been adjusting from using paper files to working in a digital environment, implementing its own custom digital Case Management System. They were looking for ways to make the overall system and processes more practical for lawyers on the day of court.
This project sought to engage those who are doing the work - duty lawyers - and consider how to best make a future digital system work for them. It considered the perspective of higher volume courts, as well as courts where a single duty lawyer would be present for the day of hearings.
The Opportunity
This project aimed to discover ways to improve the experience of duty lawyers and their clients on the day of court. We focused specifically but not exclusively how they have to switch between clients, gather key information, and how they work with limited internet connectivity.
There was also the challenge of ‘mobile lawyering’ to consider - meaning, how a lawyer works digitally (accesses and records information) while on their feet, speaking to clients, police, prosecutors or any other court participant.
Our Approach
Portable engaged with the VLA team and duty lawyers to consider how to best make a future digital system that works for them through the following engagement tools.
Stakeholder workshops
Portable designed stakeholder workshops with the VLA team, defining the participants required for workshops and the key learnings they hoped to gain. In the planning sessions, we learned from VLA how the current Case Management tool works to get initial insight into pain points and areas of improvement already on their radar.
From there, we held an online session with duty lawyers. We spoke about their experiences working with clients on the day of court and explored ideas for better ways to keep files, take notes and work with multiple clients.
Site visits
Portable visited three sites to observe lawyers in different court settings - Dandenong, Ballarat and Melbourne Magistrates Court. Portable’s design strategist shadowed a duty lawyer during each site visit to learn about the at-court duty lawyer experience, and identify opportunities to improve their experience.
Design artefacts and user testing interviews
Portable went through two rounds of visual prototype design and user interview and testing sessions. The high-level engagement goals of the interviews were to:
- Explore reactions to the design artefact
- Dive deeper into the potential impacts of altering current workflows and processes
- Understand expectations of what an largely digital-based way of working would look like
- Understand the support needed to help the work of duty lawyers
Our visual designer created a storyboard prototype depicting a day in the life of a duty lawyer and their use of digital tools. We used this to aid our discussion with duty lawyers about their workflows, how they use digital tools and what kinds of changes had the most potential to help them in their work at court.
Our user testing interviews allowed the team to gather some ‘first reaction’ feedback, suggestions to improve our designs and early concerns from duty lawyers who would use any products or features that are built and implemented.
Following these interviews, we created a clickable prototype with a narrowed set of features that stood out as the most potentially helpful during our first round of interviews.
In our next round of interviews we tested the clickable prototype. These interviews were more focused on refining the prototype and concepts. We gathered feedback on specific functionality and tested our hypotheses about what might help to enable and support the work of duty lawyers.
Synthesis and report
Throughout the research activities, we continually synthesised our findings to identify emerging key themes and trends; informing our recommendations and creating a roadmap for VLA's digital toolset. Constant evaluation is key to iterative and purpose built solutions.
VLA has a long term strategy to implement digital ways of working, with the goal to enable staff to deliver more services and help more Victorians than ever before. Through our work it became clear that building customised digital tools specifically for duty lawyers and their experience will smooth the way forward on this strategy.
Our final report and presentation included a number of suggested features and changes to the current tool they were using, as well as a potential roadmap for development.
Outcomes
The project involved a great mix of collaboration with the VLA team, contextual research, and remote research. From our conversations with duty lawyers and observations of their work we were able to create design artefacts that can be shared with VLA’s broader network.
Alongside this, we delivered a research report detailing the key insights learned from the process and a draft roadmap of next steps VLA could take. This report fulfilled the main goal of this project - to work towards ‘designing the right thing’, finding potential solutions and developing tangible recommendations.
VLA has an optimistic and forward-thinking vision for the future. Our work on this project contributed towards ensuring that the tools they create for their staff will meet their needs.
Reflections
“My favourite part of the project was getting back into site visits. Getting to see how duty lawyers navigate a chaotic environment and represent clients with limited prep or background was inspiring.”
- Luke Thomas, Principal Designer
Team
- Alice Reeve, Senior Producer
- Luke Thomas, Principal Designer
- Debra Cupitt, UX Researcher
- Cristiano Fantasia, Senior Experience Designer
Sign up to our email newsletter to get updates about our events, work and research
