Knowable Insights

Team: Engineers, Legal SMEs, PM Focus: Data Viz, Design Systems, User Research

Summary

Knowable needed a competitive edge in the crowded contract management space. While the platform already stored and analyzed contracts, it only offered basic filtering – users couldn’t gain meaningful insights from their data. I was hired to design Knowable Insights, an analytics system that would reveal patterns in how companies negotiate contracts, giving sales a compelling differentiator.

The stakes were high: a mass layoff happened on my first day. I designed the system quickly enough that we had a working demo ready just three months later for Legalweek, where it won both product innovation awards. Knowable reported profit for the first time that year.

Old Design

New Design

The User Problem

Corporate legal departments manage hundreds or thousands of contracts, but had no way to understand patterns in how they were negotiated without reading them one at a time. This made it nearly impossible to evaluate their negotiation standards, spot mistakes, or identify which terms they typically concede on versus hold firm.

The Business Need

Knowable already employed legal analysts in Chicago and Poland to ‘code’ contract data – manually tagging how terms were negotiated across clients’ contracts. However, this valuable data wasn’t being surfaced to users in a meaningful way. Stakeholders saw an opportunity: turn this existing asset into an analytics system that would differentiate Knowable in the market and help legal departments benchmark their negotiation patterns.

Organizing a Design Sprint

With the company reeling from layoffs and needing to move quickly, I used my first week to organize a design sprint for my second week. I served as designer and assembled a cross-functional team: the project manager as facilitator, an engineering lead, our head of design, and two legal subject matter experts. This allowed us to quickly align on the problem space and explore solutions together.

The five-day design sprint process we followed. Image credit: thesprintbook.com

Interviews

I recruited internal and external subject matter experts to participate in research throughout the sprint, both for initial interviews and prototype evaluation. Working with my PM, who had deeper domain knowledge, I drafted interview questions focused on understanding what types of coded contract data would be most valuable to different roles.

How do you determine whether contracts at your business are being negotiated correctly?
Can you name three fields we capture that you’re most interested in? If so, which? If not, why not?
If you could see the fields we code represented as charts, would you use them? If so, what would you use the information to do? How often?

Interview Findings

The two roles most likely to use Knowable Insights are chief legal officers and their corporate attorneys.

CLOs would use it to assess merger risk and spot problems at scale. Corporate counsel would use it to evaluate their own negotiation outcomes and improve their approach.

Both user types eventually drill into specific contracts, though their paths differ.

CLOs are more likely to have a “discovery” phase where they search for risk indicators, while corporate counsel typically look for specific information they already have in mind. Either way, both journeys end with examining individual contracts.

Different user experiences for different personas aren’t necessary.

While corporate counsel show less interest in high-level overview pages than CLOs do, they still find value in them. With a limited set of coded fields in the MVP, the interface remains simple enough for both personas to navigate without customization.

The same information architecture works for both personas for MVP.

Simple Sprint Prototype Evaluation

Interview participants returned on Friday to test a clickable prototype based on the week’s findings. I asked them to locate a specific contract using limited information – just its name and one negotiated term. The positive feedback validated our approach, with most suggestions focusing on post-MVP enhancements.

Prototype evaluation task: Participants located specific contracts by filtering charts and drilling into the underlying data.

Founding Knowable’s Design System

With the sprint complete, I began refining the Knowable Insights design for development. Knowable lacked basic design foundations – no established colors, typography, or components – so I created the company’s first design system.

Starting with a color palette inspired by the logo, I built out a full component library, iterating to ensure WCAG-compliant contrast and visibility. I checked in regularly with engineering, design, and leadership to ensure the system would scale beyond this initial project.

Finding Flexible Chart Designs

I collaborated with engineering to evaluate and select a chart library that could handle complex legal data while remaining customizable. Once selected, I styled the charts to match Knowable’s design system, developing a data visualization color palette that maintained accessibility standards while distinguishing between multiple data series.

I designed various chart types in the Knowable style, prioritizing a minimalist approach that could accommodate lengthy legal field names without cluttering the interface.

Final Design for MVP

Results and Reflections

The design came together quickly enough that Knowable launched at Legalweek just three months after I started. Representatives demonstrated Knowable Insights at the conference booth and entered it into the Product Innovation Awards, where it won both the attendees’ choice and judges’ choice awards. While I don’t have detailed financial data, the impact was clear: no further layoffs occurred, sales increased after launch, and Knowable reported profitability for the first time later that year.

Key Takeaways:

1. Build relationships with people who have domain expertise you lack. I believe I was chosen for this role not for legal tech knowledge, but for my ability to listen and learn. Success depended on leaning heavily on my PM’s expertise and building trust with subject matter experts who could fill my knowledge gaps.

2. Respect scope constraints. The sprint ideation surfaced exciting possibilities – customization features, data integrations, advanced analytics. But the business reality was clear: Knowable was already coding specific data and needed a solution that leveraged it quickly. The project succeeded because we stayed focused on what we could deliver now, not what might be possible later.