Making legal tech usable

The old homepage was thin. A few sections on the platform's features, two-minute demo videos showing how to use the product, and that was it. Nothing about what a VCC was, nothing about who the platform was for. User sessions bounced fast. People who hadn't heard of a VCC had no reason to sit through a feature walkthrough built for users who already had an account. Sales calls confirmed it: the first ten minutes were always spent explaining VCCs before anyone could talk about the platform.

The problem: nobody knew what a VCC was. You can't sell a management platform for something nobody's heard of.

So the new homepage starts earlier. What is a VCC. Who's it for. What do you actually get. How to start in three steps. The whole page is one scroll from "what's this" to "this is exactly what my business needs."

The old packages were sorted by feature count. Four tiers, inconsistent across each other, and nothing about who any of them were for.

The new pricing is three tiers: Start, Pro, Premium. Each one builds on the previous, so the choice is no longer "which features do I want" but "how much paperwork I want done for me?" Pro is marked as most preferred to guide the typical buyer there, while Start and Premium anchor the ends.

The three buyers came out of conversations with the founding team about who was actually signing up, and which conversations were closing.

The startup founder with a limited budget takes Start. The mid-market owner with multiple shareholders and managers, who needs active management, lands on Pro. The premium client who wants to hand off the legal admin entirely and have someone on call takes Premium.

The homepage was enough to introduce the concept. But a completely new legal form, with all its complexity, needed more than a quick read.

I built a layered education system. A blog with proper explanations of how VCCs work in practice, use cases, comparisons with other company forms, and articles written for each user type. A dedicated FAQ page built from the questions users had been asking through the old contact form, repeatedly. And segmented email sequences that meet people where they are in the journey: still learning what a VCC is, comparing it to an LLC, ready to sign up but stuck on a specific question.

The content didn't just live on the site - it worked for it. The dev team and I pushed the SEO score to 100 on Lighthouse, so the same articles that educated existing visitors also pulled new ones in through search.

The platform sits on Untitled UI. Tokens, components, accessibility patterns built in. For a startup with a small team and a long product roadmap, that's the easiest place to start: every state is already designed, the system is documented well enough that adding new panels or flows doesn't require inventing them from scratch, and the same library is maintained in Figma and React so the design and dev sides stay in sync.

Components that already had every state covered meant fewer empty-state and edge-case gaps for new users to fall into. That mattered more for this product than for most. A confused user in a legal-tech platform doesn't just leave, they call the founders.

Even on projects that don't use Untitled UI directly, my tokens and variables tend to follow the same approach. It's the system shape I most often borrow from.

The biggest problem on the platform was getting around it. Switching between companies was through a specific page and the active company wasn't visible at all times. The sidebar was unclear about where the user was. And the marketing site's navbar and footer were still there after login, so the product felt like a logged-in version of the homepage instead of its own product. The founders flagged it as the most common support question from users with multiple companies on their account.

I stripped the marketing navigation out of the authenticated experience and rebuilt the sidebar as a single, clear navigation. Company switching moved into a dedicated control at the bottom of the sidebar, so the active company is always visible and easy to change.

A new user would register and land on... nothing. They were left to find their own way, which often meant they didn't log in again. The founders would end up contacting every new user personally to walk them through the platform. User. by. user.

It got worse: most of the sidebar was hidden if no VCC was connected to the account. Pages and menus that would normally exist simply weren't shown. New users saw only a fraction of the product and had no idea the rest existed.

I redesigned the first-run experience. The sidebar now shows the full structure from the start, even before a VCC is connected. Each page renders with an empty state that explains what the page is for and how to use it, with a clear prompt for the first action that gets the user moving. There's also a demo mode that lets a new user explore the platform with sample data before committing to setup, so they can see what's there and decide what to do next.

Delete and remove buttons were everywhere, bright and prominent, often pulling attention away from the actions the user actually came to do. They were also too easy to trigger by accident.

I moved destructive actions into a dedicated settings area, behind confirmation dialogs with explicit acknowledgment. On the main pages, the controls now visually recede so the primary actions can lead.