Dashboard Legal
Bloomberg Law
Replatforming, rebrand, and AI feature design for a legal task management product acquired by Bloomberg Law.
One designer. One acquisition. Two very different worlds.
In 2024, Bloomberg Law acquired Dashboard Legal — a two-person-built task management platform for attorneys. The goal: integrate it fully into the Bloomberg Law research and matter lifecycle.
I was brought in as Lead UX Designer (US) to own the full acquisition UX — audit, usability fixes, Bloomberg rebrand, integrations, and AI features.
This was not a greenfield project. It was a negotiation — technical, cultural, and creative.
A founder-built product with strong opinions and no design system
Built entirely by two founders without formal UX methodology. Patterns were inconsistent, logic was founder-specific, and several issues were so tied to the product's identity that changing them required trust-building before redesign.
Colorful text everywhere
Colored text used across components to distinguish boards and checklists. Founders saw it as a navigation aid — it violated contrast standards and created noise.
Oversized progress bar
The CEO's flagship feature. Occupied a third of the screen. Usability testing showed users scrolling past it to reach actual work.
Double header
Duplicate headers created layout confusion and ate vertical space on every key screen.
Grid-only homepage
Grid-only. As matters grew, users had no way to scan or sort — just infinite scroll.
Startup identity resistance
Post-acquisition, the team still operated like a startup — protective of their aesthetic, resistant to Bloomberg standards.
No established design system
No token structure, no documented patterns. Just conventions — nothing to build a Bloomberg integration on top of.
"UX is science, not only art. There are logic and reasons behind our design decisions — and it took time for the team to understand that."
Trust first, features second
The hardest part wasn't the design — it was creating conditions where good design could land. I worked in deliberate phases, earning credibility through evidence before pushing for systemic change.
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01UX audit and usability testing
Audited the product and ran usability tests to surface evidence for issues the founders had normalized. The progress bar was the clearest case — users scrolled past it every time, despite the CEO's confidence in it.
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02Quick wins to earn trust
Fixed the most painful problems first — double header, oversized progress bar, colorful text. Demonstrably better results opened the door to the Bloomberg design system conversation.
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03Design system migration
With trust established, I led the Bloomberg design system migration — aligning typography, color, spacing, and components to Bloomberg Law standards for the first time.
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04Homepage redesign
Added table view alongside grid view — giving users a scalable way to manage growing matter lists without endless scrolling.
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05Integrations design
Designed the Practical Guidance integration (Bloomberg Law content as checklist templates) and the Outlook integration (email-to-task without context switching).
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06AI feature design
Designed the AI Assistant and AI email summaries — parsing incoming emails into assignable tasks in Dashboard Legal, reducing context-switching for high-volume legal teams.
Before and after
| Problem | Before | After | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Progress bar | ~⅓ of screen height | Compact component | Users scrolled past it consistently. Reducing it restored hierarchy and surfaced task content. |
| Colorful text | Color = navigation cue | Structure = navigation cue | Color alone isn't a reliable differentiator. Replaced with layout, weight, and labeling. |
| Double header | Redundant headers | Single unified header | Removed confusion, recovered vertical space. |
| Homepage view | Grid only | Grid + table view | Grid breaks at scale. Table view adds sorting and density without scroll penalty. |
| Visual system | Ad-hoc founder conventions | Bloomberg design system | Unified the product within Bloomberg Law, reduced design debt, enabled consistent delivery. |
AI features
Two features designed to cut manual overhead and support enterprise adoption.
AI email summaries
Legal teams get buried in actionable email — deadlines, assignments, requests. The AI email summary connects Dashboard Legal to Outlook, parses incoming messages, and surfaces the most important items as assignable tasks. Set up once, runs passively.
AI Assistant
The AI Assistant helps users navigate tasks, surface relevant content, and act faster — positioning Dashboard Legal as a single workflow destination within Bloomberg Law.
Results
What I learned
The most important skill here wasn't visual — it was persuasion through evidence. The founders were proud of what they'd built. Changing it required patience, respect, and consistent reference to user data over opinion.
Trust precedes change. I fixed real pain points before pushing the rebrand. By the time I made the case for the Bloomberg design system, they'd already seen my judgment was grounded in user behavior.
Acquisition UX is organizational design. Aligning a two-person startup with a large media company meant operating as a translator between two very different cultures.
AI needs workflow integration, not just UI. These features worked because they solved a real problem — email-to-task overhead — not because AI was the goal.