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.
Colorful board labels, oversized progress bar taking up a third of the screen, double header. Color was the only navigation cue.
Bloomberg design system applied. Single header, compact progress indicator, status-driven hierarchy. Color used semantically.
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.
UX 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.
Quick 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.
Design 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.
Homepage redesign
Added table view alongside grid view giving users a scalable way to manage growing matter lists without endless scrolling.
Integrations design
Designed the Practical Guidance integration (Bloomberg Law content as checklist templates) and the Outlook integration (email-to-task without context switching).
AI 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
AI parses email threads into structured action items. Users select tasks, assign to a checklist, confirm one step from inbox to tracked work.
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.