The system supported legal workflows tied to nearly 50% of organizational revenue, making errors or delays costly.
A $500K vendor implementation had been in progress for years without delivering a usable or trusted solution.
Legal workflows were complex, non-linear, and highly sensitive to accuracy, auditability, and compliance.
Stakeholders across legal, IT, leadership, and the vendor were misaligned on scope, requirements, and feasibility.
Continuing to invest in a misaligned solution risked further sunk cost, operational disruption, and loss of trust.
Key Decisions
Recommended exiting the vendor rather than continuing to retrofit the situation
After diving deep into the existing implementation and legal workflows, it became clear that the vendor’s approach was fundamentally misaligned. Continuing to patch the solution would have increased cost and risk without resolving core issues. I recommended shifting focus toward a clean redesign that would allow the organization to safely disengage from the vendor.
Reframed design artifacts as alignment tools, not deliverables
Given the number of stakeholders involved, I intentionally used wireframes and flows as shared decision-making tools. This helped legal, IT, and leadership align quickly on scope, feasibility, and risk, and turned design into a mechanism for clarity rather than a handoff.
Took ownership of momentum when paths were unclear
With no clear roadmap and mounting pressure to move forward, I stepped in to create structure. This meant asking difficult questions, tracking down the right partners, and making recommendations in the absence of perfect information to keep the work moving responsibly.
risk snapshot
BEFORE: HIGH RISK, low clarity
$500K vendor implementation underway with no viable path to a usable solution
Legal workflows misrepresented by vendor assumptions, increasing compliance and operational risk
Critical processes supporting ~50% of organizational revenue lacked clear, trusted requirements
Stakeholders across legal, IT, leadership, and the vendor were misaligned on scope and feasibility
Three years of stalled progress with increasing sunk cost and loss of confidence
After: Reduced Risk, Clear Direction
Safe exit from the vendor relationship, avoiding further financial and operational exposure
Legal workflows clearly documented and grounded in real practice, improving auditability and trust
Shared understanding of requirements and constraints across legal, IT, and leadership
Decision paralysis resolved, enabling forward momentum with a defensible plan
A stable foundation established for rebuilding an internal solution with confidence
Impact
Enabled ALSAC to safely disengage from a $500K vendor implementation that was misaligned with legal workflows and introducing growing operational risk.
Stabilized legal processes supporting nearly 50% of organizational revenue, reducing the likelihood of errors, delays, or compliance issues tied to unclear or unsupported workflows.
Re-established trust between legal, IT, and leadership teams by providing a shared, defensible understanding of requirements, scope, and viable next steps.
Reduced decision paralysis after three years of stalled progress, allowing the organization to move forward with clarity rather than continuing incremental, high-risk investment.
Created a clear foundation for a future internal solution, with workflows and requirements grounded in real legal practice rather than vendor assumptions.
The Story
The legal team processes nearly half the $2.1 billion needed to fund st. Jude Children’s Research hospital each year.
Their workflow is complex, high stakes and almost entirely manual, relying on painstakingly inputting data into spreadsheets due to a failed legacy system that offers little more than the duties of a filing system with a login.
A screenshot of the system they were using. It shows the dashboard with cards of recently updated accounts, but they capture essentially useless information with nothing regarding which analyst owns the account, where it is in the system or taskflow management.
So they hired a third-party vendor to improve their workflow with a brand new application.
A year of research resulted in a basic dashboard and vague promises of adding features later. But, there was zero representation of the team’s actual needs like automated task management and templated legal correspondence.
This shows the dashboard for the proposed solution. Similar to what they had, but these are actually less useful. This card here showing tasks with 24 tasks assigned to you epitomizes how far afield the team was. A typical analyst will have 250-500 tasks assigned to them at a time. Seeing a number like that is overwhelming and disheartening. What they needed was solution that helped them break these down into manageable chunks.
But The users’ concerns were repeatedly dismissed.
So I started asking My Own questions.
WORKING ON BORROWED TIME, I took advantage of the users’ unique awareness of their own processes and needs.
Because they had spent a year documenting workflows and pain points, the team quickly identified how the proposed solution fell short of their needs.
I delivered a detailed document starting with just the dashboard’s deficiencies and why it was inadequate for supporting their work.
I brought back proof the proposal missed the mark entirely and I became the trusted intermediary between legal, IT, and leadership.
But the internal team at ALSAC had a hard time understanding the vast divide between what the vendor was proposing and what the users actually needed. It was enough to make them pause, but they weren’t convinced. I was granted 3 weeks to show what the users really needed.
So they granted me 3 weeks to show what the users really needed.
I pulled in another UX designer and started gathering requirements while she built a design library in PowerApps for the vendor to utilize. It was quickly clear that beyond the obvious failings, there were three critical jobs that were entirely missing from the design solution.
I Mapped complex task automation and defined requirements for implementation
There were more than 30 tasks that needed to be auto-generated at various points in the lifecycle of a bequest. I mapped each of these along that lifecycle and provided examples of what each task would look like as well as an excel spreadsheet that would allow the 3rd party team to take this and run with it.
I identified 20+ critical data fields missing from the project scope
Without these fields, the legal team would continue to spend hours each day manually pulling data from reports and inputting it into a spreadsheet.
I Streamlined The letter generator to handle complex correspondence
With dozens of letter templates to accommodate every scenario, I rethought the concept and found a solution to plug and play with the generator.
Select a general template
Adds the opening paragraph and closing paragraph
INSERT CONTACTS
Select contacts associated with the bequest to insert names and contact information automatically
Add any inclusions
Plug in templated center paragraphs to account for things like or documentation requests
MAKE EDITS
The inline editor allows the staff to customize as needed.
Attach documents
Adds documents attached to the bequest record
PULL your signature
A standard template keeps all correspondence from St. Jude consistent but supports self-service.
Export the letter
Email or download the letter from here and a copy is saved to the documents.
we applIED all of our findings to a re-Envisioned workspace with easy-to-follow instructions for the vendor to run with.
With dozens of letter templates to accommodate every scenario, I rethought the concept and found a solution to plug and play with the generator.
The reimagined dashboard was customized to the user to support task management and streamlined workflows
For each mockup, I handed off user stories and detailed annotations to assist the vendor in understanding the core need along with an example of how it could be executed.
Ultimately, ALSAC made the decision to exit the vendor relationship, accepting short-term loss in order to reduce long-term legal and operational risk. While difficult, this decision created clarity that had been missing for years.
Through this work, the team gained a shared, accurate understanding of legal workflows and business requirements, grounded in how the work actually happens rather than vendor assumptions. Design became the mechanism that allowed stakeholders to see complexity clearly, align on what was truly needed, and move forward with confidence.
I earned deep trust across legal, IT, and architecture partners and became a consistent advocate for user needs in ongoing project discussions. Since then, I’ve continued to support the transition by helping onboard a new vendor, ensuring core requirements are clearly understood, and translating them into actionable development work.
This project reinforced my belief that good design is not about protecting sunk costs. It’s about helping organizations make hard, informed decisions, reducing risk, and creating a foundation that can support complex systems over time.
