3 legal professionals share their Designer & Builder Program experience

Hundreds of inquisitive legal minds participated in Josef’s Designer & Builder Program 2.0, learning about legal design thinking, Josef’s no-code automation platform, conditional logic and user experience design.

Throughout the free Designer & Builder Program (DBP) – which involves bite-sized modules – legal professionals used Josef to build bots to automate legal tasks and workflows. 

We’ve certified some exceptional builders who submitted bots measured against user experience, functionality, value and creativity. 

Among them are three certified Josef Designer & Builders, who shared their experience with us.

Eric Feldman, Business Development Manager, Fried Frank

What drew you to the Designer & Builder Program? 

I love the value proposition of legal bots and wanted the hands-on experience of creating my own. Josef’s Designer & Builder Program presented the perfect no-cost, self-paced opportunity to learn more about the bots design and building process.

Tell us a little about the bot you built!

I love thinking about improving the legal experience from both a client and attorney standpoint. My friend runs an estate planning practice, so I imagined him asking me for help deploying a chatbot to facilitate new client lead generation on his website, while saving his attorneys time in the drafting process. 

The bot I built asked a handful of plain-language questions to better understand what estate planning issues might matter to the potential client. 

After just three minutes of interaction, the bot produced a document giving the client a zero-cost introduction to the wills and trusts concepts that might apply to them, while simultaneously helping the drafting attorney lead an informed dialogue that focused on legal services custom-tailored to this client’s individual needs.

What did you take away from the program’s experience?

Practice makes perfect! After mapping out my bot and building it in the no-code Josef development environment, I tested my bot more than a dozen times to improve functionality and user experience. 

With each iteration, I felt a significant improvement in both efficiency and the bot’s personality. Josef made it easy to test, share, and improve my bot throughout the development process.

What would you say to someone thinking about doing the DBP?

Josef’s Designer & Builder Program is a zero-cost, self-paced program that teaches you about building and using cutting edge legaltech. Even if you just review the lessons to learn more about bots, there’s no downside to signing up and checking it out!

Frances Dunn, Special Counsel, Hive Legal

What did the Designer & Builder Program teach you?

The biggest takeaway for me was that the initial process mapping step can uncover opportunities for further automating or at least streamlining the relevant process. 

It is, of course, more efficient to identify these opportunities as soon as possible in the designing and building process. 

Another interesting learning was the benefit of providing a bot experience that feels like an interaction with a human, along with the strategy to achieve that, and what that might mean for the build phase.

For example, the bot may involve up to twice the number of messages I had initially envisaged, such as one message to react to the user’s most recent input, and the following message to ask the next question.

Next time I build a bot, I will make better allowance for that from the outset, rather than building connected messages, then disconnecting them to interpose a response and reconnecting the flow!

Why did you sign up to do the Designer & Builder Program?

I recently joined the team at Hive Legal, which Josef knows very well due to shared history! Hive has an innovation and business improvement service offering, and I was invited to join that team. 

The design and build of Josef bots can form part of the deliverables under that service, so it was important that I quickly upskill in bot design and build on the Josef platform, in order to better understand and deliver on that particular element of the services we offer at Hive.

What was the most enjoyable part of the program for you?

The most enjoyable part was the final stage of building the bot and giving effect to my planning. This was also the most challenging, because even at that final stage, there were many times I doubled back to refine my map of the process and create alternative pathways. In retrospect, I wish I had allowed more time for bot-building and refinement!

What would you say to encourage someone thinking about doing the Designer & Builder Program? 

I would encourage them to do so even if they don’t see any immediate relevance or opportunity in relation to the work they do day-to-day.

I would also encourage them to try to move through the modules as and when they are delivered, to allow maximum time for the build step and for testing with sample users. 

I would also strongly encourage them to select a relatively simple and brief process and to aim for a high quality bot, rather than aiming, as a brand new bot builder, to build a highly complex bot with a high number of alternative pathways.

Stephen Turner, Director, Lawyers of Tomorrow Technology Ltd

What are some of the key things you learned throughout the Designer and Builder Program?

I wanted to learn how to use an expert system, or bot software, that has been designed specifically for use by lawyers. 

I’ve tried out a few platforms and Josef is the only one so far that I feel I could easily get lawyers building on in hours. 

The vision of Lawyers of Tomorrow is for lawyers to be able to build bots, and client or internal facing apps, as easily as they build PowerPoint presentations…within hours! With Josef, finally, I can see that vision becoming reality.

The Designer & Builder Program was excellent. What really helped me was the focus on user experience, with tried and tested tips on how to make your bot a pleasurable experience for the user. 

The course gave me a structure for my build process, from ideation right through to final testing. I loved the checklists for action, which I combined into a huge all-in-one checklist that will serve me well going forward when I build using Josef.

What do you enjoy about using Josef?

I’ve used other expert systems software, where I was told that it was easy to use for the non-developer. However, whilst I could muddle along, it was a really slow process with hours trying and, often, failing to understand manuals that were really designed for tech developers, not non-tech builders. 

Since my goal was to promote the use of expert systems and bots amongst lawyers, I knew that they would have the same issues I had. They would hit the same brick walls. In contrast, building on Josef is fun, easy and intuitive. Once you start, Josef guides you to the next steps in the chat that you create with the bot user. 

Making connections to the next part of the chat is easy because Josef leads you there. Then you click the ‘cog icon’ to define when that part of the chat is presented to the user. That’s basically it. It’s incredibly simple. 

I felt all the previous restrictions melt away. I could not wait to get back to building on Josef! I was powered along. 

In little time, I had a fully-functioning help bot that gives advice to companies experiencing financial difficulty and connects them with an insolvency practitioner or lawyer who will help rescue their company. Finally, after years of frustration, I found a software for giving advice and systematising processes that really was simple and easy to use.

What would you say to someone thinking about doing the Designer & Builder Program? 

Using Josef is empowering. Automated advice bots, quote bots, triage bots, automated processes and documents – the potential use cases are vast and the ROI is compelling. 

If you do this course, you will have all you need to get building bots and start automating your business processes.