Redesigning a law firm's front door

Its clients run businesses. They arrive with a contract dispute, an employment question, a supplier who wants out, and no legal team of their own. They type what happened, an agent builds the case notes, and one of the firm’s lawyers takes it from there. Intake is the first thing a client ever does with Moritz, and the only part they do alone.

The flow worked. People got through it. But the feedback coming back from real clients kept landing on the same four things:

1. 01I'm not sure my case was actually submitted.
2. 02I don't know which step I'm on, or how many are left.
3. 03I can't find where to upload my documents.
4. 04It feels sterile. Like a form, not a firm.

Two goals, pulling against each other. Make submitting a case as clear as possible. Make it feel like a premium firm, not a web form. Most fixes for one make the other worse. That tension was the design problem.

All four complaints are one complaint. The client can’t see the process. So the redesign puts the process on screen everywhere the client looks: a story before they start, a receipt after every answer, a track after they submit, a lawyer’s face at each of those moments. Here’s what changed, moment by moment.

A brand-new client lands on an empty home screen. Instead of a button, they get a six-second story: talk to Moritz, receive a quote and pay, our lawyers take on your case. It ends on three real faces, and the composer slides in underneath.

This one animation answers all four complaints at once. You see the steps before you take them. You see there is a submit, a quote, a person at the end. And it feels like being welcomed, not being processed. It never repeats, so it never becomes noise.

The step dot and its rail were drawn six different ways across the app. I made one foundation component and gave it five states, then used it everywhere a client asks “where am I?”: in the brief panel, in the receipts in the thread, on the track of the submitted card, and on the case tiles at home.

The composer sits under the greeting on every visit. You type what happened, and the conversation opens with your words already at the top and the brief panel already filling in.

Each answer leaves a one-line receipt in the thread, and the count in the brief moves. Skip a step and it still counts. You chose, so it’s done.

The receipts aren’t a new capability. The agent already knew what it had saved. It just never said so.

A long first message often answers three questions at once. Moritz takes them, names which ones it took, and leaves them editable. Anything it filled in is yours to correct.

It’s in the placeholder, in Moritz’s first message, and in the brief panel at every step. A file is accepted at any point, not only at the documents step.

For contract matters, the document is the very first question. A contract usually already exists, and asking for it late means re-asking everything it would have answered.

Submitting used to end in a page that looked like the one before it. Now it ends in a card: a check, a number, a four-step track, and the three people your case is going to.

After submit, the agent needs a few minutes. Instead of a spinner, Moritz says what it’s doing, step by step, and tells you that you don’t need to stay.

A case tile changes shape as the case moves: a track before a lawyer is assigned, a name and a face after. Every tile shows when it last moved, so there’s no wondering where a case is.

A lawyer’s face shows up on home, in the brief panel, on the submitted card, on every case tile, and on every case you come back to. The same three faces follow a case from the card to the tile, so they never shuffle.

One thing I refused: a named lawyer on the brief before one is assigned. It would have promised a person the firm hadn’t given you yet. So the track ends in the three lawyers the case is heading toward, and a name appears only when it’s real.

Most of what Moritz says is scripted by hand, and the model only fills in what it pulled from your message. A few of the lines: