Deep Dive · 2024
CTD — Legal Case Management
A compliance-aware document workspace for law firms
ROLEFrontend Engineer
DURATION6 months
TEAM1 designer · 2 frontend · 2 backend · 1 PM
TIMELINE2024
Next.jsTypeScriptTailwindTanStack Query
Challenge & Limitations
The operational hurdles, data boundaries, and strict service Level agreements of the system.
The Problem Statement
Mid-sized law firms were tracking cases across inboxes, shared drives, and spreadsheets. Documents drifted out of version, audit trails were patchy, and access policies were enforced by convention rather than software. The product needed to feel inevitable — the obvious tool for serious legal work.
Rigid Constraints
- ·Strict audit trails on every read and write of case material
- ·Granular access policies down to individual documents
- ·Workflows that respected real legal practice — not generic SaaS patterns
- ·An interface lawyers would actually adopt without a training session
Design & Engineering Decisions
The tactical solutions mapping backend systems, developer experience, and interface layout.
Architecture
- →Treated the document as the first-class entity, with cases composed from documents — not the other way around
- →Modeled permissions as a separate, testable module with deterministic outcomes for any (user, action, resource) tuple
- →Adopted a server-first rendering strategy so audit-relevant pages were always rendered against the source of truth, not stale client state
UX & Interface
- →Used quiet typography and ample whitespace — the product had to feel like a serious legal tool, not a consumer app
- →Built a unified inbox-style activity stream so case progress was always one click away
- →Made every destructive action two-step, with explicit context about what was about to happen
Performance
- →Streaming document previews with progressive page rendering for very large PDFs
- →Granular query keying so opening a case never invalidated unrelated case data
- →Background pre-fetching of likely next documents based on the active case
Deliverables
The Outcome & Business Impact
Adoption inside the pilot firm hit near-100% within six weeks of launch. The audit story — once the product's biggest risk — became its most-cited feature in customer conversations.
≈100%Pilot adoption
100%Audit completeness
−60%Time to file a case update
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