Accenture GLR: Streamlining Complex Legal Processes Through Content Strategy & UX Design


PROJECT OVERVIEW

Duration: 3.5 Months | Team: 4 Designers, 1 Design Lead, 1 Engineer | My Role: Content & UX Designer

THE CHALLENGE

The Global Legal Review (GLR) was a complex legal process at Accenture for approving new tools and technologies globally, ensuring personal data rights are protected under varying international laws. This process involved numerous stakeholders and could take years to complete due to its complexity. For the MVP, we focused on two key actors:

  • Project Managers (PMs): These were the individuals seeking approval for new tools, responsible for completing the lengthy questionnaire but often lacking legal expertise.

  • Legal Assessment Coordinators (LACs): These lawyers reviewed and owned each case, carrying it through the approval process and ensuring compliance with international regulations.

The GLR process faced several critical problems:

  • Time-intensive process that could take years to complete

  • 200+ question legal questionnaire that was overly complex for non-lawyers

  • Manual workflows lacking centralization or automation

  • Conflicting user needs between lawyers who needed complete information and project managers who struggled with complex legal concepts

A prior Phase 0 led to a deep understanding of the existing process and the pain points for both user groups.

MY APPROACH

Discovery & Research

I led targeted research to understand both user groups' perspectives:

  • Conducted surveys and interviews with Project Managers (PMs) and Legal Assessment Coordinators (LACs)

  • Mapped the existing process to identify redundancies and pain points

  • Ranked questions by legal significance and difficulty level

  • Analyzed communication patterns between stakeholders

Survey spreadsheet capturing legal assessment data from LAC lawyers, including question-to-law mappings, conditional impacts of answers, and legal significance rankings with explanations—providing critical quantitative and qualitative insights to inform the GLR questionnaire redesign.

Key Insights:

  • Both groups worked across fragmented systems (email, SharePoint, Excel)

  • PMs struggled with legal terminology and lacked context for questions

  • PMs couldn't track their progress through the approval workflow or see what steps remained to complete the process

  • LACs spent excessive time tracking down incomplete information

Content Strategy & Information Architecture

I developed a systematic approach to restructuring the questionnaire:

  1. Content Audit & Mapping: Categorized related questions and identified conditional logic

  2. Content Reduction: Eliminated redundant questions, reducing questionnaire length by 50%

  3. Logic Mapping: Created branching patterns to show only relevant questions based on previous answers

  4. Plain Language Rewriting: Simplified complex legal terminology while preserving legal accuracy

  5. Structure Development: Organized content into 2 sections, 9 sub-sections, and 21 pages

Design Process

I transformed the content strategy into a usable interface:

  1. Interaction Design: Reduced clicks per question from 30 to 1-3

  2. Progressive Disclosure: Created conditional triggering for relevant follow-up questions

  3. Navigation Design: Developed an intuitive progress bar showing completion status

  4. Prototyping & Testing: Tested with real case scenarios and iterated based on feedback

SOLVING KEY CHALLENGES

Challenge #1: Balancing Conflicting User Needs

Challenge: PMs wanted to skip difficult questions, while LACs needed complete information.

Process:

  • Analyzed impact of skipped questions on legal assessment process

  • Tested multiple approaches with both user groups

  • Facilitated stakeholder discussions to align on requirements

Solution: Created a compromise that let users skip temporarily but required completion before final submission, with clear messaging about expectations.

Challenge #2: Building Human-in-the-Loop Safeguards

Challenge: The backend logic couldn't anticipate all legal nuances and edge cases requiring specialized assessment.

Process:

  • Mapped legal review workflow to identify critical decision points

  • Collaborated with LACs to understand where human judgment was essential

  • Designed the progress bar to communicate review checkpoints

Solution: Structured content into logical sections with completion checkpoints that:

  • Enabled LAC review at strategic points before users could proceed

  • Identified edge cases automated logic couldn't capture

  • Added custom requirements based on case specifics

  • Used progress bar lock icons to indicate sections awaiting LAC review

Challenge #3: Designing Complex Question Types

Challenge: Questions with "select all that apply OR none" options created confusion.

Process:

  • Prototyped multiple UI approaches

  • Conducted user testing to identify the clearest solution

  • Refined visual hierarchy to improve comprehension

Solution: Implemented all-checkbox design with clear visual separation and language cues, validated through user testing.

Challenge #4: Building an Adaptive Information Architecture

Challenge: Conditional logic created unpredictable questionnaire paths.

Process:

  • Mapped all possible question paths

  • Evaluated multiple approaches for displaying conditional questions:

    • Immediately after trigger question

    • At the bottom of the current page

    • On separate pages

  • Tested options with users and discussed technical constraints with developers

Solution: Designed triggered questions to appear immediately after their parent question, maintaining context and relevance. This approach avoided technical complexity of separate pages (which would confuse users by unexpectedly adding to the progress bar) while providing better context than bottom-of-page placement.

Accenture's GLR platform featuring the redesigned user interface with intuitive progress tracking, contextual question triggers, and categorized content—providing a streamlined experience for both lawyers and project managers throughout the complex approval process.

OUTCOMES & IMPACT

My content-first approach delivered significant business results:

  • 65% reduction in time to approve cases

  • 30% increase in first-attempt approval rate

  • 50% reduction in questionnaire length

  • Streamlined experience from 30 clicks per question to 1-3

Implementation & Handoff

  • Collaborated directly with developers to build the MVP

  • Documented conditional logic and design patterns for future development

  • Created comprehensive handoff materials for the delivery team

  • Supported the transition to full production

REFLECTION & LESSONS LEARNED

This project demonstrated how content strategy can transform complex processes. By focusing on the underlying structure and language before visual design, I created a solution that balanced legal requirements with usability needs.

The section-based approach with strategic human checkpoints proved that effective digital transformation doesn't mean removing human expertise—it means creating systems where technology handles routine tasks while preserving space for human judgment where it adds the most value.

Key Lessons:

Multidisciplinary Design Leadership: Leading both content design and interaction design allowed me to create an integrated solution where information architecture and user interface worked seamlessly together—crucial for transforming complex legal processes into intuitive experiences.

Stakeholder Management Is Critical: When working with stakeholders who have vastly different perspectives (like lawyers and project managers), continuous communication and giving everyone a voice at the design table proved essential. This approach helped build trust with legal experts who initially resisted simplification.

Simplification Requires Persistence: Our key stakeholders were lawyers who believed complex information must remain complex. By patiently demonstrating how simplification could still meet their core needs, we transformed their source of truth into something radically different yet still legally sound—resulting in the 65% reduction in approval times.

This multidisciplinary approach to designing complex systems has become central to how I approach all design challenges, balancing user needs with business requirements while delivering measurable impact.