Developing a transformative workflow management solution for corporate legal teams.
NMBL Technologies partnered with Codal to design and develop Proxy, a comprehensive workflow management tool for the legal space. Founded in 2018 by attorneys and tech specialists, NMBL seeks to boost productivity in the legal space for in-house lawyers by building software that streamlines workflows and facilitates effective collaboration.
Proxy is a legal workflow management tool designed for corporate legal departments. In-house counsel, corporate stakeholders, and outside firms trust Proxy to help them manage important tasks, deadlines, and documents related to legal operations.
As a design and development agency committed to delivering pixel-perfect solutions for real business challenges, Codal was a perfect fit to build and launch this cutting-edge legal workflow management tool.
After initially building a minimum viable product (MVP) for Proxy, our team worked to transform it into a complex, enterprise-grade solution over multiple ongoing releases. Understanding the complexities of legal project management and the unique needs of corporate legal teams, we set out to build a transformative solution.
With a three-tier organizational structure between projects, workflows, and tasks, the solution needed to empower in-house lawyers to assign, delegate, and prioritize items, as well as directly document management capabilities.
Codal began with an initial Discovery phase, where we collaborated with Proxy stakeholders to solidify goals and requirements.
Working through sketches and potential user flows gave our UX design team a foundational understanding of the application’s usability. Codal designers then worked to create a modular platform with interconnectivity mapped out at an architectural level. From this, the team created a fully standardized and documented design system, which they applied to wireframes, producing user interface designs for our engineers to reference.
This design system was developed in accordance with Proxy’s mission statement and company values. It provided a roadmap for successfully implementing Proxy’s brand guidelines, as well as its key visual elements—such as the logo, typography, iconography, data visualizations, and more. This system was also crucial in establishing a consistent look and feel for Proxy, and informing an intuitive and aesthetically pleasing user journey.
Codal’s engineering team worked on an Agile timeline alongside designers, quality assurance analysts, and the Proxy team to bring this product to life. Creating an effective legal workflow management tool required implementing several essential features and functionality.
The application’s tiered approach to organizational architecture—including projects, workflows, and tasks—as well the sensitive nature of legal projects and initiatives, meant that a number of provisions needed to be built in. These included a robust document management system, with the ability to assign permissions to specific groups or individuals within an organization.
These permissions grant access—limited or full—to files based on the demands of a specific project. In addition to features related to navigating the solution itself, the Codal team built in a user-friendly service request and legal intake platform, allowing users to submit service requests directly to legal teams via email or from the Proxy application. This avoids the need for a third-party source—or any kind of human interaction—to facilitate new requests, and enables legal teams to resolve those requests in a timely and secure manner.
Additionally, Codal built the application to be successfully hosted on different server instances, including a multi-tenant or secure private cloud. Proxy can be installed on on-premise systems, or in a dedicated cloud-server environment—for companies with a large number of users, or those wary of sharing cloud space with other Proxy customers.
As with any application handling large amounts of legal documentation, security and privacy were top of mind. At the server level, Proxy uses 256 AES encryption for all data at rest, and implements end-to-end encryption from browser to server. When it comes to customers using a multi-tenant cloud instance, all documents and data are compartmentalized and never interact with the data of other customers. Proxy was built using Privacy by Design concepts, meaning the authentication, access controls, permissions and roles, and other security measures apply to all features and functions within the application.
Codal—working in close collaboration with the legal experts at NMBL—delivered a top-notch legal workflow management solution.
Elegantly designed and developed with an impressive set of features, Proxy is a comprehensive solution for corporate legal teams looking to get things done faster and more efficiently. And with flexible deployment options, firms seeking a traditional on-premise solution, or those looking for a Software-as-a-Service (Saas) approach, can get up and running in a short period of time.
Proxy represents one of the most all-inclusive project management solutions in the burgeoning legal tech space. The tool helps companies handle anything from small, ad hoc requests to full-scale projects via a fast, intuitive user interface. With extensive organization and delegation functionality, in-house counsel can easily manage workloads, assign tasks, and monitor progress.
