Clarity, By Design
CASE STUDY
Clarity, By Design
Turning complexity into confident design decisions through AI
Our Problem:
There was no clear or accessible source of truth for the Design Team.
Legal guidance was scattered across Slack threads, email chains, and one-off conversations. There was no centralized, reliable way to find what had already been approved.
Designers often had to search across channels or rely on partial context to piece together answers. In many cases, it was unclear whether guidance was still valid or applicable.
This led to major redesigns and delays in product releases.
Legal operated as a single-threaded system.
Without a reliable system, designers couldn’t move forward with clarity.
Work slowed as teams waited for answers, forcing designers to try to make decisions independently. Planning became reactive instead of predictable.
Designers understood Legal’s constraints—a small team supporting a growing volume of requests. But that empathy didn’t reduce friction; it amplified it.
Over time, the lack of consistency and transparency reduced confidence in the process and in the decisions coming out of it.
Design teams lacked the confidence to move forward.
Legal held the knowledge, but there was no structured process for how that knowledge was requested, tracked, or reused.
Requests came through multiple channels, lacked consistent context, and had no clear intake or prioritization model. There were no defined SLAs or visibility into status. Designers were never certain when was the right time to involve the Legal Team.
Every question, regardless of complexity, required direct Legal involvement, creating a system that couldn’t scale with demand.
Designing for Designers
Large teams don’t adopt processes that feel heavy. Any solution needed to be intuitive, fast, and embedded into how teams already work or else they’d default back to Slack and hallway conversations.
The Solution
I designed The B.A.R., an AI-assisted decision system that enables Product and Design teams to move quickly with confidence—without compromising legal or compliance standards.
Built using Google Gemini and custom Gems, the system translates past legal decisions into structured, accessible guidance.
It allows design and product teams to self-serve answers for repeatable scenarios while keeping Legal in the loop for higher-risk cases.
Meet the Team
POWERED BY GOOGLE GEMINI
O.L.I.V.E.
THE AI “PARALEGAL”
Provides real-time, context-aware answers so designers can quickly understand what’s safe to ship.
Responses are grounded in approved decisions and include:
Confidence levels
Risk indicators
Source references
This gives teams clarity without needing to wait on Legal for every question.
Removes the “black box” of legal review by making workflows visible and predictable.
Teams can:
Track request status without follow-ups
Understand approval timelines
Escalate when needed
This turns Legal from an interruption into a system teams can plan around.
C.O.L.L.I.N.S.
THE AI “LIBRARIAN”
A centralized repository of approved legal decisions.
Instead of re-asking the same questions, teams build on a growing foundation of structured knowledge. Every decision strengthens the system, making future decisions faster and more consistent.
The C.E.L.L.A.R.
THE SOURCE OF TRUTH
Guardrails
Structured so Design and Legal teams can move fast without second-guessing decisions:
RAG-based architecture
Responses are generated using retrieval from a curated knowledge base, ensuring there are no hallucinations and outputs remain grounded in approved decisions.
Human-in-the-loop
The Legal Team reviews and approves all recommendations regardless of importance.
Design Ops maintains and archives decisions on a regular cadence.
Escalations by design
Recommendations are automatically triaged by urgency, risk, and confidence level.
Full traceability
Every decision is structured, stored, organized, and auditable
Implementation
Rolling out The BAR required more than a tool—it required changing how teams made decisions.
The strategy focused on reducing friction early, building trust through consistency, and introducing the system in layers.
Phase 1 — Stabilize and Create a Path Forward
Before introducing a new system, the priority was to reduce immediate friction for the Design Team and establish a clear, consistent entry point for legal requests.
Introduced a single, standardized template for legal reviews
Announced the upcoming workflow to set expectations and reduce uncertainty
Partnered with Legal to align on approach, guardrails, and success criteria
Began capturing and structuring decisions to seed The BAR
This created immediate clarity for teams while laying the foundation for a scalable system.
Phase 2 — Build Structure and Trust
With a consistent intake in place, the focus shifted to making the process predictable, visible, and reliable.
Established clear escalation and triage paths
Introduced recurring touchpoints (office hours, team-specific sessions)
Continued expanding The BAR with both new and historical decisions
Partnered with Design Ops to backfill and structure past knowledge
By making the process visible and repeatable, teams began to trust the system and rely less on ad hoc communication.
Phase 3 — Scale Through Enablement
Once the system was stable and trusted, the rollout focused on adoption and long-term behavior change.
Launched The BAR to Design and Product teams
Led async and live workshops to onboard teams
Embedded guidance into existing workflows to reduce learning friction
This phase shifted the system from a supported process to a self-sustaining one, enabling teams to move faster with confidence.
