Clarity, By Design

CASE STUDY

Clarity, By Design

Turning complexity into confident design decisions through AI

Our Problem:

Design and Product teams didn’t have a clear or reliable way to make legally compliant decisions.

Critical guidance lived across Slack threads, email chains, and one-off conversations. There was no single source of truth, no defined process, and no visibility into how decisions were made.

As a result, designers were forced into a tradeoff:

  • Wait on Legal and slow down delivery, or

  • Make judgment calls without full confidence

How did we get here?

Legal wasn’t the problem—it was the only path to answers.

But as a system, it didn’t scale.

Repeated follow-ups

Inconsistent guidance

Lack of transparency

The Result:

Friction that slowed product velocity and eroded trust.

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 BAR, 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.

Demo →
Demo →

Meet the Team

POWERED BY GOOGLE GEMINI

C.O.L.L.I.N.S.

The AI “Paralegal”

The C.E.L.L.A.R.

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.

The AI “Librarian”

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.

The Source of Truth

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.

Demo →
Demo →

O.L.I.V.E.

Guardrails

Designed so teams can move fast without second-guessing decisions:

Grounded outputs — OLIVE only retrieves from approved decisions and is instructed never to guess, preventing hallucinations.

Human oversight — The Legal Team reviews and approves every recommendation, regardless of importance.

Escalation by design — Recommendations are automatically triaged by urgency, risk, and confidence level.

Full traceability — every decision is structured, stored, organized, and auditable

Demo →
Demo →

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.

Demo →
Demo →