Pericles
A Marketplace for Litigation Finance
Team
Mike Klain - Business Strategy and Product Management
Daniel Barcia - Business Strategy and Client Relations
Cameron Lancaster - Lead Product Designer
My Role
UX Research and Strategy
Deliverables
Wireframes and prototype for use in seed funding applications and presentations
Timeline
February 2020 - March 2020
The Challenge
The costs and time associated with litigation can be prohibitive for plaintiffs in pursuing a claim, even if it is likely to succeed on the merits of the case.
Through legal finance, investors help fund legal claims on a non-recourse basis. This gives disadvantaged litigants access to better legal resources, and helps sustain them financially during the course of the litigation process.
However, disadvantaged litigants don’t currently have easily accessible solutions for being connected to funding, and vice versa.
Our Solution
Pericles is a marketplace that expands the availability of legal financing for disadvantaged litigants. Funders can view all investment opportunities and litigants can view all funding options, facilitating connections that are not occurring in the legal finance industry today.
Simplified User Flow
Project Brief
Pericles is a legal finance platform that connects disadvantaged litigants with funding. The marketplace helps facilitate connections in the legal finance industry which currently rely on idiosyncratic relationships between funders and litigants.
In February of 2020, I spent two weeks researching and designing a prototype that could be used by the company’s founders to pitch the project to investors and secure seed funding. In this case study we will review how UX and product design tools were used to uncover the core of what users and stakeholders needed in an MVP.
Westfleet Advisors, a legal finance broker and advisor, estimates that there are currently $9.5b AUM dedicated to legal finance in the United States. With this in mind, our objective was to identify the major pain points for litigants and investors in the current legal finance market and create an experience that would allow for disadvantaged litigants to connect with investors and ultimately achieve financing for their claims.
Research Process
In order to design the platform appropriately, we began by researching our user base: lawyers familiar with the legal finance process and legal finance investors.
Our primary research tool was interviews, which were conducted as open ended conversations that allowed us to understand the pain points in the current marketplace and empathize with the legal finance process.
Through affinity diagrams, we were then able to assess the current process of the legal finance industry and highlight the information and standards that would be key for litigants and investors alike in an online marketplace. The diagrams below show how we organized some of these insights into recognizable trends and processes.
Takeaways
Our research helped inform us about the pain points that litigants and investors experience in pursuing legal finance and identify opportunities for our product.
Most importantly, we identified:
The current process of litigants seeking legal finance and investors searching for claims to potentially fund
An understanding of the current market and key players in the legal finance industry
Critical information necessary for ensuring the product obeys regulations surrounding legal financing in the United States
Persona Introduction
After sorting our insights into recognizable patterns, I created personas to help develop a thoughtful representation of our two user groups. The diagrams below outline these personas with our user’s motivations, pain points, and tools used throughout the legal finance process.
Journey Maps
The next part of my process was to create a journey map through which we could visualize when these pain points occur for our potential users.
Insights Overview
Insight #1
Users need an approachable tool to help their goals come to fruition.
Investors are limited to idiosyncratic relationships with law firms in order to make litigation finance deals
Lawyers are not entirely familiar with litigation financing in the United States and need a resource to learn about it and connect with investors
Insight #2
Users want to connect with the right partner.
Investors may only invest in a particular segment of the law and therefore need to know certain details about a claim before engaging with plaintiffs and lawyers
Lawyers want to partner with investors that share the same values when it comes to justice
Insight #3
Users want to manage risk.
Investors want to be able to analyze a claim and feel confident about reaching an agreement before engaging with the plaintiffs and lawyers
Lawyers want flexible terms for their clients and therefore want to ensure that potential investors are able to reach an appropriate agreement
Our Solution
The Pericles Marketplace will facilitate connections in the legal finance industry that are not happening today.
Litigants can view all funding options and funders can view all investment opportunities
A competitive marketplace will allow litigants to reap savings over time as funders vie to differentiate themselves through better services and more attractively priced agreements
Product Flow + Site Map
After researching and gaining insights on our users, our first step was to create a flow through which our users would experience the product. This also gave me a clear vision of what pages needed to be designed.
Through design workshops, we iterated on multiple low fidelity versions of our site map, ultimately converging our research and testing into a viable direction for the product.
This version includes all of our main pages, some of the information the user may expect to see on those pages, and demonstrates the user’s flow while they are engaged with the product.
Sketching & Wireframes
The next step of our process was to brainstorm and sketch what some of these pages would look like. This was most useful in helping to ideate on how to differentiate our two main pages and how users would navigate between them. After sketching through a few ideas, we developed wireframes to see how these interactions would function on a webpage. Through reviewing these wireframes with our users and stakeholders, we were able to further iterate on our design and finalize our solution.
Conclusion
After three weeks of developing an informed solution for connecting plaintiffs with investors, the platform was incorporated into the scope of the Pericles project for Daniel and Mike to present with their application to the Harvard Business School Rock Fellowship Program.
Daniel and Mike were accepted to and participated in the HBS Rock Fellowship Program through the Summer of 2020, and based on their success in that program, were able to receive continued support from HBS through the Rock Accelerator Program.
While developing a web-based solution for making litigation finance arrangements has been put on hold, it remains in their long-term plans. Pericles has now entered a co-investment deal with a larger firm in the litigation finance space and will be focusing on building relationships to bridge the gap between investors and litigants.
