Smokeball
Problem
Legal work is still heavily manual, with lawyers spending significant time on tasks such as research, drafting, and information retrieval. While advances in AI created an opportunity to improve productivity, there was no clear model for how AI should integrate into legal workflows in a way that felt intuitive, trustworthy, and genuinely useful.
Smokeball needed to design an AI experience that reduced low-value work without adding complexity—particularly for solo and small-firm users.
Approach
As Head of Product Design, I led the product and experience design of Archie, an AI-powered matter assistant embedded directly within Smokeball.
Working closely with Product, Engineering, and Marketing, we designed a clean, conversational interface focused on simplicity and ease of use. Key to this was guiding users through interaction—using dynamic prompt suggestions and contextual actions to make it easy to refine queries, explore results, and generate outputs.
We focused on integrating AI into real workflows, enabling users to:
Ask matter-specific questions
Generate emails, documents, and tasks
Summarise content and retrieve key insights
Access context-aware guidance within their work
Supporting experiences such as a Prompt Library with shared community prompts, Knowledge Sources and an Archie Apps Marketplace helped accelerate adoption and repeat usage.
My Role
Owned | Led | Contributed to |
|---|---|---|
End-to-end product and experience design for Archie, including core interaction patterns (conversational interface, AI-assisted drafting, and human-in-the-loop workflows) and integration into Smokeball’s product experience. | Hands-on design execution across key features, while driving cross-functional alignment with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to shape priorities, refine use cases, and ensure a cohesive AI experience. | AI product strategy, and the evolution of best practices for designing usable and trustworthy AI-powered experiences. |
Outcome
Adopted by 3,000+ law firms
Used by 10,000+ lawyers
~25,000 prompts per week
Up to 80% reduction in email drafting time
More broadly, Archie established a foundation for scalable AI experience design, positioning Smokeball to evolve its product around intelligent, workflow-driven automation.
