WillPortal

The brief

A US law firm needed a secure application where its clients could upload and manage their most important legal documents (wills, trusts and directives) and decide who else could see them: their lawyers, and nominated family members. It had to feel trustworthy enough that people would hand over their most sensitive paperwork.

The hard part

Designing the whole system rather than a set of screens. Three kinds of people use it with very different rights: the document owner, their lawyer, and family members who may only need access at a particular moment. Those rules had to hold everywhere, in the interface and in the data underneath, and they had to work alongside paid subscriptions without either getting in the way of the other.

What we built

• End-to-end system design: the data model, the access rules and the subscription model, designed together before the build started
• Role-based access: separate permission levels for document owners, lawyers and family members
• Secure document storage on Firebase, with access controlled per document
• Stripe subscriptions: features unlocked by subscription status, kept in step through Stripe's webhook events
• A faithful build of the firm's Figma designs, with no shortcuts on fidelity

What happened

The firm went to market with a finished product: one system in which the document owner stays in control of who sees what, and which looks and behaves the way the subject matter demands.