AHMAD QASEM

Leicester, UK /

12:46 PM

SAY HELLO!

AHMAD QASEM

Leicester, UK /

12:46 PM

SAY HELLO!

AHMAD QASEM

SAY HELLO!

Reimagining Legal Technology for Professionals

Rebuilt a B2B SaaS legal tech platform from the ground up as the founding designer, creating a design system and redesigning the core experience in under 4 months.

gray and black laptop computer on surface

Role

Founding Product Designer
[Solo]

Team

Cross-functional collaboration
Product, Engineering, Leadership

Timeline

Feb 2026 - Present
Launched May 2026

Tools

The situation

I joined an early-stage legal AI startup with a working MVP that had no spine — features stitched together, no system, no clear strategy. My mandate: make it something legal professionals would actually trust.

My approach in one line

I designed the foundation, not just the façade.

While the obvious work was polishing the chat interface, the real leverage was underneath it: the system, the strategy, and the machinery that makes an AI trustworthy. So that's where I focused.

How I worked

A deliberate sequence — each step earning the right to the next.

1

Diagnose

Audited the existing product end to end. The problem wasn't the features; it was the absence of a system or strategy beneath them.

2

Research

Interviewed end users, domain experts, and internal stakeholders. One signal came through everything: in this field, trust is the product. People won't adopt what they can't verify.

3

Reposition, then build the base

Used that insight to reframe the product's purpose, and resisted the urge to jump into screens. Built the design system and core foundation first, so everything after it could move fast and stay consistent.

4

Design, test, iterate

Designed features on top of that foundation, prototyped, and put them in front of real domain experts — refining against their feedback rather than my assumptions.

What that meant in practice

Strategy first

Audited the MVP, ran user and domain-expert interviews, and brought the CEO a redesign plan. The biggest shift: repositioning the product from a "legal chatbot" to a structured legal assistant, a change that redefined what we built and why.

A system, not just screens

Built the design system from scratch on the team's own tech foundation, then partnered with engineering to mirror it in code, closing the gap between design and build.

The part nobody sees

The platform's accuracy depends entirely on how its knowledge base is built. I designed the internal tool that powers that, and through research, identified that this "invisible" foundation held value well beyond its original purpose.

The hardest problem

Domain experts had to validate complex, frequently-changing content before it could be trusted, navigating dense material, understanding its full history, and tracking their own progress, all at once.

Three competing needs. One screen. I designed an interface that let them move from orientation, to inspection, to context, to confirmation, without ever losing their place.

"This makes it easy to see all the versions."

- Domain expert, after testing

The outcome

A live product, rebuilt from zero in three months: a design system, a sharper strategic position, and the core infrastructure the entire platform now runs on.