Simpson Thacher | UX Research – Fund Formation Process
At Simpson Thacher, I led UX research initiatives focused on understanding and improving the complex fund formation process within a large-scale legal environment. My role centered on uncovering how legal professionals—from partners to associates and support staff—navigate highly specialized workflows involving regulatory requirements, document creation, and client services. I conducted in-depth interviews and contextual walkthroughs with attorneys and legal operations staff to map the current-state workflows, capturing task sequences, decision points, document types, systems accessed, and time-billed activities. This research provided visibility into inefficiencies, redundancies, and pain points across a process that spans multiple teams, tools, and handoffs. Insights were synthesized into user personas, end-to-end journey maps, and micro-journeys that detailed critical moments within fund formation, including document preparation, review cycles, approvals, and client interactions. These artifacts helped stakeholders clearly understand the operational complexity and variability across roles.
In addition, I developed internal UX research training tools to support consistent data gathering, enabling legal teams to participate in future discovery efforts. Project schedules and timelines were documented to align research activities with business priorities, ensuring findings could inform strategic planning, process optimization, and future system design initiatives.
Original plan - start of project
Fund Formation Phases | User Journeys, Micro Workflows and communication patterns
User Personas Internal Actors with frequency of activity within phases of development
