Cobalt - workforce & resource management
A workload-visibility dashboard for 40+ legal operations staff - deliberately framed as a planning and fairness tool rather than a monitoring tool, which is what made people actually use it.
No visibility into how workload was actually distributed.
Cobalt's legal operations team had no visibility into how staff workload was distributed across active cases. Some paralegals were quietly overloaded; others had spare capacity nobody could see. Leadership had no reliable way to forecast staffing needs against incoming caseload.
Tracking felt like surveillance, not support.
Interviews with team leads and staff surfaced the real workload picture, but also something more interesting.
- Engagement with the initial tracking process was low, because it felt like surveillance rather than support.
- Staff didn't want to be watched - they wanted their workload to be visible so it could be balanced.
Framing determined whether people would use it.
- Designed a workload dashboard tied directly to live case data, not a separate manual reporting step.
- Built capacity indicators that made over- and under-allocation visible to managers at a glance.
- Deliberately positioned the tool as a planning and fairness tool for the whole team - not a monitoring tool aimed at individuals - because the framing itself determined adoption.
Adoption tripled once the tool felt fair.
The same feature can succeed or fail entirely based on how it's framed - a "tracking" tool and a "transparency" tool can be nearly identical in function and completely different in adoption. Involving the people being involved in the design process was what built the trust needed to get there.