Problem Statement

The legacy billing and immigration tracking system ('Catwalk') forces attorneys to manage high-stakes compliance and dynamic fee scheduling manually. This creates severe cognitive overload, leaves the firm exposed to critical data integrity and security vulnerabilities, and introduces human errors such as missed government filing fees or incorrect visa configurations that directly result in rejected petitions, denied extensions, and catastrophic impacts on human lives.

Requirement Statements

To transform this problem into a secure, automated, and human-centered ecosystem, the system must fulfill the following structured requirements.

User & Cognitive Requirements (UXR)

UXR-1 (Cognitive Load Reduction): The interface must offload manual data tracking by utilizing parameter-driven templates that auto-populate standard fee structures, preventing the user from needing to memorize or manually audit thousands of lines of data.
UXR-2 (Choice Architecture): The system's default states must be engineered as "safe states". Bounded, predictable controls (such as dropdowns, toggle functions, and sliders) must replace open, free-text entry fields to eliminate configuration friction and user error.
UXR-3 (Psychological Safety): The system must provide transparent validation indicators and real-time automated error flags to alleviate user anxiety and establish explicit data confidence before any financial information is committed.

Business & Regulatory Requirements (BRR)

BRR-1 (Compliance & Accountability): The tool must strictly adhere to US immigration and labor law frameworks by maintaining an unalterable, comprehensive audit log detailing who modified what data, and when.
BRR-2 (Risk Mitigation): The system must restrict critical editing rights through role-based access control, ensuring standard users have view-only access while confining operational access to office-specific data silos (e.g., Austin employees only accessing Austin schedules).
BRR-3 (Operational Efficiency): The architecture must automate high-frequency billing tasks to successfully reallocate an estimated 20%–30% of manual man-hours away from spreadsheet scrutiny and toward higher-value legal workflows.

Functional & Technical Requirements (FTR)

FTR-1 (Ecosystem Integration): The platform must maintain robust, bidirectional integrations with legacy touchpoints, pulling case IDs, visa categories, and expiration tracking from Visa Tracks, and automatically pushing clean billing data to Aderant.
FTR-2 (Scenario-Based Modeling): Rather than offering absolute black-box predictions, the platform must process user-defined variables (such as extension timing and fee assumptions) to generate three explicit planning paths: Conservative, Moderate, and Aggressive.
FTR-3 (Accessibility Standards): The user interface must be engineered from the ground up to comply fully with WCAG 2.2 standards, requiring all core interactive features and toggles to be completely keyboard-navigable.

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CLIENT •

Ogletree Deakins

CATEGORY •

PRODUCT & SYSTEMS DESIGN

DATE •

4 February 2026

Immigration financial tool

Ogletree Deakins one of the US's largest immigration law firms was running critical billing and forecasting operations on a fragmented system held together by manual effort and institutional memory. Attorneys were losing billable hours to administrative reconciliation. Errors compounded across thousands of cases. IFT was designed to fix the cognitive architecture of that problem not just automate the workflow.

Problem Statement

Requirement Statements

To transform this problem into a secure, automated, and human-centered ecosystem, the system must fulfill the following structured requirements.

UXR-1 (Cognitive Load Reduction): The interface must offload manual data tracking by utilizing parameter-driven templates that auto-populate standard fee structures, preventing the user from needing to memorize or manually audit thousands of lines of data.

UXR-2 (Choice Architecture): The system's default states must be engineered as "safe states". Bounded, predictable controls (such as dropdowns, toggle functions, and sliders) must replace open, free-text entry fields to eliminate configuration friction and user error.

UXR-3 (Psychological Safety): The system must provide transparent validation indicators and real-time automated error flags to alleviate user anxiety and establish explicit data confidence before any financial information is committed.

Business & Regulatory Requirements (BRR)

BRR-1 (Compliance & Accountability): The tool must strictly adhere to US immigration and labor law frameworks by maintaining an unalterable, comprehensive audit log detailing who modified what data, and when.

BRR-2 (Risk Mitigation): The system must restrict critical editing rights through role-based access control, ensuring standard users have view-only access while confining operational access to office-specific data silos (e.g., Austin employees only accessing Austin schedules).

BRR-3 (Operational Efficiency): The architecture must automate high-frequency billing tasks to successfully reallocate an estimated 20%–30% of manual man-hours away from spreadsheet scrutiny and toward higher-value legal workflows.

Functional & Technical Requirements (FTR)

FTR-1 (Ecosystem Integration): The platform must maintain robust, bidirectional integrations with legacy touchpoints, pulling case IDs, visa categories, and expiration tracking from Visa Tracks, and automatically pushing clean billing data to Aderant.

FTR-2 (Scenario-Based Modeling): Rather than offering absolute black-box predictions, the platform must process user-defined variables (such as extension timing and fee assumptions) to generate three explicit planning paths: Conservative, Moderate, and Aggressive.

FTR-3 (Accessibility Standards): The user interface must be engineered from the ground up to comply fully with WCAG 2.2 standards, requiring all core interactive features and toggles to be completely keyboard-navigable.