Rise Up:
Federal Workers Legal Defense Network
Simple technology enabled a rapid response to crisis
Project Details:
Roles: Product Lead, Strategy and Design
Team : Project Manager, 3 Engineers
Time Frame: 6 weeks, 2025
Project Stage: Idea to Public Launch
The Ask:
In response to the mass firings of federal workers by the Trump administration, a new nonprofit formed from a coalition of unions, democracy organizations and a long-term client, We The Action.
They wanted to launch a service that would match thousands of these federal workers with trained lawyers for pro bono consultations.
Core Requirements
In 6 weeks, our team of 5 built a strategically simple, stripped down piece of technology that could:
Take in requests for pro bono assistance from federal workers
Ensure the privacy of federal workers, never sharing their names with volunteers
Prioritize the most urgent worker requests
Register legal volunteers, track their training and their eligibility to participate
Give lawyers complete control over their workload and capacity
Track outcomes on an anonymous basis to understand trends
When building a response to breaking news, requirements change often. Our team adapted quickly to these changes, including overhauling our entire product plan about 2 weeks into the build process.
Prioritizing speed
With time-to-launch a top priority, we identified key areas that would speed up our build, without sacrificing quality:
Used Typeform for intake forms so the nonprofit could manage themselves
For the lawyer’s dashboard, we used an open source component library so we didn’t need to build from scratch
With limited design and planning time, we focused on simplifying the system itself. An imperfect, yet flexible UX was going to be better than none at all.
This was an exercise in prioritizing only the absolute necessities.
April 2025
Launch
Within the first week over a thousand lawyers had signed up to assist over a thousand federal workers.