A courtroom with no Wi-Fi. TrialDirector Cloud

I joined IPRO in 2022 to replace a designer who had left. IPRO was three companies stitched together: Zylab legal hold in the Netherlands, IPRO's own discovery and ingestion software in Arizona, and NetGovern archiving out of Montreal. I was one designer across all of it. I helped the Dutch designer on legal hold, and I did the first designs for the discovery product that Reveal now sells as Logical.

TrialDirector was my last two to three months there. It is the tool litigation teams use to present evidence in court, and it is old. IPRO has been around for over thirty years and TrialDirector for more than fifteen, with very few changes. The job was to design its cloud version, inside the IPRO world.

The people asking for it were the people who manage trial projects. Their biggest concern was simple: a lot of courts in the United States do not have Wi-Fi. A lawyer, or the assistant sitting behind them, changes things during the hearing, and those changes have to stay on the machine where they were made.

So the cloud product had to upload and download, and it had to keep working with no connection at all. When the laptop got back online, everything that happened in the courtroom had to be accounted for. In court, what the screen says about a piece of evidence has to be true.

The pushback was not about the design. The team knew this was a generational change for a fifteen-year-old tool, and nobody argued for the old way. The pushback was about the cloud itself. The stakeholders were nervous, and they named the places they expected it to break.

I took those named places as the brief. Design for the known failures first, and the courtroom without Wi-Fi was the first of them.

The first pass went straight to the people who would use it. We ran one round of feedback with trial managers on the offline flow: make changes in court, reconnect, reconcile. That round is what I had when the work stopped.

I was in the documentation phase, writing the design up for the engineers, when I was let go and Reveal took the company.

Designing the cloud version as if the courtroom had Wi-Fi. Every modern collaboration pattern assumes a connection, and this one could not.

Silent merging on reconnect. A lawyer's change and their assistant's change do not average out. Somebody with authority over the case decides, and the log shows they decided.

Three months, one round of feedback, and nothing shipped. I cannot show the offline flow running, because it never ran. The search builder and keyword builder I designed first for the discovery product are live in Reveal, refined by the designer who followed me, and that is the only work from IPRO I can point to in a product.

TrialDirector is still on-premises under Reveal, and courts in New York and across the country still present with it. That is the gap. A cloud version would put a modern trial tool in front of small firms, and with the language models now being built for legal work, it would change what a small firm can do for a client. I designed the first version of that, and I do not know if anyone has picked it up.