An in-house legal desk, built from scratch — Nayara Marques
Mesa JurídicaLegal tech · own product2026

An in-house legal desk, built from scratch

Mesa is my own product, made from nothing: the desk an in-house legal team works from to follow its lawsuits and the outside firms that run them. I interviewed the lawyers, designed and built it, and cut the first version to what one client needs on day one.

My own product, made from nothing: the desk an in-house legal team uses to follow its lawsuits and the firms that run them.

Role
Founder and product designer. Research, strategy, design, design system and build.
Users
In-house legal teams at groups with large labour caseloads.
Timeframe
2026, ongoing.
Built
Designed and coded by me with Claude Code, on Mesa's own design system.

01 — Context & my role

In Brazil, a company with thousands of employees carries hundreds or thousands of labour lawsuits at any time. The information sits in firms' reports, court systems and the legal team's own spreadsheets, and the in-house team still answers to the board for every number.

Mesa is my own product. I do the research, the product strategy, the design, the design system and the build, using Claude Code to write the code I design.

02 — The first bet

The first version was a clean record of every case a company has, built from public court sources and checked against the client's own spreadsheet. The data held up. The open question was what a legal team does with it every morning.

On one large group's records, Mesa found 98.3% of the cases listed on the official court certificates: 3,334 of 3,390, across four regional labour courts.

03 — What the interviews changed

I interviewed two in-house legal teams: a legal director and a legal manager at one group, and an in-house lawyer at another. Three findings changed what Mesa is for.

Most departments hand their lawsuits to a network of firms, tiered by case size. The team's job is managing those firms, not writing filings. Who analysed what, what was flagged and what leadership signed off. The team needs that history to show it warned in time. Only the firm running a case can say whether a loss is probable, possible or remote, and that call moves the quarter's results.

Drafting templates left the plan: the firm writes the filings, so the team needs one folder per case with everything the firm sent.

04 — The direction

Mesa became the place an in-house legal team works from, not a report it reads. One top bar holds the product: Dashboard, Cases, Firms, Reports and Events.

The Dashboard. Everyone starts here, lawyers included: the caseload's numbers in one view, from who the company is sued by most to who holds how many cases.

What the desk is made of

Everyone lands on the Dashboard and sees the numbers, with no views to switch. A lawyer's own day is the Cases tab filtered to Mine. Every case has its firm, and the firm reports the value at stake and the chance of loss. Managing firms is the team's job, so each firm has its own page. Lawsuits and internal requests sit in the same Cases table. Adding cases is one box for numbers and documents. A lawsuit and a demand open the same case page, with three views: Context, Timeline and Research. Firm, client, company, court, person and lawyer pages share one template. Learn one page and you know them all. Cases, firms, the Dashboard, Reports and Events are the core. Contracts and the other modules come after the first version, when a client needs them.

The core screens

Cases. Lawsuits and demands in one table, ordered by the next event, with overdue deadlines in red and Mesa's seal on what Mesa read from the official gazette.
The case page. Who is in the case, its dates and values, the firm that looks after it, and the phase the case is in.
Events. The week's hearings and deadlines, with where each one happens and who is responsible for it.

05 — The MVP strategy

The vision is a department's whole desk. The first version is what one warm lead needs to see at a dated presentation, and one rule decided every cut: if that client does not need it on day one, it waits.

A real lead and a fixed presentation set the scope, not a feature list. The MVP comes first, built for the first client's demo. Then phase 1, a clickable prototype of the rest, and phase 2: the server, email and access for people outside the team. Screen, actions, states, edge cases and gaps in the flow, then one round of adjustment. Smaller details go to a list for after the first version. Below 1024px, Mesa says it works on a computer. The phone version is on hold. Contracts were the biggest ask in the interviews and a product of their own: they come after the MVP, and none of it is built now. The early panels (My day, Team, Board, Controllership and Oversight) are kept as explorations for later versions.

A security review stands between the prototype and the first real client. Nothing goes live until it is cleared.

06 — Mesa shows its work

Legal teams sign their name under every number, so Mesa never hides where a number came from. Three rules hold for everything Mesa produces, now and in later phases.

Anything Mesa produced carries its seal (✦ Mesa), and actions Mesa takes use their own button, so a person can always tell Mesa's work from the firm's or the team's. Value at stake and chance of loss come from the firm running the case. Mesa never estimates the provision itself. When Mesa writes something, such as a summary or points to review, it arrives as a draft the lawyer checks, with the source beside it.

07 — How I build it

I build alone and with AI, and AI drifts fast. So the rules live in the code, and a check stops a screen that breaks them.

Seven type styles, with the serif kept for the brand, numbers and highlights. One corner radius, three elevations, and every component in one catalog. A script fails any screen that breaks the design system rules before it ships. A glossary of product concepts and a log of every decision, so a cut stays cut and the next screen starts from the same words. Every feature is a task with its five parts, in the phase it belongs to.

08 — Results so far

Mesa has no live client yet, so these are the results of the work so far, not of use.

Mesa's record matched the official court certificates on a large group's caseload. The product plan was rewritten the same day as the interviews, and every screen since follows it. The MVP went from a whole department to the screens one client needs, for a demo with a warm lead.

09 — What I learned

Three lessons, two about the product and one about the practice.

The people I was tracking lawsuits for do not run lawsuits. They manage the firms that do, and the product had to follow that. Writing down why something waits is what made the cuts stick, and what kept the first version small enough to finish. Building alone with AI, the design system's check is what keeps many screens reading as one product.
Product design

Let’s build a product for people who sign their name under every number.

I research, design and build products end to end, and scope the first version to what a real buyer needs.

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