Alexis Trevizo

Awarehealth

A mental wellness app for lawyers which focuses on community building and AI guided resilience training.

My role

Co-founder & Designer

Contributors

Joey C., Param K.

June 2018

Discovery

THE situation

Lawyers have unusually high rates of mental illnesses such as alcoholism, substance abuse, and chronic depression.

  1. Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to suffer from depression compared to the average population.
  2. 32% of lawyers under 30 are problem drinkers.
  3. $800K Yearly cost related to mental health at 1000 lawyer firm.

How might we provide a wellness solution to lawyers who are facing mental health issues?

Diving Deeper

To develop a few ideas, we conducted addtiontal inteviews to learn more about lawyer assistance programs (LAPs) and their effectiveness. We conducted 100 interviews where we learned that peer focused solutions AAA and 12-step programs have low attendance and minimal long term effectiveness because of:

  1. Perceieved inconveniences such as long commutes.
  2. Perceived little value for lawyers who believed their conditions weren’t severe
  3. Too few follow-up opportunities and little accountability for improvement.

"They are simply a huge waste of time. Who has time for these things?"

"I feel like the [LAPs] don't really know who I am. It feels transactional."




the inital idea

Our idea was to make an app that lawyers could use in parallel to LAP meetings help to reduce inconveniences and create accountability. We would increase accountability by introducing a virtual assistant to help with difficult concepts. We also chose to include bite-sized tasks for lawyers to complete at any pace to help reduce time concerns.

Testing and Validation

To test our whether our idea was viable, I created a series of low fidelity wireframes. Which we shared with lawyers, wellness experts, and LAP organizers

new insights

  1. A purely AI guided experience didn't resonate well with lawyers. "what't the point of the assistant?"
  2. Lawyers were curious to see what other users were doing in the app. This is because LAP meetings usually have in-person participants who can offer additional perspectives.

The Solution

In our most recent iteration, we've decided to lean further into the peer to peer aspects of wellness to emulate the in-person LAP meetings. We also chose to reduce the presence of the virtual assistant. In addition to incorporating feedback from lawyers; we spent time learning from wellness experts about measuring an individual's progress as they use the app.


As a result, we created AwareHealth, A mental wellness app for lawyers which focuses on community building and AI guided resilience training to aid with Lawyer Assistant Programs.