Selected work · 04

A legal community, made navigable.

Aptivos is a content-curation platform that closes the gap between law firms and the service providers they rely on. We designed and built the platform end-to-end — search, profiles, editorial workflow, and the discovery experience that holds it together.

Aptivos — content-curation platform overview

Role

Design & engineering

Services

Web application · UX/UI design · Editorial workflow · SEO · Ongoing support

Duration

10 months · ongoing

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Background

Legal-tech is saturated; law firms can't tell the signal from the noise.

The legal-tech market in the UK has been growing for a decade. Law firms get pitched dozens of new tools every quarter — case-management systems, e-discovery, contract automation, billing, marketing — and almost no neutral way to compare them. Generic listing sites became noisy directories. Conferences and word-of-mouth filled the gap, badly.

The Aptivos founders saw the same problem from the other side. Reputable service providers — software, consultancies, expert authors — wanted to be discoverable to law firms without becoming part of yet another sponsored directory. The bet was an editorial-first platform: curated content rather than auto-generated profiles, structured search rather than fuzzy keyword matching, and a discovery experience that read as a vetted product, not a listing site.

Challenge

Two audiences with very different mental models — and zero margin for the wrong feel.

Law firms wanted to find vetted service providers quickly; providers wanted to be discoverable without becoming part of a noisy directory. Neither audience trusts a generic listing site, and neither tolerates a UI that feels consumer-grade. The platform needed editorial credibility on day one — before the content library was full — and a search experience that worked on day one, before the data was massive enough to make a generic full-text search useful.

The brief came in as two basic PDF pages. Everything else — design system, search architecture, taxonomy, editorial workflow, business logic, hosting, analytics, ongoing support — was for us to lead. The platform had to scale from zero content to thousands of curated entries without changing shape under the operations team's feet.

Approach

Editorial as the front door.
Curated articles and opinion pieces, not auto-generated profiles. Trust comes from the writing, not the database size — and the editorial cadence keeps the platform feeling alive while the directory layer fills out underneath.
Search that respects the domain.
Faceted, structured, taxonomy-aware. Categories and filters built on top of the editorial taxonomy rather than a fuzzy text-match — so a law firm searching for 'contract automation for in-house teams' finds vetted matches, not the SEO winners.
Profiles that read as vetted.
Structured fields, consistent visual hierarchy, and a design that signals 'part of the editorial product' rather than 'sponsored listing'. Service providers know the surface they're appearing on; law firms know what to expect.
Firebase, sized to the platform.
Firestore + Firebase Auth + Storage + Functions on Google's infrastructure — scalable, reliable, and structured so the database access pattern stays cost-effective as the catalogue grows. Real-time forum and messaging built on the same primitives so nothing fragments.

Highlights

Built end-to-end from a 2-page brief
Design, search, taxonomy, editorial workflow, business logic, hosting, analytics, ongoing support — all led by the studio, from a brief that arrived as two PDF pages.
Real-time community on the same stack
Forum threads, an interactive events calendar, a job board, and an aggregated news section — all built on Firebase so nothing fragments and the operations team only learns one stack.
Vetted, not sponsored
The whole product is engineered to feel like an editorial publication rather than a listings site. Profiles read as part of the product, not as ads.

Yuriy and his team are simply the best. They take a vision and turn it into a complete work of art — every aspect of the solution completed professionally and to perfection.

Douglas Geller

Founder & CEO, GDSI (Aptivos)

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