Epiq: Replacing spreadsheets with a reconciliation platform

Epiq is a worldwide provider of legal and business services, serving law firms, corporations, financial institutions, and government agencies as they manage bankruptcy matters and the mountains of data that come with them. I was hired as the sole UX designer and researcher on what the team internally called the Calvary Project, building out AACER, Epiq's Automated Access to Court Electronic Records platform, into a real reconciliation platform as a service.

The problem going in was almost comically manual. Banks and financial companies tracking their customers' bankruptcy cases relied on Microsoft Excel for a massive, constantly growing database. Every time someone needed detail on a single customer, that meant externally downloading a spreadsheet with a thousand-plus rows, then hunting through it by hand.

Research first, then a foothold

Much of the legal and financial jargon was new to me, so research started with interviews, current and prospective Epiq customers talking through what they actually needed from a platform-as-a-service. I paired that with competitive research against companies like KLDiscovery, AccessData, and Modus, all of them strong on data forensics and eDiscovery. That's where I found Epiq's actual opening: not more forensics tooling, but a genuinely reliable reconciliation platform to replace the bulky, not-so-automatic process everyone was stuck with.

The value proposition came straight out of that research. Consolidate data from multiple sources. Automate the manual reconciliation work. Surface discrepancies instead of burying them in a spreadsheet. And underneath all of it, the thing every financial client kept repeating: they needed to ensure regulatory compliance, with consistent rules and reports they could actually trust.

Building the reconciliation platform

The core of the platform was a Validation screen, where users could upload documents directly rather than emailing spreadsheets around. From there they could see errors and make edits immediately, see how many cases lived inside each document, and catch schema issues before they became someone else's problem downstream. Batch Jobs, Case Review, and Work Queue views sat alongside it, and once a document was uploaded, the external spreadsheet was gone from the workflow entirely.

Three use cases drove most of the design decisions: continuous case reconciliation, running daily and automated through an API, with on-demand and self-service options for teams that wanted more control; ongoing analysis, helping teams spot debtor trends and process breakdowns before they compounded; and filed forms reconciliation, making sure required forms had actually been completed and filed, not just assumed to be.

After the Calvary Project shipped, Epiq brought me back to redesign the umbrella AACER dashboard, the shared entry point for its other products like AACER 2 and AACER Analytics. That gave users one snapshot view of court case filings, filterable by state, chapter, or judge, instead of jumping between disconnected tools to piece the same picture together.

What I learned

This was my first real B2B platform, and it forced a different approach than consumer work. The users weren't average people, they were experts in the legal and financial field, and the interface needed to respect that instead of over-explaining it. Legal software, eDiscovery especially, tends to lag behind other industries in UX, so a platform that just quietly removed a stack of manual steps felt like a genuine breath of fresh air to the people using it.

This project predates UXcalibur, but it's one of the ones that shaped how I think about regulated, high-stakes software today. In legal and financial tools, trust gets built one exact, unambiguous label at a time, not through a redesign that looks nicer but says the same vague thing.