Interface Design to Support Legal Reading and Writing: Insights from Interviews with Legal Experts

Legal professionals spend significant time reading, writing, and interpreting complex documents, yet research has not fully captured how they approach these tasks or what they expect from skimming and writing-support tools. To examine practices and views on emerging tools, we interviewed 22 legal professionals about workflows, challenges, and technology use. In each session, we leveraged prior HCI-based skimming and writing prototypes that surface emergent cross-document relationships and support AI-resilient interaction (noticing, judging, and recovering from model errors or unexpected behavior); participants completed a contextual fit evaluation to assess whether and how they would use the tools, which document types, and at what stages in their work. Our analysis details limitations and challenges in workflows, domain-specific feedback on AI-resilient interfaces, and expert insights on legal tech design. These findings offer actionable guidance for technology designers developing reading and writing-support for legal professionals, and for legal professionals seeking peer-informed tool integration strategies.