Designing Graceview: telling compliance teams what changed

Graceview was a regulatory horizon scanner. It watched the places regulators, governments and courts publish, worked out what was new, and told the legal, risk and compliance teams who had to act on it. Its customers were law firms and the in-house teams at banks, asset managers and other large companies, whose lawyers had been reading regulator websites by hand.

In May 2026 Legora acquired Graceview, and it became Legora's regulatory horizon scanning tool. We wrote a few words when it happened.

We were Graceview's design partner from June 2024 into early 2026, working with co-founder and COO Jules Ioannidis. Jules brought the requirements and what customers were asking for. We designed the product and its design system on the shadcn components Graceview's engineers already used. Nothing went to those engineers until Jules had reviewed it.

Regulation changes in thousands of places at once

A bank in a dozen countries answers to central banks, securities regulators, parliaments, tax offices and courts, each publishing on its own website and often not in English. The White House alone put out 367 articles in a month.

Every one of those has to be found, judged relevant or not, placed by jurisdiction and area of law, dated (when a consultation closes, when a rule takes effect), summarised and sent to whoever acts on it.

Where a rule applies was the hardest thing to model, and Jules put the problem to us early. A client might follow federal rules in one country, a single state in another and the EU on top, which a country-first tree makes awkward to pick. We settled on splitting jurisdictions by level, federal, state and city, with associations like the EU beside them, and showing a selection as flags and a count ("EU, NATO and 10 more") rather than a list of 193 countries.

When we started, the scanner did the finding and lawyers at content partners like PwC did the deciding and writing. So the product had two sides, one for partners to curate and one for clients to read.

The client side reads like a briefing

Clients were general counsel and their teams. Horizon put recent updates down one side and a topic's page beside it, opening on a short "At a Glance".

The roadmap laid out what was coming by date. A consultation ran as a pill across the weeks it was open. A rule taking effect was a labelled dot.

Any update could become a task on the actions board, a kanban borrowed from Linear. We kept the fields few, because a legal team will turn every action into a form if you let it.

The calls went back and forth between one global search and separate ones for Horizon and Documents. We landed on one box behind Command-K with tabs to narrow it, plus a "find in" field on each view, and prototyped it before anyone built it.

The partner side is a triage queue

Everything the scanner found landed in Create, sorted into to do, draft, done and trash, with source, area of law, location, content type and assignee in columns. What a partner kept became a page or an event in the library, after its own review.

Partners asked for saved views. We'd designed those for another client, so we lifted the pattern and let an admin set them up for the whole team.

One partner's review ran from author to second-line reviewer to QA, while another only needed draft and review. So each partner sets up its own review states, as in Linear, and marks one as publishable.

Sources go offline and scrapes fail. The logs list every source with its last sync, its successes, warnings and errors, sorted by consecutive failures, so the one broken all week sits at the top.

Like Linear's, the partner inbox shows each item's current state and latest change. Emails go out in batches every ten or fifteen minutes, under Graceview's name, because a client's digest could hold content from several partners.

The assistant answers from what's in Graceview

AI chat was in the first sprint. Jules wanted citations inline rather than at the end of an answer, so each paragraph carries its own numbered sources, and you can highlight part of an answer and reply to just that.

We took the attachment button off. To ask about a file, you put it in Documents first, because Graceview didn't want its chat used as a general-purpose ChatGPT.

In 2025 the chat became the Assistant, which searches the timeline, the library and the knowledge base, each a tool you can switch off. You add context the way you mention a page in Notion, and it shows what it's doing in one compact line, as Cursor does.

Some records are a liability

Graceview's breach tool, which we redesigned, walks a team through whether an incident has to be reported under the ASIC Act and the Corporations Act: a few yes or no questions per section, then a conclusion. It doesn't store the reports. Jules's clients were wary of creating records that could be asked for in legal discovery.

the one screen designed to forget

Customers stopped wanting the lawyer in the loop

Midway through 2025 Jules opened a call with a change of direction. Lawyers had sat between the scanner and the client because the models hadn't been good enough to trust alone. Increasingly, customers didn't care. What they wanted, he said, was something like Perplexity for their own regulation: see the sources, set what comes through, get the data out in their own shape. They wanted to see how the sausage was made.

A law firm wanted every new decision from an international patent court, 1,200 and counting, with a weekly digest. A global bank wanted each update tagged against its own seven topics and rated on its own impact scale.

My first question was where any of that would live. The feed was one queue; you couldn't save a search, let alone several. If a bank had seven topics and a firm had three courts, was that one feed or many? Monitors started there.

Graceview then had a model tag every source against a new taxonomy of areas and sub-areas of law. You browse the areas you care about and follow sources the way you'd follow accounts.

Later that year Jules wanted the product reshaped around monitors. He took a week to skeleton it; we took two to mock it up from the components we already had.

Monitors were the last thing we designed with Jules, through January 2026: several per workspace, one for each area or country a team watches, replacing the single queue. To do, draft, done and trash became unread, read and hidden, as in a feed reader.

Hidden holds whatever a keyword filter, an AI filter or a person ruled out. It has no unread count, because the count would never stop growing, and no search, because anything that costs money to run is switched off in there. Bring something back and it returns as unread, so it can't get lost twice. When Jules asked whether the missing controls should show disabled or go entirely, I took them out. Greyed-out buttons are noise on a screen built to be ignored.

the team called it the junk drawer

Custom columns are where the bank's request ended up. You define a column, a type and an instruction, and the AI fills it in for every item, starting with the 2,000 most recent. Filter on them and "high impact, my topics" becomes a view with its own digest. The pre-filter that decides what comes through at all now gives a score out of 100 instead of a yes or no, so each team picks its own threshold.

Where it went

Much of what came later took the lawyers out. What carried across was every update placed by jurisdiction and area of law, dated, summarised and linked to its source.

In May 2026 Legora acquired Graceview to bring regulatory horizon scanning into its platform, monitoring tens of thousands of official sources across more than 100 jurisdictions. In June Legora launched it as Monitors.

Congratulations to Jules and the Graceview team. We wrote a few words about the acquisition.

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