UX Researcher

About the Company

Adalat AI is building an end-to-end justice tech stack that automates manual and clerical pain points in courtrooms, giving judges back time to focus on what matters most: decision-making and delivering justice. Our solutions - from AI-powered transcription in Indian languages to case-flow management and document navigation - are now deployed across 9 states, covering nearly 20% of India’s judiciary. Backed by leading technology companies and funders, and incubated at MIT and Oxford, Adalat AI is working to eliminate judicial delays and expand access to timely justice. Founded by a team with backgrounds in law, technology, and economics from Harvard, Oxford, MIT, and IIIT Hyderabad, we are scaling rapidly across India and the Global South.

Role Overview

Adalat AI builds software for one of the most complex, high-stakes environments in India: courtrooms. Judges, lawyers, stenographers, and court staff use our products daily in proceedings that affect people’s lives. Getting the user experience wrong isn’t just a product problem—it’s a justice problem.

Today, the team ships features based on engineering intuition, design judgment, and field feedback relayed informally by the Partnerships team. There’s no one systematically asking: does this feature actually work for the people using it? Are we solving the right problem, or just the most obvious one? Is the product behaving the way we intended in the field?

This is Adalat’s first UX Researcher hire. The role owns the dual mandate that drives product quality: “Are we building the right thing?” (discovery, validation) and “Are we building it right?” (usability, product analytics).

Key Responsibilities

Plan and run user research

Design and conduct qualitative research: user interviews, contextual inquiry in courtrooms, usability testing with judges, lawyers, stenographers, and court staff.
Define research questions in collaboration with the Product Designer and Product Lead. Scope studies that answer specific product decisions, not open-ended explorations.
Synthesise findings into clear, actionable recommendations—what to build, what to change, what to kill.

Evaluate what we ship

Run usability evaluations on features before and after launch. Identify friction points, comprehension gaps, and workflow mismatches.
Maintain a living picture of how Adalat’s products are actually used vs. how they were intended to be used.
Conduct heuristic evaluations and expert reviews alongside the Product Designer to catch issues early in the design process.

Identify patterns that inform product strategy

Move beyond individual usability issues to identify cross-user, cross-court patterns that have strategic implications.
Feed pattern-level insights to the Product Analyst for incorporation into the strategic research picture.
Contribute to roadmap discussions with evidence-based input on user needs, pain points, and opportunities.

Partner with Design and Engineering

Work closely with the Product Designer as a research-design pair. Inform design decisions with evidence; validate design solutions with testing.
Make research findings legible to engineers—concise, specific, and connected to implementation decisions.
Establish lightweight research rituals: share-outs, insight repositories, and research-informed design critiques.Who You’ll Work With

Qualifications

Must have

3–6 years of UX research, product analysis, or a combination of both.
Strong qualitative research skills: interviewing, synthesis, turning ambiguous signals into clear direction.
Quantitative chops: comfortable analysing product data, interpreting metrics, setting up tracking.
Experience in complex, high-stakes domains—healthcare, government, enterprise software, or similar.
Comfortable defining your own research agenda; Adalat doesn’t have a research ops function.
Clear communicator who writes concise, actionable findings for a technical audience.

Strong plus

HCI or cognitive science background.
Experience in legal tech, civic tech, or public sector products.
Hindi (for direct research with court staff without a translator).
Prior experience at a startup or small product team.

What You Will Achieve in a Year

In your first year, you'll have established Adalat's first formal user research practice — a research calendar, an insight repository the team actually uses, and a set of UX metrics dashboards that track whether shipped features work. You'll have run usability studies with judges, stenographers, and court staff across multiple courts, producing findings that directly changed shipped designs. You'll have built the research-design pair rhythm with the Product Designer so that nothing goes to engineering unvalidated. By month 12, the team will have gone from "we think this works" to "we know this works, here's the data."