Lead Product Designer · UX Leader

I lead design through complexity.

Design leadership for AI, legal technology, and complex enterprise products.

15+
years designing digital products
1M+
legal practitioners served
4 of 6
designers promoted during mentorship

See a bit of what I've done

6 case studies, showing AI, workflows, B2C, B2B platform complexity, customer experience, and creativity.

01 · Thomson ReutersGenAI · Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 + CoCounsel

The AI legal assistant I designed, shown live at the Microsoft Build 2024 keynote to 4,000 people in the room and 200,000 watching online

Build '24 live keynote demo200K watching the livestream
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02 · Thomson ReutersAI search · Product direction

Natural Language Search

Reframing how legal professionals search across data sets ranging from 100K to 20M documents.

45% increase in search success1 week → 3 hrs median time to answer
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03 · Thomson ReutersCommerce · Service design

Customer Success Payments

Redesigning payment and renewal journeys at enterprise scale—and connecting better UX to business growth.

$180M revenue tied to the payment portal21% increase in product renewals
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04 · Thomson ReutersDesign systems · DesignOps

Global Experience System

Creating consistency across global marketing experiences and complex enterprise billing communications.

114 marketing pages rebuilt200+ product invoices redesigned
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05 · Thomson ReutersAI operations · Internal tools

Label Insights

Designing an internal tool that helps teams label training data and improve AI products.

20% less labeling time per documentAI model training workflow
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06 · Thomson ReutersGenAI · Memory / Personalization

CoCounsel Agentic Memory

Defining fiduciary-grade agentic memory for CoCounsel Legal—so lawyers stop re-entering matter context and can trust what the AI remembers.

18 design variations explored2 memory types defined
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I stay tool-agnostic. What matters is shipping the right outcome.

  • Vercel
  • v0
  • Cursor
  • Figma
  • Figma Make
  • Miro
  • Jira
  • ADO
  • Sketch
  • XD
  • Axure RP
  • Photoshop

The work gets better when the team sees the same problem.

My role is to create the clarity, alignment, and momentum that helps teams make stronger product decisions together.

  1. 01

    Align around outcomes

    Give teams a shared view of the customer problem, the business opportunity, and what meaningful progress looks like.

  2. 02

    Make complexity legible

    Turn technical constraints and intricate workflows into decisions that teams—and customers—can understand.

  3. 03

    Build design leverage

    Create the systems, narratives, and partnerships that help good decisions travel beyond a single screen or project.

Erik Olausen at work

Minneapolis–Saint Paul · Working across complex product spaces

Customer reality. Business context. Delivery.

I’m a design leader with 15+ years across AI products, enterprise platforms, and a nine-year founder run. At Thomson Reuters, I set direction for eight designers and coach six more while shaping products used by 1M+ legal professionals. I connect customer reality, business context, and delivery—and help teams turn that clarity into measurable progress.