design thinking

Many lawyers these days are making efforts to be more competitive in pricing and to develop healthier client-firm relationships.

In this post, I argue that Law Firms that want to invest in operations (‘legal ops’ for acronym lovers🤓), and transform their service could be looking at Service Design, a methodology that has been there for more than 20 years and that we have been practicing for quite while now.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a thinking process that comes from “product” designers. Basically the the people designing the mouse 🖱️and computers follow these thinking processes to build useful products that people love. This type of thinking is what sets appart good designed products from poorly designed products. You get the picture right?

From products, these thinking methods moved to the design of services which are immaterial more relational interactions between people and companies.

This is one of my favorite quotes from Herbert Simon a political scientist from the 60s who was the first person to come up with the term Design Thinking.

Everyone designs who devises course of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

I love this quote for two reasons :

first because it opens up the methodology to everyone and not just the product designers.
And second, As Diana Pinos perfectly states in her blog, Design Thinking goes much further than “product”, to solve all kinds of situations in an organization: new products, services, ways of communicating, how you treat your employees, ways of working, political systems, education systems, activism, etc.

What is Service Design?

Service Design is the practical application of Design Thinking to the development of services.

The goal is to restructure your organization (teams, tech and processes) so that it adapts to offer a better experience for all the actors involved. I know this may sound a bit is a bit abstract but it’s because it is. But The vast majority of what goes into a service is essentially invisible. Agree?!

With Service Design you need to go “meta” and get the big picture of how are you actually delivering your service as a system. You need to identify and visualize where are the points that need to be improved.

Service Design includes things like:

visualization tools allow bringing different technical disciplines together and
meeting facilitation techniques
a step by step process to innovate: create a new service or re-organize an existing one
research methods to discover insights about your audience and other stakeholder’s
create regular communication “avenues” to include your client in the design of your legal operations

Service Design can improve a legal service

If you are into streamlining your service so that you can repeat same processes with new clients and boost profitability, this can be a game changer.

You will be able to clearly see bottlenecks back end (hidden processes) and front end (what customer sees). Come up with ideas to reduce the amount of time you spend on certain tasks.

Current business management in the digital age is a complex matter: Service design promises to be great method to manage and visualize complexity.

What are the skills you need?

Service Design is optimistic. Service designers really believe that the perfect service is possible to achieve if you are willing to dream it, imagine it and co-create it with everyone involved.

You need people to be able to work in different “modes”. This requires to use brain functions that often are not used in legal profession:

During the service design process there is a time for ideation in which you can be creative and “brainstorm”.
There is a time for strategy and organizing the way forward.
Collaboration skills. understanding people working from different disciplines. talk with people that are from other disciplines.
Tools to visualize, sketchnote and draw.

Seeing operations through your customer’s eyes

The ability to listen and to extract user needs from human interactions will help you succeed as a lawyer. Service design believes that the user is also an expert in his/her life. What they see and how they speak about their problems can give you great insights on how to improve your legal operations. Design thinking includes also the left part of the brain so emotions are also taken on board in the design of the perfect service.

What are the challenges?

It’s an innovation process right? And let’s be honest, lawyers have not been trained to innovate. I say it from my own experience as trained lawyer.

This means you are going to spend some time working on things that are very uncertain and that you don’t know the outcome. If your team does not have an innovation mindset, or the mental resilience to trust this process, this is going to generate frustration and stress.

Also make sure you explain very well the innovation journey. What are we going to be doing at each phase because it’s very easy for people to get lost.

Ok, enough buzz words and theoretical concepts🤯. As I always say,

Design is like Yoga. It’s about doing it and not talking about it.

So now it’s time to get our hands dirty. Let’s start including design in our practice.👇

We have worked with Law Firms starting their design challenge and we would like to help you . Apply for a free consultation call and let’s see together if we come up with a plan to start this exciting journey.

Thanks 🙂 Xenia Viladas

Nature is full of examples of successful collaborative processes, both intra- and inter-species.🐢🦈🐋🦜🌳

Collaborative structures in natural ecosystems often involve a diversity of species, as in the case of plant-animal win win collaborative networks. Members of these systems (the actors) play different roles, reflected in different services. For instance, in pollination networks, while the plants provide some food resource(nectar) to the animals🐝, the animals mediate pollination by transferring the pollen between plants.

There are more and more people looking at nature in order to find inspiration for improving practices and processes inside organizations.

What do legal organizations say and do when they talk about innovation? Could they also be inspired by nature? Forum, a publication from Barreaux De Bruxelles, the lawyers association in Brussels region, has published an article called Academie Digital Des Avocats in which they explain that in order to become digitally enhanced, a lawyer must innovate in order to push his client to see their problems from another angle. (“an avocat innovateur pour pousser son client a voir ses problematiques sous un autre angle”.) In other words he or she must be an “solution architect” bringing to the table expertise from different backgrounds.

I think we should all welcome and celebrate these words🎉🎉. This is totally new for a sector that was, until now, never really challenged or driven by innovation. Compared to other economic sectors (fashion, car industry, agriculture or banking), under strong pressure to innovate, law firms never had a reason to innovate. It was not in their DNA. That was clearly “a thing” for the others to do.

In the last 2 years I had the chance to speak to hundreds of lawyers👂. From my research “discoveries” I select 3 cases where I see innovation happening or at least intended. I also went to nature and we got inspired by what I saw there.

Big , Medium and Small they are all innovating (or at least they try)

The solution they try to bring in the innovative examples below might be technical, legal, psychological or human, business strategy or processes. When a team wants to offer new services in a new field, it’s called innovation. Some examples below…

Big global law firms: We want to be a business partner and legal is only part of it

I quote directly what I’ve heard from the communication department of a firm that has more than 1500 employees:

We should focus our efforts targeting the problems of the clients. If you want to provide advice that goes beyond legal, we have to focus on “the things” that matter to the general counsel or CEO. For example, if they have an issue with their staff, they have to deal with it asap, otherwise they will loose profit. We have to give them that kind of advice and make them feel we understand their business. They expect from us that we know not only about legal stuff, but also about their real problem.

Medium law firms

I met a company in Brussels that employs 12 lawyers giving advice on financial issues. They want to move from purely legal advice to offering value-based leadership, team culture transformation, and training on how a company should pay attention to ethical issues.

Small one-person law firm

I also had a nice walking conversation with Brussels based lawyer Severine Evrard. This year she is launching a very interesting training program or Mastermind as she calls it. Masterminds can help you have a better control of your professional life as a lawyer: how are emotions affecting us? how can we improve collaboration and better manage our time?

Lack of diversity in law firms is hindering innovation

Diversity is what keeps natural ecosystems alive. As we learn lessons from Covid-19, we see that a lack of biodiversity makes us more vulnerable to infections and diseases.

If you want to solve diverse problems you need to understand that only a diverse population is going to help you solve them.

I am going to be clear and very direct. I don’t see enough diversity in law firms. Law firms only hire lawyers. And often sometimes they only hire lawyers from the same university. This must change if the law firms want to innovate in the way described above. Otherwise they just end up “copying” one another.

Isabel Parker, chief legal innovation officer at Digital Legal Exchange in the UK says that cognitive diversity, working with multidisciplinary teams does bring better outcomes for clients, and thinks that the legal profession should open up to a more diverse talent pool.

In these times we live, diversity in the business environment is more than just bringing different business profiles. It also includes gender, race and ethnicity. It now includes employees with diverse religious and political beliefs, education, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientation, cultures or disabilities.

How can diversity bring innovation in legal teams?

In a volatile and complex business scenario you need a multidisciplinary and diverse team to “build” a new service.

This relevant service you want to introduce has to be designed, ideated, prototyped, bugdeted, coded, measured, packaged and sold and this requires different skills.

A Boston Consulting Group study found that companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation. This finding is significant for tech companies, start-ups and industries where innovation is the key to growth. It shows that diversity is not just a metric to strive for, it is actually an integral part of a successful revenue-generating business.

How can I include diversity in my firm?

Start by looking at what you have

Try to sense and feel what drives the members inside your team. Try to unlock hidden or under exploited potential. Maybe you have team members who like to draw diagrams✏️, learn data science📐 or bake cakes. All those capacities need to be acknowledge and exploited during the ideation and implementation phase of any innovation.

Recently I talked to a lawyer from a Brussels firm with 12 people. He took 1 year off legal duties to focus on content strategies, “legal design” and business development in general.

Those diverse individuals inside are often put in the spotlight or expected to help their colleagues get it right. Don’t leave them alone and give them air support and empowerment instead💪.

Start putting in place some “smart” metrics

Lord kelvin is often quoted on this, “if you cannot measure it , you cannot improve it”.

If the leaders inside law firms do not put in place measurable, specific and achievable goals on diversity inside the firm, it is just not going to happen.

Rethink your recruiting tactics

Your culture will be shaped by future recruits. Be proactive about the types of people you bring to your team. your job specifications should reflect your new values.
Start recruiting people with different profiles. and treat them as good as you do with your lawyers. I often see the non lawyers are considered inferior because they don’t invoice as much cost per hour.

Ecosystem Thinking

Understand that wicked problems are too complex to be solved by one organization alone and acknowledge the need for collaboration of a diverse ecosystems to achieve the change they are working towards. Try to approach problems with design thinking, systems design, and ecosystem mapping.

Combine diversity with affinity to your brand, vision and values

Too much diversity might also be difficult to manage. When you bring people who speak different “business languages” you need to combine this with some affinity in the form of a strong common goal and vision for your team.

If you want to stay in touch with us for more topics at the intersection of legal design , innovation and tech please subscribe for free to the Places of Learning Newsletter.