Peer to Peer Magazine

43 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Revolutionizing Law with Design Thinking FEATURES Tim Brown, CEO of global innovation firm IDEO and a leading proponent of design thinking, describes the revolution inherent in design thinking this way: Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology and the requirements for business success. A human-centered approach to innovation — once the province of professions typically associated with design, such as architects, urban planners and industrial designers — is now seeing increasing use in businesses of all types, including a few law firms (and it is being taught in some law schools). It stands in stark contrast with problem-focused modes of analysis more typically associated with business and with the law. At the core of design thinking is something uerly outside the toolset given lawyers in law school: empathy. This is its most important differentiator from the value delivered by lawyers and law firms. Even they are hurting. Redesign is occurring out of necessity, out of vast unhappiness with the state of affairs. And much of it is being done outside the quiet halls and chambers of traditional firms and courts. Engineers and businesspeople have noticed an opportunity and are acting. The question now is: To what extent will lawyers and law firms participate in the ongoing redefinition of what constitutes legal practice? Do they even have the tools to participate? Regarding that last question, the answer is yes. Lawyers trained in the time-honored way might not have had the tools or mindset to recognize the growing problems with traditional practice models or to understand how profoundly unhappy corporate clients and others were becoming. But those tools are available now, and some firms and many companies are using them to redesign businesses for an age that expects iPhones and Teslas. And such tools need to be broadly adopted, lest outsiders do to law practice what Apple did to BlackBerry. That might sound dire, but the marketplace is full of BlackBerrys, Kodaks, AOLs and Blockbusters — companies simply designed out of existence. Design Thinking When we speak of design, we oen aach an article to it, referring to a particular design as being beautiful or elegant. The smooth metallic surface and chamfered edges of the iPhone fit that understanding of design. In that sense, design refers to a particular physical aesthetic. But design is also a process, a methodology used to arrive at a superior end state. It goes far beyond the physical aesthetics of product creation to encompass the entire user experience associated with a product or service. As aractive as the iPhone's physical design was, the revolution it spawned had much more to do with how users interacted with a wide range of services, from telephony to email to music to photography and videography. This process, this way of thinking that is so different from how businesspeople and lawyers typically approach problems is called "design thinking." To what extent will lawyers and law firms participate in the ongoing redefinition of what constitutes legal practice?

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