Peer to Peer Magazine

38 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | FALL 2016 The Power of Design for Legal Innovation CASE STUDIES The Promise of Design Design is the practice of making things with a focus on three metrics: Usability: Can your audience use the thing intuitively? Usefulness: Does it give the audience value and meaning? Engagement: Do people want to spend time, money and aention on it? The promise of design is not just about making things beautiful, it is about making things that engage and empower people. Design Thinking for Non-Designers Design thinking is an adaptation of the practice of design for those outside the professional design industry who want to harness design metrics. Design thinking offers clear processes to follow and mindsets to employ to create innovative products, services and systems that beer serve a chosen audience. Design thinking offers an adaptable core five-step process that gives structure to innovation efforts: discover, synthesize, build, test and evolve. Discovery involves scouting out a challenge area, talking to potential users and experts, and gathering information through observations and data collection. This leads to synthesis, in which the innovation group identifies key themes, insights and paerns that create a focus on a particular need or opportunity. In building, the group brainstorms ways to address this design brief, borrowing from other fields and stretching to identify breakthrough ideas. A few ideas are selected to move forward and be made into rough prototype versions, which can be used in the fourth stage: user and expert testing. Quick, critical feedback helps the group prioritize and flesh out the details of the ideas in which to invest. Aer several rounds of evolving the prototypes and testing, the group gradually develops a high-resolution plan for the specifications to be sent to professional designers and developers for implementation. 1 2 3 It is a common discussion in the world of legal professionals, both in Big Law and in the access to justice circles: We need innovation in the services we offer and efficiencies in our ways of working so we can deliver greater value to our clients (and have more satisfying career pathways). The key question is how. One of the key answers is design. by Margaret Hagan The Power of Design for Legal Innovation

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