Peer to Peer Magazine

40 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | FALL 2016 The Power of Design for Legal Innovation CASE STUDIES can then be developed by professionals. We use the design process with various partners — in- house legal departments, court self-help centers and law firms — to help them beer define the problem they are trying to solve and then generate and refine breakthrough solutions. The process is a boon to lawyers' relationships with their clients and each other. Because design involves empathy-driven conversations and collaborative work, going through the process strengthens lawyers' understandings of how they can beer serve their clients. It helps them get beyond their training and see the situation from the clients' points of view. Even if no new product or service comes out of the process, it is an effective tool for connecting with a client. Design can help build new leadership and interdisciplinary skills among lawyers (and law students) that can create a new generation of lawyers. Those who go through the design process 2 3 learn to be more creative problem-solvers who can work collaboratively with other professionals and have a strong orientation toward serving clients and identifying new revenue sources. These types of hybrid lawyers can be beer managers of organizations (and founders of new types of legal service providers), and they adapt well to the changing legal market. Design for the Future As more legal organizations embrace a design-driven approach to innovation, we can expect to see more organizations building capacity for user research and service experimentation, whether internally through labs and research and development groups or externally in collaborative incubators and innovation centers. We will also see more partnerships among legal and non-legal organizations in which groups learn from each other and discover new ways to serve customers through collaborative efforts. As the focus turns from a lawyer-driven to a client-driven set of solutions, the value will be on creating a seamless process for clients to get their needs — legal and not — resolved efficiently and transparently. This will require more interdisciplinary creativity from legal organizations and an openness to collaboration. Design can be a powerful driver of innovation in legal services. It is a process that is easy to learn and transformative in its focus on human needs, analogous thinking and agile prototyping and testing. It is not a management fad; it is a fundamental method of problem-solving that flips your point of view to seek out collaborators and move quickly. It can be adapted and scaled to many types of challenges and can serve anyone who is interested in answering the question, "How can I make this [frustrating, annoying, inefficient, ugly, confusing] thing beer?" P2P We use the design process with various partners — in-house legal departments, court self-help centers and law firms — to help them better define the problem they are trying to solve and then generate and refine breakthrough solutions.

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