Peer to Peer Magazine

44 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2016 FEATURES Revolutionizing Law with Design Thinking traditional business or legal thinking. Empathy goes beyond trying to understand a problem. It asks you to put yourself in the shoes of the person who will use your product or service and to try to understand that person in ways that transcend logic, that draw upon intuition and emotion. Design thinking recognizes the first-level importance of the emotional content of a successful design. When we think of traditional value propositions, we oen bring to mind some notion of utility. This product or service will accomplish a certain thing. Lawyers think like that. We will provide you with advice, and it will be correct. But the most successful designs go beyond mere utility. If you buy a Tesla, the automaker promises: » You will receive the safest transportation in the world » You will be transported in a sumptuous surround » You will feel pampered, affluent, intelligent The design of a Tesla is loaded with emotional content. So too is the iPhone. Its hip exclusivity is as much a part of the design as its elegant user interface. All of the best designs are founded first on human considerations. Clients have been telling us for years that they want more than utility in their law firms. One of the most common complaints about lawyers is that they take no time to understand their clients' businesses. That complaint relates to the utility of advice — abstract advice is less valuable than that given in a specific business context. But the complaint has just as much emotional content as a you-don't-pay- enough-aention-to-me statement in any other human relationship. A New Model? What would law practice look like if it incorporated design-thinking principles? The services that already exist give some hint. Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom are easy to use and inexpensive. You might say those tools are meant for consumer-grade legal problems, and they can't possibly apply to more complex legal issues? That, unfortunately, is a typical problem- focused lawyer analysis — the kind design thinking circumvents. A deeper dive into the client psyche would reveal that easier and cheaper are two of the foremost desires of clients. Lawyers are hard to reach, oen unresponsive and impose high costs on every second of interaction. Design thinking starts with desires like that. How might we address those concerns? Here's the second key differentiator between lawyer thinking and design thinking. There is no one answer to these problems. To arrive at something optimal — to an iPhone-like solution — we will have to define goals, then prototype, then fail and revise, and then cycle through the whole process again. Empathy and a disposition to experiment are the hallmarks of design thinking. We can't say what a redesigned law practice will look like. We can only say that the best answers will have been designed in all the best senses of the word. And good design is always a surprise. P2P As infrastructure is outsourced to the cloud, law firms will keep fewer tech support personnel in- house. Those resources will shift to training and security.

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