Peer to Peer Magazine

57 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Luddites or Empaths FROM THE FUTURIST the implicit and oen explicit message is that lawyers are worth their high fees only when they are correct. Nothing in this gauntlet of correctness emphasizes the need to be helpful. You don't have to look far to validate this — just read an opinion leer through a client's eyes. It is hard to imagine a more hedged body of text, or one less likely to help a businessperson weigh risks and make decisions. A carefully drawn opinion leer is correct without being helpful. Or examine a typical user agreement, like a cell phone contract. My own is thirty pages of legalese, and the simplest concepts — say, how my privacy rights are protected — are buried and unintelligible. Not helpful. Move to the macro, and we see this unhelpfulness on a continental scale. The vast majority of the poor in North America have no access to justice. They can't afford to pay lawyers, and those provided for free are too few and too underequipped to be of real use. For the middle class and small business owners, lawyers are too expensive for most people to consider, so they go unrepresented or underrepresented when they encounter legal problems. Even the largest corporations complain that cost and value for legal services have become disconnected, spawning a fee-slashing movement to remedy the problem. The overall result is that lawyers are unhelpful on a vast scale, and our society suffers for it. At long last, though, that suffering has goen noticed. Ingenuity arising from outside traditional practices has begun to redesign law practice so it is helpful, affordable and available. Services such as RocketLawyer and LegalZoom are redefining the infrastructure for the delivery of legal services. Virtual entities such as Axiom, Counsel on Call and VLP are reformulating what it means to be a firm. Blockchain-based technologies are offering up electronic contracts that are lawyerless, smart and self-enforcing. Alternate dispute resolution services are springing up to remedy the cost, delay and unfairness inherent in an overloaded court system. And all of this is just a beginning. Training in Empathy Must traditional lawyers be le out of all this redesigning? No, of course not. The problem is not an inherent condition of lawyers but a lack of training in fundamental skills of helpfulness. Mind you, not all lawyers are lacking in helpfulness. Each firm has a few lawyers that clients absolutely love, usually because those lawyers actually listen to clients. They exhibit empathy for client problems and take positive steps to remedy them. Some of the most creative legal solutions emerge from such lawyers. For example, I would argue that Marty Lipton created the poison pill defense to hostile takeovers out of empathy for the businesspeople whose work was being ravaged by the takeover trolls of his age. Some firms are trying to train all their lawyers in the skills that come naturally to some. Bryan Cave's Coaching the Coaches program teaches associates empathy skills like active listening and encourages authenticity in client relations. That's a start. Designing the Answer But to remedy the widespread problems now inherent in practice, I believe that lawyers need to go further. They must add another tool to their toolbox: discipline. The same hard work, study and practice that helped them acquire basic legal skills. We see this discipline in an emerging field focused on applying design principles to problems in areas far beyond design. Over the past several decades, businesses have noticed that professionals in design fields—architects, urban planners, industrial designers and other creative types—solve problems in a fundamentally different way from scientists, businesspeople and lawyers. Design thinking, as it has come to be called, translates the methods used by successful designers into language that can be applied in other seings. We oen think of "design" as applying to particular physical aesthetics or fashions, which seem to fall far outside realms such as business and law. 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 is, the revolution it generated had much more to do with how users interacted with a wide range of services,

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