Peer to Peer Magazine

58 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | FALL 2017 Luddites or Empaths FROM THE FUTURIST from email to music to photography, than with its elegance. And geing to those interactions required an extraordinary kind of inquiry, because if you had asked cell phone users whether they needed something like the iPhone, they would have said no. They might have quarreled with this or that bit of functionality in their flip phones, but they were not asking for iPhones. Geing to the iPhone required something else to happen during the design, something uerly outside the toolset given to lawyers in law school and businesspeople in business school—empathy. Empathy goes beyond simply responding to a problem and asks you to put yourself in the shoes of the person who will use your product or service, to understand that person in ways that draw upon intuition, emotion and logic. Design thinking recognizes the first-level importance of emotional content in a successful design. When we think of traditional value propositions, we oen bring to mind some emotionless 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 the safest transportation in the world, a sumptuous surround, that you will feel pampered and affluent. The design of a Tesla is loaded with emotional content. So too with the iPhone. Its hip exclusivity is as much a part of the design as its elegant user interface. The best designs are founded first on human considerations. Building Easy Buttons into Legal Practice Clients have been telling us for years that they want more than utility from their law firms. One of the most common complaints about lawyers is that they take no time to understand their clients' businesses. Abstract advice is less valuable than that given in a specific business context, but the complaint carries just as much emotional content as a "You don't pay enough aention to me" statement in any other human relationship. The unasked questions that open up the workings of our clients' businesses present extraordinary opportunities for law. Helping lawyers understand their clients' businesses—or even beer, helping clients themselves beer understand their businesses— represents the foremost opportunity to turn every lawyer into a Marty Lipton. Some firms are taking this opportunity very seriously. For example, King & Wood Mallessons has brought all of its lawyers and a healthy cross section of clients together for a week each year with the aim of completely redesigning how the firm delivers service. As preparation, many of the firm's staff had actively studied design thinking, including doing so at world famous design schools, preparing themselves to be design thinking leaders for the firm. That preparation is a lesson for all professionals who work with lawyers. Since technological laggardness is not an irremediable trait of lawyers, it is susceptible to leadership. Law firm professionals who undertake the discipline of design thinking put themselves in a position to lead. By importing empathy into law firms, by seeking to build "Easy Buons" for practice problems that affect the delivery of legal services to clients, legal professionals in many areas can arm law firms for Law school and in-practice training emphasize the need for lawyers to be correct above all else.

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