Law by Design Solicitors
An essential element of their success was their pace. Because Gross, Chacon and other members of Faegre`s design team really enjoyed what they learned and committed to taking a long-term perspective on integrating design thinking principles into the business, they took the time to understand what design thinking is and became good at leading sprints and being facilitators. In fact, this strategy of staying under the radar gave Gross and Chacon the time and space to understand how design thinking can be integrated into a law firm`s processes and offerings. “What we didn`t do was rush things,” Gross says, “and that`s what made all the difference. He continues, “We went into this design sprint and we thought, OK, how do we get people to think that it`s not just about adding beautiful images to something? Then we did the design sprint. It was quite a long day of design sprinting, and we were exhausted at the end, but in a great way. We joked that it was like a therapy session. We really thought about the stakeholders, what other people in the company thought, and how to approach these things from a different angle. It`s really that empathy that I think was so important. We realized we wanted to go beyond just visual advocacy. We believe that this whole design thinking process is important and can become a very important part of our practice. There is a pattern of long adversity in the history of Design Thinking at Faegre.
The concept had to be presented to exactly the right lawyers in the right way. Gross, Chacon and others at Faegre were already working in the field of visual advocacy, and design thinking was no such leap. But then it had to start as an experiment. They first had to acquire expertise to evaluate what Design Thinking could offer them. Most importantly, they needed the unusual combination of significant resources (in terms of time and funding) coupled with minimal oversight. Perhaps in part because of Gross` reputation and performance within the company, they both got it. And the rest came from what they could do with that leeway and the strength of the concept. What can you expect concretely from this book? You can expect to train in design and be equipped with tools to revamp your current services or create new initiatives (or new organizations and startups). Armed with new skills, the question for Gross, Chacon and others shifted to how they could convince their colleagues — and the firm — to use a technique that produced few billable results while taking up lawyers` time. Gross notes, of course, being a lead partner helped, as did the fact that the Silicon Valley office was buzzing with business, and when Gross submitted a funding application for a design thinking initiative to management, the application was approved almost immediately. But he also notes that Faegre`s culture and roots in the Midwest have been crucial. “That means everyone gets paid well and everybody has nice homes and everyone enjoys their lives, but we`re not a New York company that has billable hours requirements for New Yorkers,” Gross said.
“We work very hard, but we also have a culture of spending time coaching people in our company and doing design activities for us.” However, design law is extremely complex and potentially includes both two- and three-dimensional product design. In the past, when it came to three-dimensional items, companies had to consider four different types of design rights. Brexit has made things even more complicated. In this book, I advocate a design-driven approach to legal innovation. Design is the way to generate promising ideas on how to improve legal services and then develop them quickly and efficiently. Some product designs may also be protected by copyright, and copyright claims are also asserted in an increasing number of design cases. In some of these cases, copyright is now being used to claim protection for products that may have been designed decades ago. If you come here to become a designer, or even a legal designer in particular, I hope the following chapters will set you on this path, from which you can find many more formal and rich resources on how to practice design.
First, my goal is to move lawyers from unconscious designers – who create services, develop technologies, create policies and legal systems – to conscious, with more attention to user voices, experimentation and test feedback, and the need for more creative and ambitious ideas. Ideally, this book helps lawyers, clerks, law professors, judges, and others be more thoughtful and creative about how they work and how they engage the people they serve. It aims to create a movement around design-driven innovations in law. We need more organizations that can conduct agile and creative legal services experiments and bring to market a new generation of products, services and systems. We didn`t make a connection between all this design stuff and how it would help us in cases or with clients. What`s ironic is that we did it out of pure love – we just wanted to get really good and see where it goes – and in fact, it had a huge impact on our cases. The irony is that because we started doing this, we were able to become really good for love and are much more advanced than we would otherwise be. And now it has had this massive impact on business development and case strategy.
This book is a call to design. The world of legal rules and services can be better, and design can be the most important guide to ushering in a new era of usable, attractive and user-friendly law. In the event of a dispute, we can use our knowledge of design rights to help our clients achieve the best business outcomes. Generally, problems can be resolved without litigation. When litigation is unavoidable, we have exceptional experience and expertise in litigating design cases to a satisfactory business conclusion. “This is an exemplary company with an unparalleled understanding of the legal market and SEO. We have been supported from cradle to grave in the design, construction, SEO and execution of the construction of our website. Marketing lawyers are able to empirically back up every decision that needs to be made with real data and ensure that the website is perfectly optimized to deliver results. There is also a lot of creative talent to grab attention and make an impact in the very short time a website has to make a first impression and win business. Customer contact and availability are excellent; a real pleasure to work with Ben and his team. Thank you from all of us at Phillips Law.
It`s a documentation of what I`ve learned over the past three years as I experimented with how to bring the worlds of law and design together. (This will also be an iterative project – so please let me know how it can be improved in future updates.) Helen and I are going to go into our design lab now, we`re going to bring people in, and we`re going to do the design thinking process about how we can empathize with the jury and what question we`re really trying to solve, and we`re thinking about all the different ways to do that. Then we try this solution, this unique approach to the case, and then we test it. We made huge strides in applying classic design thinking to the test work, but it wasn`t easy. We hadn`t done that in a long time. It was new and very exciting. While most businesses know the basics of web design, sometimes it`s hard to know where to turn to make improvements. We can help simplify this process in some crucial areas. That`s when they decided that if they tried to bring design thinking to Faegre, they would give everything. Gross, while continuing to do his job, returned to school at night and spent a year studying Design Thinking at Stanford d.school. Chacon also learned about the design thinking process, participated in other design sprints, and took a course on the subject at Berkeley. “I probably spent 500 hours there, and Helen easily spent that much time training non-billable, training, leading sprints, educating us,” Gross notes.
“I would say we`ve been under the radar just to make investments and training for at least one solid year.” Over time, together and separately, they began to conduct their own design sprints, both internally within the company and externally with customers. Meanwhile, Minneapolis-based attorneys Razavi and Bottini worked with the University of Minnesota`s schools of law and design to create and teach a visual advocacy course at the law school. A recent example of design thinking in the context of the legal profession is IDEO`s redesign of the partner review process at Hogan Lovells. Described in a Fast Company article, the problem was that employees were receiving irregular feedback that lacked substance, leaving them largely in the dark about what they were doing well and what needed to be improved. IDEO examined what employees expected from these reviews and where the reviews were insufficient. They looked at them from the examiner`s point of view. They thought about what the company wanted to achieve through these reviews and what they could gain.
