Australian Corporate Lawyer - Autumn 2017

theAustraliancorporatelawyer
DESIGN THINKING – A NEW COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGE FOR LEGAL TEAMS?
Simon Harper
As co-founder of Lawyers On Demand, Simon
was named ‘Legal Innovator of the Year’ at the
2015 FT Legal Innovative Lawyers Awards for
a decade of “sending shockwaves through the
legal industry”. American Lawyer Magazine
named Simon a top 50 innovator of the last
50 years – one of only three UK lawyers to be
recognised as such.
“
Most people make the mistake of
thinking design is what it looks like.
People think it’s this veneer – that
the designers are handed this box and told,
‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think
design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels
like. Design is how it works.”– Steve Jobs
What is design thinking?
Keen observers of the zeitgeist might have
noticed a couple of words recently trending
heavily in the legal world – “design thinking”. If
it’s not already on your radar, then 2017 may
well be the year that corporate legal teams
can’t avoid it. And it’s worth listening – design
thinking can not only help you effectively
identify and solve problems but also shed light
on the wider process of how to work better.
Growing up as the son of a designer
and despite my failure to genetically
pick up the drawing skills, I found
myself accidentally introduced to the
concepts of design thinking as part
of my upbringing. Without being
conscious of the influences, I used that
background when conceiving, building
and growing Lawyers On Demand
(LOD). Over a ten year period, some of
those principles helped us take LOD
from a scribble in a notebook to a 650
lawyer business across eight offices.
As ever, The UK Financial Times was early
to the party during last year’s Innovative
Lawyers Summit with a session on applying
design thinking to legal services. Similarly,
LexisNexis have been pushing the topic
with at least three separate pieces and a
couple of seminars on design thinking in the
last 12 months. Deloitte and PwC are both
regular commentators on design thinking
and it’s a well-established topic on the legal
consultancy landscape. So what’s this all about
and how does it help in-house lawyers.
Design thinking has been a mantra in business
schools for more than a decade and that’s
probably a good place to start for a definition.
“It means taking a creative, experimental, and
user-centred approach to how we provide
legal services,” according to Margaret Hagan,
Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford
Law School’s Centre on the Legal Profession.
To pull this apart a little more, this means it’s
an approach to solving the problems of clients
(whether internal or external) centred on us as
human beings. It’s about finding solutions that
are genuinely useful rather than just coldly
analytical. It draws upon logic and reasoning
but also imagination and intuition to create a
beneficial outcome.
“Competing is no longer about creating
dominance in scale-intensive industries,
it’s about producing elegant and refined
products and services in imagination-intensive
industries. As a result, business people don’t
just need to understand designers better, they
need to become designers” – Roger Martin,
author of The Design of Business
The elements of design thinking
Design thinking offers a framework to think
differently about the problems we’re trying
to solve and come up with new solutions.
Though this is to some extent a process, it’s a
fluid rather than prescriptive one. I’d pick on
three things to highlight:
1. Framing the problem
Design thinking recognises that we often
fail not because we arrived at the wrong
solution but because we identified the wrong
problem. To avoid this, our solutions need to
be focused on the insights and needs of a
particular client – or a composite version of
multiple clients. This requires empathy to find
the right problem to address. The best creative
solutions come out of the best insights
into human behavior, coming from both
observation and conversation.
A crucial part of this process is to reframe
the problem – generating a change in
perspective. It was Albert Einstein who said, “If
I had an hour to solve a problem and my life
depended on the solution, I would spend the
first fifty-five minutes determining the proper
question to ask, for once I know the proper
question, I could solve the problem in less
than five minutes.”
2. Generating ideas
This is about solving the problem in multiple
ways. Design thinking teaches us that the
start of this is more of an attitude than a
process: in other words, be curious. There’s
something interesting about everything and
endless curiosity is often the key to ultimately
20 VOLUME 27, ISSUE 1 – AUTUMN 2017