By Anthony Metzler

Let’s be honest, a lot of people don’t trust lawyers.  Some believe this is because lawyers speak and write in ways that are calculated and self-serving. But the world is changing and lawyers need new skills to adapt to the current consumer-driven market. This perceived lack of trust between lawyers and clients could be reduced through empathy.

Empathy is an essential element to Design Thinking – an iterative, flexible process that aims to bring ideas to life with the highest consideration of what users want and need. By using Design Thinking, lawyers can enhance their product and earn the trust of their clients. Today, Design Thinking is a solution that is utilized by some firms and companies. In the future, being able to effectively utilize Design Thinking will be a trait that the next generation of lawyers must possess because clients are already starting to expect it.

Legal businesses always claim that their work is predicated off of understanding and meeting clients’ needs.   But what do clients need? According to a Law Firm Leaders Survey[1], clients need their lawyer to be more like a business partner. Transparency and control are something that consumers want because clients should know what they are getting. Offering clients this transparency is offering a view into the internal processes of a law firm.

Lawyers have gotten away with inefficiencies for a long time. Our profession justifies this by the billable hour, but the model is not sustainable in a modern context. Lawyers must now take an honest look at how they operate, meaning process improvement. Implementing process improvement is a vulnerable thing for a profession that is historically adverse to change. Legal project management has been essential in helping firms and corporate legal departments adjust and ease the change from the way things have always been done.

Legal Project Management is the application of processes, methods, knowledge, skills, and experience to achieve identified objectives. Project Management emphasizes writing out processes and employing project managers to lead teams towards their identified goals.  This oversight opens the door for pinpointing and mitigating inefficiencies. But project management is a broad plan of action for improving client and attorney trust; it takes the nuances of agile workflows for projects to have the greatest impact.

Agile workflows are a particular approach to project management where work is conducted in incremental and iterative steps called sprints. Sprints offer the ability to gain user insight while a product is being designed.  This leaves an end product that is designed around the users wants and needs. The benefit to adopting agile workflows are increased efficiency in design and a product that is more aligned with the needs of the users. Agile workflows are best for building attorney-client trust because of the communication and transparency that agile workflows offer.  Trust inherently grows when clients feel they are in control, and agile workflows create that feeling of control because of the accountability.  Agile workflows are pivotal to building this trust, but the best way that workflows become reality is through Design Thinking, and that is why attorneys must adopt Design Thinking principles.

Here are the Five Steps of Design Thinking: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. These steps are iterative and non-linear.  Empathy requires a person creating a product to step in the shoes of the person that is going to use the product.  It allows developers to set aside their preconceived notions and actually know what the user wants, and, therefore, make a superior product.

Defining the problem is the next step, where it is crucial to develop a problem statement.  Problem statements require developers to define the exact issue that the customer is facing and representing that issue through a statement. Ideate is the step where developers look at their problem and attempt to stimulate free thinking in order to expand the problem space and develop possible viable solutions.  Prototyping is the act of releasing a minimally viable product to clients to gain feedback on features that should be added or removed from the product.  Testing is the act of putting that prototype in practice, incorporating user feedback and looking for more ways to improve the product. At this stage, it is important to go back to earlier steps to improve the product further.  In Design Thinking, it can be fruitful to consider that some projects will be constantly improving and constantly in the process while other projects have clear metrics to determine completion.

Understanding how our clients are managing expectations is imperative to provide them with a service.  Because Design Thinking is by its very nature transparent, clients are less likely to be surprised when a project hits an obstacle. Design Thinking enables lawyers to become human-centered, which is after all, what the profession is all about.

[1] https://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/biglaw/22491-what-clients-want

Student Bio: Anthony W. Metzler is currently a 3L at Suffolk University Law School, concentrating in Legal Innovation and Technology and is the 2018-2019 Managing Editor of the Journal of High Technology Law. Prior to law school, Anthony received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Criminal Justice and History where he graduated with cum laude honors.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.