Design Thinking and Lawyers

I am going to start by saying that I am not trained in "Design Thinking" or any of its sub or related fields. I'm not going to spend a lot of time giving backstory on Design Thinking. For that, go check out the Stanford d.school and/or the work of Margaret Hagen at Stanford's Legal Design Lab. So, with the "what this isn't" out of the way...

I believe that one of the most underrated skills of a lawyer is problem solving. Clients don't often think of lawyers as "problem solvers." We are more often thought of as "technicians" or, in other words, people who act at the instruction of the client.

Indeed, many clients dread lawyers because we aren't seen as problem solvers at all, but problem causers. Lawyers have a reputation for saying "no, you can't do that because laws x, y, and z say it's illegal." As a result, clients are reluctant to come to lawyers in the first place. I'm not saying I'm immune to this problem [hands over ears "lalalalalalalalala"], but I am saying that lawyers can and should be better.

Moreover, We can have a relatively long discussion about why lawyers-as-technician is a dead business model, but the short of it is that no-longer-that-advanced-technology will soon be doing the "technician" piece of being a lawyer. Advances in technology such as artificial intelligence, smart contracting, blockchain, not to mention industry pressures from rapidly increasing innovation cycles will put pressure on lawyers to modularize, standardize, and mechanize the drafting of contracts and other transactional documents.

There will be (already is) increased pressure on lawyers to be problem solvers. To work with clients to understand facts (products and businesses processes), the analyze "the law" (regulatory, case law, whatever), and to work with clients to align appropriately. Once this framework is in place, our robot overlords will take it from there and draft the contracts that define the way forward.

Thus, lawyers have a need for an arsenal of tools to engage in problem solving. Law school, the analysis of fact and conclusion of law, is one such tool. The business world has many such tools - Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Six Sigma, just to name three. As business lawyers we will need to be conversant in these business tools, not just our legal tools.