A Conversation on Legal Service Design Thinking with Jason Moyse

Jason Moyse is a principal at Law Made. He has a growing interest in "design thinking" for legal businesses, and I recently spoke with him about that topic.

David: Can you tell us what legal service design thinking means applied to legal, and is any different than design thinking?

Jason: Even this morning, there's been quite a bit of discussion on social media on that very topic, because we're starting to see the label “legal service design thinking” in many different avenues. In truth, it is a handle of convenience. What's happening is that service design thinking is coming into legal.

David: So what's a simple way to explain what we're talking about... what is this exactly?

Jason: It's about making a service more usable, more desirable—and in many cases—more efficient. Where would we see that in a corporate legal department? Maybe in the ways they interact with their business clients or the way that the corporate legal department interacts with their business partners.

It might simply focus on rethinking a touchpoint that others have with legal through something other than sending an email or a phone call. It might involve a process to rethink the way that their output is delivered.This is where lawyers are often guilty of delivering answers to questions with a text narrative that is dense and long. But they could be using data visualization or just straight up images to make the same point in a more compelling way.

A lot of design thinking is about providing a better experience for their end user who doesn't speak legal.

David: Where do legal design thinkers come from? Are there enough of them?

Jason: Well, all over… and no.

The background is that this is nothing new, in the sense that this discipline exists in other industries. The background of true service design thinking practitioners is absolutely varied. That's part of what makes it exciting. It really does take someone who is ready, willing, and able to work in multidisciplinary environments.

The best design thinkers tend to be visual, and most lawyers are textual. They're a bit trapped in the narrative. They want to write and they want to read. So that's why lawyers aren't naturally service design thinkers.

David: So design thinkers are not coming from legal. Once upon a time, there were 200 major law firms and they all needed to hire Microsoft engineers to move them from now to next because once upon a time, major law firms didn't use Microsoft; they used Novell and WordPerfect. And where did all those people came from? They came from banking, brokerage, financial services, manufacturing, consumer products. They came from everywhere. And so where is this expertise coming from? It's coming from everywhere. Right?

Jason: That’s true. And the other thing that's happening is that the more enlightened firms are transforming their IT departments to get away from “keep the lights on” to client solution-enabled... way beyond just we take care of the email and information security. They actually build experiences either for practice management or external facing for the purpose of value creation.

Some places, they’re just not enlightened yet, and they don’t treat this new breed of talent the way they should be treated.

David: So we have new talent, with new skills, who can provide a much-needed outside perspective… if organizations can recognize the value they bring. Thank you, Jason! This is going to be very interesting.