We sent our Grads to Design School and this is what we learnt (Part 1)

Most traditional law firms are not very innovative. As I explain in my article, "10 things law firms are saying that kill innovation", there are a myriad of reasons that explain why this is the case.  Some of those reasons are structural, some are cultural and some are due to the personalities that you find in law firms. Whatever the reason, traditional law firms are struggling to innovate and adjust to the disruption that is starting to impact the legal sector.

The Maddocks Innovation Challenge

Given that these disruptive forces and the pace of change are only going to increase, traditional law firms need to devise ways to become more innovative – to re-engineer a static cultural environment into one that encourages and supports innovation. At Maddocks, we are embracing these challenges and responding to them in a number of different ways. Last year, our Executive Committee declared 2016 as the “Year of Thinking Differently” and that philosophy has inspired a number of different initiatives at every level of the firm, including our recent ‘Innovation Challenge’ involving all of the firm’s graduates and first years. 

Last year, our Executive Committee declared 2016 as the “Year of Thinking Differently” and that philosophy has inspired a number of different initiatives at every level of the firm, including our recent ‘Innovation Challenge’ involving all of the firm’s graduates and first years.

The Innovation Challenge required the firm’s graduates and first years to “solve” 8 issues faced by the firm using design thinking methods. Design thinking was developed by d.school at Stanford University as an innovation methodology combining creative and analytical approaches and collaboration across different disciplines. According to the d.school website, the design thinking process ‘draws on methods from engineering and design, and combines them with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world’.  

Our 40 or so participants in the Innovation Challenge were given a 2 day immersive, practical introduction to the design thinking methodology and then presented with the issues they were being asked to solve.  

What did our the participants say about it?

Having just completed the 2 day introduction, I was curious to find out what our innovators had learnt and what they thought about design thinking. The participants reported that:

• Moving off-site to a fun and creative environment helped set the stage for the days’ activities.
• Even after only a short period of working in a traditional law firm environment, they found “thinking outside the box” to be much more difficult and taxing than expected. 
• Despite their lack of familiarity with innovation, by starting with a customer profile that they developed and then examining how that hypothetical customer felt about the issue that they had been given (a process known as design empathy), they were able to come up with new ideas and solutions.
• The design thinking methodology of very short time frames for discussion also allowed our participants to question and challenge each other’s ideas in a way that wasn’t threatening. They were able to shrug off concerns about politeness and being careful and considerate of each other’s feelings (which they found wasted quite a bit of time) and instead work through, evaluate and eliminate a lot of ideas quite quickly.
• The creative design toolkit (including workshopping, storyboards and prototypes) helped the participants develop and refine their initial ideas in the short periods of time allocated to them.

What comes next?

The participants in the Innovation Challenge now have 8 weeks to refine their ideas before presenting them "Shark Tank" style to our innovation committee for consideration for further investment by the firm. Each group will be mentored by a member of our Innovation Strategic Group to assist them in developing their ideas. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article to see how our Innovation Challenge played out.