Old Problems, New Solutions
This week’s podcast guest, Scott Rechtschaffen, has built his career on developing creative solutions to long-standing problems. “It’s just sort of in my nature to question the way and the why of how we do things. It’s sort of my outlook on life to find different ways of doing things if they’re more efficient,” he says. “I don’t question things that work, but I do question things that people just do out of habit.”
As a shareholder at Littler, Scott found himself drawn to outside-the-box solutions for day-to-day frustrations. “I just naturally gravitated to alternative ways of doing things. Some things frustrated me, particularly repetitive tasks. Back then — this is late 80s, early 90s — we were constantly drafting the same policies over again for clients, and agreements and handbooks, and I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’”
Luckily for Scott, Littler was supportive of him exploring what that better way could be. “Fortunately, I worked for — and still do — a very entrepreneurial firm that gave me a lot of latitude to try different things, and so I developed a very early stage document automation, which was at the time pretty much relying on mail merge,” Scott says. “Slowly but surely, whenever someone had a crazy idea, they’d say, ‘Let’s call Scott and see what he can do.’ I sort of developed this reputation for off-beat, crazy projects.”
“I had been taught that serving your clients isn’t just about appearing in court or writing memos or drafting letters. There are other ways to deliver legal services.” Click to tweet
One of the craziest, most off-beat of those projects? Developing a board game that evolved into an entire company.
The board game emerged as a response to a problem faced by a number of Littler’s clients: the difficulty of training their employees on workplace issues. Scott was approached by a colleague who told him, “I want you to build a board game that we can give to people to make training fun.” Scott explains, “I literally got permission to spend 2 months building a board game. It was sort of like Trivial Pursuit — you marched around the board answering questions so you could become team leader of the year.”
The game was given to Littler’s clients at their annual conference, and it was a huge success. In fact, it exploded beyond far beyond Scott’s expectations. They started selling the games for $100 per copy. Then they released a special edition with additional features that sold for $500 per copy. At one point a client built a life-size version of the game in which managers would literally move around the board, and the game was featured on an ABC News World Report. Based on the success of the game, Littler created a company called ELT (Employment Law Training) to produce the game and release additional training tools and materials that companies could use to help them navigate employment issues.
Although he was an attorney with no experience in board game design, Scott didn’t consider designing and producing a board game outside of his job description because ultimately, it was solving a client problem. “I had been taught that serving your clients isn’t just about appearing in court or writing memos or drafting letters. There are other ways to deliver legal services. If we could train managers and enhance the workforce, that was part of our job.”
For more of Scott’s creative solutions to long-standing problems for lawyers and their clients — including what Scott came up with to replace firmwide request for information emails — tune in to this week’s episode of The Modern Lawyer on iTunes, Soundcloud, or modernlawyerpodcast.com.
