Meet the Legal Design Lab: An Interview with fellow Jane Wong

It’s the Tuesday of Jane’s last week as Stanford’s Legal Design Lab Fellow. She enters the meeting room at Stanford Law School with a big smile. After catching up about her recent trip to Israel, we started our interview.

Design is like the orchestra conductor that helps you know which technology to play at different times.

What’s your passion, Jane?

My passion is helping our society to be more compassionate. When I was in high school, I was introduced to the civil rights movement. That’s how I became interested in social inequality and chose to study sociology at UC Berkeley. Berkeley is where I first saw so many homeless people suffering in the streets, and at the same time I noticed that many people did not seem very concerned. I became interested in how homelessness had become so serious in our country, so I wrote a research paper on the social and political factors behind it.

What got you interested in legal design?

As a first-year at Stanford Law, I took Introduction to Legal Design. I found it more engaging than my other classes, because my team was tackling a real-world problem on something meaningful. In my second year, I became more involved in the Legal Design Lab, such as participating in some workshops around court innovation. In my last year of law school, I took another legal design class, Prototyping Access to Justice.

What did you like the most about your Legal Design Fellowship?

I haven’t reflected enough on it yet, but I really liked the amount of choice I had; I chose my project for the year. The fellowship is an ideal learning experience. Unlike the usual school program where you have a lot of one-size-fits-all requirements, this fellowship gave me a lot of room to explore my interests and to dive deeply into areas that I am passionate about. It’s also exciting that the lab is committed to the public interest.

Tell me about the project that you developed this year for the fellowship.

During law school, I met a lawyer outside of Stanford who was using design to promote access to justice through her nonprofit Project Legal Link. When I applied for the fellowship, I brainstormed with this lawyer, and together we proposed that I would spend the year helping her and other legal nonprofits create a unified intake system in the Bay Area. Right now, we are doing a pilot of that project with housing law providers in Alameda County.

Which moments will you remember from this fellowship?

There were many memorable moments, but one was when I got out of my comfort zone to do public speaking. At the beginning of my fellowship year, we held a law + design summit at Stanford. At that event, Jose Torres (the previous Legal Design Fellow) was leading a breakout session, and I was helping him. In the middle, he suddenly told me he had to leave and asked me to take over. I was pretty nervous, but I followed the booklet we had for the session and it wasn’t too hard — actually, I found myself having fun.

I remember you leading it. I met you at that session.

That’s right! Over the past year, I have had more opportunities to do public speaking. I presented at our legal design lunches on campus and spoke at a legal aid innovation conference in San Francisco. Last month, I spoke at a national conference of court managers in Georgia, presenting an hour-long slide deck that I had put together. I gradually became more comfortable with public speaking. I find it fun nowadays.

What’s next? What do you want to do in the future?

My immediate plan is that I will be starting a housing attorney job in October at a legal aid nonprofit in San Jose. In the long term, I am interested in starting my own nonprofit law firm. I want to address the legal needs of low-income and middle-income Americans. I would focus on the bread and butter areas of civil law, like family, housing, consumer, and immigration.

Your idea of a nonprofit law firm is interesting. How do you think law firms could be more innovative?

The legal industry is stuck in an old era, in an old way of thinking. Many things that law firms currently do are due to inertia. At the same time, legal organizations can easily become overwhelmed by the array of “innovations” out there. I like how design thinking is a problem-solving method to create solutions and test them in the real world. In that way, design thinking is action-oriented. Design is like the orchestra conductor that helps you know which technology to play at different times.

More specifically, Margaret Hagan has promoted the concept of user-centered design, one that involves the user at every step. I’ve come to see that this type of participatory design is a good way for organizations to know how to tackle a specific problem. It is easy to be overwhelmed without it.

How do you see legal design fitting into the larger picture of law practice today?

We know design has permeated industries beyond tech and digital services. To their credit, some law firms and government agencies adopted design thinking some time ago. While I haven’t measured the adoption rate of design thinking in the legal sector, I see more and more picking up on the idea. It depends a lot on the type of legal organization we’re talking about, and how flexible the culture is.

What advice would you give to a current law student?

My biggest piece of advice is, “Don’t do something just because everyone else is doing it!”

There is a strong herd mentality and a lot of fear among law students that terrible things will happen if you don’t do x, y, or z. I’ve noticed that this fear is strongest among students who come straight through college. I recommend that students seek out the people who inspire them in their particular areas of interest and to pick up their cues from these role models.

Another tendency of law students is to put off the things they really want to do for years and years. There is a tendency in law school to feel like you’re locked into a series of steps that consume your whole life, but at the end of the day, much of it could be a waste of time. Feed your soul now! Go after your personal interests, even if the benefit to your legal career is not obvious.

What that looked like for me during 1L was making time for my health, visiting my family, and meeting people at Stanford outside of the law school. For example, I joined Power2Act, a Stanford club that advocates for students with disabilities. I met graduate students from other departments at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I took a beginning voice class at the Music Department. I went to a Cuban dance club, where I learned that salsa can be done in a circle! I also went on dates and got married in my third year.

To be clear, I’m not saying that everyone needs to do these particular things. I’m just saying that everyone should think for themselves about what would make their three years of law school meaningful, and make time for that. You’ll thank yourself later.

For the last part of the conversation, I asked Jane to tell me the first word that came to her mind when I said the following words:

Homelessness — “Passion”

Stanford Law School — “Important”

d.School — “Fun!”

Design — “Thinking”