The Business Case of Legal Design
A revolution is happening inside the law: seminars, TED talks, hype articles, books and online schooling. Legal Design is booming at the moment.
At the same time, legal design is not an established market. Despite the hype, there is only a small number of companies actually doing legal design.
Design is good for business — but is business good for legal design? What do you have to consider when starting your legal design studio or building a legal design arm in your law firm?
We have done LD projects since 2017, and Dot. was formed in 2018. It is not a long time by any means, but in legal design field, it makes us battle-tested OGs. We love to share our insights — but we encourage you to take them with a grain of salt. Legal design is still relatively new, and we all are learning how to open the parachute while skydiving.
THE GOOD
1. It Works and Therefore There Is a Lot of Work
The business value of design and design thinking has been well established. Studies all suggest that companies who apply design methods to their strategy grow faster and are more profitable. Design thinking has been adopted by the industry giants such as Pepsico, 3M, IBM etc.
The legal services industry has enormous potential for strategic use of design. The industry is large and mature, but its key players do not consider design as a strategy.
Furthermore, we are confident that applying design methods into legal work can positively impact both business and society. When legal design is done right — by collaborating, giving end-users a voice and working iteratively — the end-products are radically better than what we started with. The projects are very inspiring, and they can spark a more considerable change inside any organization.
Nothing from our experience indicates that law is immune to design thinking, nor that the conclusions of market analyses — that strategic design results in improved revenue growth and shareholder returns — do not apply to the legal field.
Look around, and you will notice that most legal documents and processes are entirely undesigned. They are not designed for use. There is much work to do!
2. Legal Design Scales & Transcends Borders
Most of the legal work is national. Laws, professional associations of lawyers and educational institutions are nationwide, and most of legal work is done according to the national laws.
Our team is stationed in Helsinki, Alicante and New York and our clients are from all over the world. We have upcoming seminars in Transylvania, Peru and Finland. As a small studio hailing from Finland, we have been fortunate enough to work with international household-name clients.
Legal design also features several scalable elements that traditional legal services rarely have. Legal design can easily convert into toolkits, e-courses, masterclasses, packaged services and digital tools that can scale and transcend national borders. These might be very profitable in the future.
Legal design problems are felt all around the world. Of course, it is necessary to have relevant legal expertise, but it is safe to say that legal design is very international. This opens up several possibilities for forward-thinking firms.
3. Legal Design Work is Meaningful
The financial analysis and ROI calculations can sometimes overlook an important point on legal design: it is inspiring and fun.
Trying to solve wicked problems with a multidisciplinary team is very rewarding and meaningful work. That is why it attracts a lot of great talent, both from legal and design circles.
Most service businesses revolve around talent. Good individuals create disproportionate business value. The fact that legal design attracts good talent is a reliable heuristic for good business.
THE BAD & UGLY
1. The Market for Legal Design Services is Small
The blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand.
Unfortunately, this also means that there is no market.
The buyers rarely know how to buy legal design, and the legal design firms are still learning how to package and sell their services.
Selling legal design differs significantly from selling traditional legal services. We encourage you to look at how service design companies and software development companies price and sell their work.
2. Pilot Projects Get Buried
Legal design sometimes suffers from “pilotitis”, a well-known disease for service design firms.
Pilotitis means success in a pilot project but a failure to harvest the learnings from the pilot and bring them into the everyday operational culture. Instead, the pilot gets buried under other projects and initiatives.
Many clients just want to dip their toes in the water, which can impact the business. This is why you also have to pace your team and conserve energy (and budget) for the post-delivery.
The delivery is usually not the finish line!
3. Building a Working Culture That Supports Collaboration is Hard
Lawyers are trusted advisors. They are supposed to have the “right” answer. The working culture does not encourage experimentation or tolerate failure, as mistakes could be catastrophic for the client. Designers are taught to fail by prototyping, testing and iterating. Learning from failure is not just an opportunity but an imperative.
Building a culture suitable for legal design services means investing in exploration, investigation, and learning. Lawyers have been traditionally involved in risk management and mitigation; that is why it might be difficult to foster a culture of curiosity since curiosity might include failures.
Furthermore, legal design services tend to be less profitable in the short run than hourly-billed legal services. The value of legal design is measured differently from traditional legal services. It is difficult to incorporate (usually project-based) legal design services into a traditional law firm structure.
CONCLUSIONS
There is immense potential in legal design services. However, for business model innovation we have to look at what other fields of business are doing. We strongly believe that legal front-end design will be a profession in the future — a profession that will employ tens of thousands of people.
Legal design also features several scalable elements that traditional legal services rarely have. Legal design can easily convert into toolkits, e-courses, masterclasses, packaged services and digital tools that can scale and transcend national borders. These might be very profitable in the future.
If, however, you are trying to approach the building, measuring and selling legal design services similarly to traditional legal services, you are deemed to fail from the beginning. The company culture must support design services — otherwise, it will be a short-lived experiment.
Aside from business model canvases, feasibility calculations and business predictions, you can also use a simple heuristic: if you really want to do it, and your talented colleagues are interested in it, there might be a business opportunity. Do it!
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If you want to talk more about the business side of legal design, please do not hesitate to contact us. We love open discussion and consider our competitors also allies. Say hello at hello@dot.legal.
