Workshopping the way to successful interactions with the law
An interactive approach to creating positive interactions between lawyers, clients and everyone else.
Sometimes it might feel that the whole workshop thing is overdone. However, time and time again, we see the best (and happiest) results come from interactive workshops between numerous stakeholders.
Dot. workshops and design sprints are the perfect way to learn the legal design established tools, methodology and techniques. Read below to see how legal design workshops enable people within your organisation to be more efficient, deliver innovative legal solutions and embrace more collaborative and creative working styles.
Workshops x legal divisions
Legal Design begins with a change of mindset, a willingness from legal teams to make their advice accessible to those who will put it into practice. Too often, legal advice is a source of frustration for internal clients: on top of the objective constraints imposed by law, legal advice can be difficult to comprehend, hence to apply.
Legal Design can change the way internal clients see the legal division.
For example, one of our workshops enabled a legal division to redesign the interaction process with some of its sensitive internal clients, and to deliver advice in a solution-oriented way, without changing anything on the merits.
In another series of workshops, our client challenged us to inspire a global legal team and enable them to tap into their creativity resources, to produce themselves presentations at their annual seminar in a user-centric, innovative and engaging way. Because the seminar was just weeks away, and the legal division very busy, we only had 90mn per team for each of the workshops. As a result, each of the 8 teams came up with different and innovative ideas for presenting at their annual seminar, including Russian dolls, ice-breaker rhymes, quizzes, infographics, user profiles, personas, a constellation, a timeline, a “day in the life of”…- in less than 3 weeks.
“This was a great and very useful session — speaking just for myself, it was maybe the most efficient 90 mins I’ve been all week!”, APAC General Counsel.
User centricity is key to improved legal services. We use and teach research-based methodologies and tools to help legal teams work effectively and efficiently to understand the users’ goals, needs, constraints, to use this information to rethink legal processes. Delivering advice in a user-centric way will make for a swifter and better adoption of the legal solutions by internal clients. As a first step, using real-life examples or storytelling can make complex policies clear and applicable on a practical level.
Workshops x law firms
How can we enable partners to stand out in the tech innovation race and drive user-centric innovation? How might you inspire, motivate and retain millennial lawyers who no longer sacrifice everything for the sake of prestigious cases? How might you support senior associates in their partnership track, especially in building deep trust relations with their clients? We tailor our workshops to the specific needs of the Magic Circle law firms that we are assisting.
Workshops x educational institutes
We need to be creating intelligent, human-centered law graduates, who are empathetic and understand the customer viewpoint as well as the law. To quote Dot.’s advisor Margaret Hagan, “lawyers and legal people must embrace a restless imagination, and a deep day-to-day empathy for people whose lives they affect”. At law school, lawyers are taught what is the law and then taught how to apply the law from the perspective of a lawyer.
Legal design adds an additional dimension to the the law graduates mindset — it teaches students to view legal issues from the perspective of clients and consumers, a skill usually cultivated only after several years of legal experience.
Legal design gets student’s doing and tackling legal challenges by using creative problem solving strategies and techniques to create solution to legal problems. Through legal design sprints and problem-based workshops we are assisting universities and educational institutes to shape the future wave of legal thinkers with a holistic set of skills for success.
