Weeknote 1 | 2024

I wrote a poem once that included the line “all I am is questions”, and this is how I feel coming into the programme. But I think that’s OK; questions are the starting point for any challenge.

Why I’m Here

I come from a legal background, but my work in pro bono legal services has always been guided by human-centred design (thanks to the folks at the NuLawLab at Northeastern University).

These days I am not practising law, but I am engaged in the delivery of free legal services to clients in need with LawWorks. And even so, design and creativity are at the forefront of any problem I approach.

I’ve been with LawWorks for almost a year as Head of Digital (and more recently Head of Clinics), and in that time I’ve been picking up what morsels of knowledge I can from the Tech for Good sector (particularly out of Scotland). And from CAST and Third Sector Lab, I’ve learned about the idea of open working.

Transparency and authenticity, which are necessary for open working, align with access to justice, the mission to which myself and my colleagues are committed. In law, injustice can be found in the substance of law or in the procedure of law. So it is in work; how we do the work is as important as what work we do. I’m hoping this programme can help me improve the ‘how’, which in turn will benefit the ‘what’.

What I’m Doing

In response to decreasing capacity and funds, I am in the process of re-envisioning how the LawWorks Clinics Network is operated and delivered. LawWorks provides infrastructural support to over 300 independent legal clinics across England & Wales. The resulting improvements in their operations better serve their client communities.

Despite the spread of our work, our team is small. Full of know-how and connected across the pro bono landscape, to be sure, but small. And I need to find ways to leverage the capabilities we have to increase our impact without duplication or overwhelm.

So, this is where open working comes in. Two major actions I want to accomplish are 1) establishing an internal framework for evaluating the social value of what our team does and 2) memorialising our institutional knowledge so that it can be shared, scaled, improved, automated, etc.

For both of these efforts, open working seems like a powerful, real-time process for digging into the nitty gritty of the day-to-day work and pulling out data. And as Head of Digital, I am very interested in how we can then use that data on behalf of our funders, our clinics, our partners, and the clients we are all working so hard to help.

My Reservations

The lawyer side of me balks a bit at open working. Lawyer-client confidentiality and evidentiary privilege are ethical and legal concepts that have guided a lot of how I communicate. In the charity sector with limited funds, we are all trying to survive while still creating good workspaces with good compensation.

• Does our value, what we have to offer to funders and other supporters, diminish the more widely available our knowledge becomes?
• How do I maintain a commitment to transparency and authenticity without losing the value of what we do?
• And when you add re-use to the picture, does that diminish value further? Or does it actually increase?

At a high-level view I am pretty committed to the idea that greater transparency across industry can only be a good thing. And with that, my first guess as to the answer to my questions is that the utility of open working depends on how you do it, or how you communicate with your audience.

I’m excited to dive deeper into this process. Shout out to Robyn Barclay and Ross McCulloch for putting this all together!