4 Legal design thinking mindsets for lawyers: Definitions, Uses and Benefits

The four design thinking mindsets for lawyers are collaboration, creativity, simplicity, and customer experience. Design thinking mindsets for lawyers involve a customer-centric approach to providing legal services. Lawyers are unable to change the law, but lawyers are able to change how legal services are provided and how complex legal information is communicated so the user understands the information.

Design thinking for lawyers doesn’t mean lawyers unlearn the law. Embracing a legal design thinking mindset requires lawyers to be open-minded and receptive to new ideas and perspectives. Lawyers are still lawyers, and the law is still the law, but lawyers use a design thinking mindset. That’s all.

Traditional lawyering is fiercely competitive and secretive, and lawyers are burning out. Adopting a new designer mindset allows lawyers to deliver legal services meaningfully, build sustainable client bases, improve work-life balance, and transform the industry.

What is a design thinking mindset for lawyers?

Design thinking for lawyers means thinking about a problem from a human perspective rather than a lawyer’s perspective. Lawyers are able to change how legal services are delivered using design thinking. Lawyers are able to communicate complex legal information in ways most suitable for the user by applying design thinking. 

Moving from a lawyer mindset to a design thinking lawyer requires four mindset shifts.

What are the 4 design thinking mindsets for lawyers

The four design thinking mindsets for lawyers are collaboration, creativity, simplicity, and customer experience.

1. Collaboration

Collaboration occurs when a group of people with diverse backgrounds and different expertise work together to create a desired solution. The design thinking mindset welcomes learning from others and taking time to discuss issues. Design thinking celebrates different backgrounds and experiences and acknowledges people don’t have all the answers. Design thinking welcomes ideas and suggestions to improve products and service delivery. Lawyers with a design mindset embrace collaboration because a collection of minds delivers the best solutions for the end user.

2. Creativity

Creativity uses the right side of the brain, where intuition and imagination live, rather than the right or analytical side, where traditional lawyer work lies. Creativity is a way of thinking: looking at alternatives and exploring new solutions.

The legal design mindset introduces the right brain into lawyers’ thinking to find the real problem and deliver the best solution. Creativity encourages idle time, where brains get rest, get curious, and allow more conscious thinking. The creativity mindset moves lawyers from busy perfectionists to creative experimenters.

Daniel Pink explains creativity in the book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Right-brain abilities are listed below.

• Design and not only function.
• Story and not only argument.
• Symphony and not only focus.
• Empathy and not only logic.
• Play and not only seriousness.
• Meaning and not only accumulation.

3. Simplicity

Simplicity in design thinking means making complex information simple to understand. Simplicity isn’t “dumbing down the law.” Simplicity is delivering information to users in easy-to-understand ways using visualization, plain language, and layering, for example. 

Lawyers write documents using language non-lawyers are unable to understand. The emphasis is on delivering the message the lawyer wants to impart. Scant regard is made about the user’s state of mind, literacy, or comprehension level. Precedent documents do nothing to alleviate this. 

Taking time to understand the user and creating information for their level of knowledge allows lawyers to stop traditional lawyer-focused communication to user-centric legal experiences clients understand.

Businesses have found ways to present information about offerings in easy-to-understand ways, and the touchpoints reinforce customer trust. The legal industry is no different. Simplicity gives users agency over their lives through simple legal communication that empowers them to make better decisions.

4. Customer experience

The customer experience mindset shift is intentional thinking about how you’re solving the problem rather than doing what has always been done. 

Ask who the customer is. Ask what the customer needs and what the customer needs to achieve the outcome. The customer experience means asking how and where the customer wants to be served and how lawyers are able to make the experience of the law more accessible. 

Customer experience is different from customer service. The in-house or law firm customer experience is the collection of touchpoints with the provider as they move through their journey with you. Client experience touchpoints bring feelings of relief and trust rather than bottlenecks and frustrations.

Customer experience or customer-centricity is understanding:

• The experience of customers using the product or service.
• The user interface of law, legal products, services, and information: Is it accessible, usable, and helpful to the customer?

What is the Traditional Lawyer Mindset?

The traditional legal mindset means the road to success is competing and withholding.

Lawyers are clever people. Lawyers study hard to be accepted to law school or university. Lawyers study harder to graduate, pass the bar exam, or get admitted to the Register of Solicitors and Barristers. Lawyers are taught to compete through their introduction to the legal system. The competition amplifies when lawyers are applying for roles in-house role or big law firm. 

Lawyering is a competitive environment with little room for trust. Lawyers learn to compete for assignments, try to one-up colleagues, sit on valuable information, and even take credit for work done by others. The value of lawyers is measured in billable hours, so lawyers work alone. Traditional lawyer work leaves no room for collaboration or asking for advice. The legal system perpetuates the mindset, and it’s a lonely, soul-sapping mindset.

Lawyers teach lawyers to replicate the “lawyer way.” Attorneys and solicitors believe the “lawyer way” is the only way. Innovation, change, and growth don’t apply to lawyers because the legal profession is different. 

I call it the snowflake syndrome, resulting in an echo chamber. Lawyers talk lawyerly, continuing to do what they’ve always done, unable to see and adapt any fresh ideas from other industries.

Lawyers love solving legal problems and helping people and businesses meet their life and business goals. And yet, lawyers want to leave the law because of the traditional lawyer mindset.

The problem is not the law, and it’s not you. The problem is how the law is delivered, the fixed legal mindset, and the traditional business model of commoditized work. 

The 4 design mindsets for lawyers are able to change this.

What is a mindset?

A mindset is the beliefs, values, notions, outlook, and attitudes that shape beliefs about self, worldview, and how an individual responds to situations. Individuals with a fixed mindset view intelligence as static, are unwilling to tackle new challenges, and give up easily. Lawyers with fixed mindsets stay in the comfort zone, fear failure, and prefer to perform legal work as it has always been done.

Individuals with a growth mindset are curious, open to challenges, learn from failure, and use grit, perseverance, and determination to learn new skills.  Lawyers with growth mindsets are curious about new ways to deliver legal services and ready to shift their mindset from traditional lawyers to design-thinking lawyers who use legal design.

Legal design is transformative. Legal design and design thinking offer meaning to legal work, and your users receive revolutionary legal practice. Legal design mindsets allow lawyers the freedom of an open mind and embrace curiosity, which is liberating. 

For me, it was life-changing.

Why is a design thinking mindset fundamental to lawyers and legal design?

A design thinking mindset is fundamental to legal design because legal design is the intersection of how lawyers communicate complex information meaningfully and effectively. Legal design thinking is a mindset that puts humans at the forefront of every interaction. The legal design thinking mindset starts with empathy and digs deep to understand end-users needs through collaboration, simplicity, creativity, and customer-centricity.

Legal design is about allowing more people to access the law. Design-led lawyers challenge how lawyers look at problems and communicate with customers. Legal design shatters the mystery of the legal system. Legal design looks for alternatives to the billable hour model and permits lawyers to practice empathy, gather data, and create. Legal design allows lawyers to use visualization and collaboration to build effective customer-centric outcomes. Lawyers with design-thinking mindsets take time to understand the customer and deliver solutions each user can comprehend and act on. Design-minded lawyers bring humanity, dignity, and accessibility to law.

How to use design-thinking lawyer mindset

To use a design-thinking lawyer mindset, follow the steps below.

Embrace Multidisciplinary Collaboration

Lawyers work alone and rarely invite non-lawyers to collaborate and solve legal problems.

Design thinking is founded on empathy, collaboration, and information sharing. Lawyers work as solo competitors, striving to rise to the top alone. The collaboration mindset is crucial in legal design. Legal design allows us to create cultures where lawyers are free to collaborate, vent, explore, and produce new outcomes for their users (and meaningful work for the lawyers, too).

Collaboration is challenging for lawyers, especially specialists seen as the go-to expert or the solo competitor. Learning to shift the mindset from “achieving alone” to being one who supplements the skills of others takes time. Lawyers struggle to shift from traditional contracting, but collaboration means contracts are presented best for the user because people with different perspectives bring new viewpoints to the table and share ideas. The result is something one person could not achieve alone. Collaboration means lawyers are able to achieve much more. 

A collaborative environment embraces diversity and inclusion and values humans who might otherwise be “too messy,” “too slow,” “too loud,” or “too quiet.” Collaboration requires people from different disciplines to add to the discussion.

• Build an environment of trust.

Lawyers need an environment where trying new things without fear of recrimination is encouraged. Build this experimental time into the schedule. Let lawyers and other teams share, talk, and get to know each other. Jump in and participate. It’s fun. 

Sure, we have drinks on a Friday afternoon, but it’s the lawyerly way to end a long working week.

Leaders are able to create safe places for dialogue and building trust. Safe places involve an investment in time and money, but the mindset shift happens when the team feels safe to open up and seek input from colleagues.

You might not believe me, but I’m amazed by the lawyers at every workshop I teach at Lawyers Design School.

The lawyers want to open up and share their experiences and their frustrations. They are eager to discuss things they want to do and where they see opportunities for change. Often, the most valuable takeaway is the chance to have meaningful conversations about your work with your team.

As you get going, recognize that collaboration and the inevitable inefficiencies are important, even if nothing tangible comes out. Transformation lies in the small “aha” moments in between the work, and little by little, it changes everything. This is a long game.

• Offer new opportunities for learning to encourage a collaboration mindset.

Allow the team to experience new learning. Transformation requires quality fuel for the brain. The workshops at The Lawyers Design School are a great way to start. Design thinking in law is about innovation and finding better ways to share complicated legal information in new ways. Lawyers have big brains, but they’re working alone. Imagine the possibilities for the team, the business, and the customers if collaboration harnessed the collective brainpower.

• Embed collaboration in work processes.

Conduct user/client interviews and meetings in pairs because no two people hear the same story the same way. Record the interview and have the second person listen if budget is an issue. Two unique perspectives and thought processes mean the listeners focus on different parts of the story. The conclusions will be different. Get the participants to research ways to solve the user problem and deliver the legal information the way they think the user will digest most easily. Working together, the breadth of ideas and potential solutions grows.

Involve the team to look at the ideas because it brings more perspectives and questions. Grab Post-it notes and start scribbling on the whiteboard, sprinkling the whiteboard with Post-its as you work together to find the best way to deliver your legal services to the user.

Collaboration is not an all-day job. Sharing openly is a wonderful benefit of collaboration. Creativity flows when working as a group because one person is not pressured to perform.

Collaboration unearths a firm idea. Make it, test it, scrap it if it doesn’t work, and try the next one.

Start by talking to your colleagues if that feels too much. Pick up the phone or walk to their office and ask their advice. Share a problem and see if they are able to help. Maybe tomorrow they’ll do the same with you. It’s how it starts.

Embrace Creativity

Embracing creativity is the mindset shift from perfectionism and busyness to creativity, experimentation, and innovation. 

Creativity is transformational in law because it is about doing less, allowing idle time for your brain. Making white space for new ideas to pop in. The world is overwhelmed with busyness and exhaustion, and lawyers who dare to do less bring profound change.

The hidden treasures often lie in plain sight, the everyday things no one bothers to notice.

Yet, to get ideas about everyday little things, you must strengthen your ability to notice them. Slow down, listen, and observe.

The creativity mindset and legal design challenge the routines and the default and replace them with creativity, curiosity, and experimentation. Leave perfectionism and fear of failure at the door.

As an expert, you are able to constantly develop your ability to solve more challenging problems and put all your free capacity into development.

Your creative mindset is at the core of your humanity, yet you need to make room for it. No magic tricks are required. 

• Make time for creativity.

To tap into your creativity, you must free your capacity and create space for it. As a leader, this means giving your team some idle time and mental white space. Idle time takes courage and deliberate unlearning of an unhealthy work culture that rewards busyness. What appears unproductive is necessary to make room for creativity and innovation.

Creativity requires scheduling time for white space and then relaxing, refueling, reflecting, and coming up for air. The creative mindset and idle time feel weird, and the temptation to send emails or return calls or other routine things is tempting. Do not do this.

Look at your calendar at work and home and build time for white space. Never, ever give it up. (You’ll thank me for it later.) Try walking without a podcast in your ears, meditating, or simply learning to live with your thoughts. Be kind to yourself. This takes time.

• Don’t force creativity.

Be gentle with your creative self. Be mindful of your feedback and watch for criticism originating in fear. Build on the positives and replace “yes, but” with “yes, and.”

Create an atmosphere of psychological safety to explore new things. Creativity is sensitive and needs positivity, kindness, and care rather than punishment and criticism. Creativity and ideation require action, yet you can’t force them.

Dare to be a novice, even a bad one, and test your limits. Success will be measured by how you are able to tolerate not knowing, the uncertainty, and finding ways to overcome it.

Creativity starts with curiosity. Look around. Look at the most mundane things in your office or on the way to work. Do they look different? Take time with this, and practice observing things you normally don’t. 

• Practice Being the Creative Problem Solver vs the Routine Expert

Imagine a problem has landed on your desk.

Lawyers look at a problem and give it scant thought. The routine expert relies on the subconscious mind, sticking to a process. Going through the motions, quickly analyzing it, and delivering an outcome. 

Another lawyer might invest more cognitive or right-brain thinking in the problem. The cognitive lawyer questions or challenges themselves to think about a better solution and may not find it.

Lawyers using design thinking mindsets use their right brain and empathy to deeply understand the user’s real problem. Then, generate many (bad) ideas while collaborating with different people.

Creative expertise creates new knowledge and directs actions and resources for creative problem-solving. It’s about novelty, combining ingredients in unexpected ways. Looking at familiar things and seeing them in a new way.

Think about the last time you saw a new invention that looked obvious. It took someone to look at a problem with fresh eyes to create a better way to do the same thing. It’s creativity in action.

We run on autopilot most of the time, almost blindfolded. Our daily routines are so entrenched that we go through the motions without much effort or energy. Our brains like to conserve our energy and don’t encourage exploration. We pay no attention to the little things.

We need creativity in the chaos of life.

“As good as excellent performance in routine projects may feel as lawyers, it won’t develop your creative skills nor future proof your legal career.”

• Practice Being the Learner vs Being the Knower

Being the learner is challenging for lawyers.

The law is about knowledge and having all the answers. People respect lawyers, view lawyers as experts, and seek expert advice.

Are you still an expert if you say you don’t know the answer? Yes, you are, and you should.

Apply legal design thinking means you need more than your existing knowledge. Design thinking means challenging what you already know and asking new questions. You become the learner.

Design thinking (and the best innovations) is at the fore here. It’s finding questions that have yet to be asked.

You’re a better expert when you admit you don’t know everything. It frees you up to find new creative solutions.

• Practice Experimental Prototyping vs Perfectionism

Lawyers want to be perfect at everything. There’s no room for failure or mistakes. Failure is too costly to billable hours and ego.

Lawyers are harsh on themselves. We don’t allow the slightest missteps. We need to be in control. And if we, at some point, make mistakes (as everyone does), our inner critic goes crazy.

Design in action involves a lot of experimentation and trial and error. To make and learn from mistakes.

From a lawyer’s perspective, it sounds wild.

Test solutions as early as possible, even if you know you don’t have the solution yet—experiment often and iterate.

Legal design encourages you to start somewhere and see what happens. Once you start, you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Legal design invites you to trust the process.

The design mindset is a new approach to failure. Failure does not exist, only experiments and learning from them. Failure is part of the process because not all experiments work.

Using legal design to solve problems takes a weight off because there’s no need for ready-made answers, and you’ll be more successful when you embark on a journey with an open mind.

• Practice Optimism vs Cynicism 

Cynical and critical voices are everywhere in the legal space. I hear it every day. Any new solution or idea can’t work because things don’t work that way. The idea works somewhere, but not for lawyers. Lawyers are different. Lawyers are special.

Listen carefully because this is fear speaking. Cynicism and criticism protect the critic and allow her to stay in her subconscious.

The designer mindset is an optimistic one that embraces the possibility of finding the right solution to the most challenging problems.

Everyone has the innate skills to find the answer. It just takes practice.

Start simplifying legal communication

The best way to start simplifying is to look at the communication through the user’s eyes. The user is on a journey when they receive legal communication. Start asking, “What information does the user need at each point of time?”

Making it easy for users means drip-feeding the information at the appropriate time in their journey. Avoid bombarding the user information. 

• Use plain language

Using plain language in legal communication is essential to simplification work. Think about the customer. Plain language simplifies legal communication.

• Alter the amount of information presented

Perform a risk analysis before reducing and changing information. Risk assessments demonstrate how much unnecessary information is included in legal documents.  

“Don’t pour information with a bucket if the recipient only has a teaspoon. You need to adapt your communication to match with the recipient’s spoon size.”

The following approaches take more time because of the risk analysis but are extremely effective as a stand-alone or combined approach.

• Reducing or reorganizing the information

Remove what is unnecessary or difficult to understand. Provide a high-level overview of the information explained in a human-friendly and approachable way and complement the overview with a more detailed document. Present the one key piece of information the user needs to know, followed by a simple yet complete communication on the issue.

• Increasing the education

Increase the length of the communication by adding educational elements, for example, user-friendly “how-to’s,” “explainers,” or  “FAQs.” 

• Alternative versions using visualizations

Visualization is useful in legal design because lawyers are able to convey different information to the recipient instead of writing or speaking. With visualization, you can bring abstract content into a shareable and experiential form.

Adding visual aids to text and applying a simplification mindset for visual law means users are able to skim the document for relevant information.

• Start again

Lawyers with a design thinking mindset quickly see a document is incomprehensible. Take the document apart piece by piece, establish its purpose (if any), and redesign it.

Start with the customer experience and customer-centricity

The customer experience is the priority. Start framing every action to the customer’s situation and place in life. Start using your designer mindset and empathy to understand the real problem your customer needs to solve instead of looking at everything like a lawyer.  The human connection will spark your designer mindset, and by applying creativity, you’ll approach your problem-solving with a different perspective.

The distinction between traditional lawyering and client-centric lawyering was explained brilliantly by Rachael Adranly in the article, How Design Taught Me To Be a Human-Centered Lawyer. The traditional lawyer mindset means focusing on the following.

• How to make your case
• How to come up with winning arguments
• What are the billing hours?
• How to close the most deals using whatever means possible

The client-centric mindset focuses on the following.

• How your clients feel about how you handle the case
• How you interact with the lawyer on the other side
• What kind of experience you provide to your client or a colleague

It was a revelation for Rachael when a customer-centric approach meant she could do her job as a lawyer well AND care about the experience of the people she affected. Once it became about humans and not transactions, the world shifted on its axis. It can for you, too.

• Plot a customer journey map

Gathering the team and charting a customer journey map is an excellent way to identify frustrations and bottlenecks in a customer experience. A customer journey map documents every potential customer interaction with a legal organization during a project.

The customer experience is about how your customer feels about how you went about solving their problem. Are you easy to access and communicate with them often? Are they able to trust you? How do you build trust?

Customers want comfort in knowing lawyers are available for them and they can trust you. They want it to be easy. And if these things are critical for customers, they are fundamental for you. 

A Lawyerist article on the Customer Experience in Law shares some enlightening statistics on customer touchpoints.

• A maximum of 10% of callers to a law firm will get to speak to a lawyer.
• More than 40% of potential customers who leave a message or complete an online form receive a reply within 3 or 4 days.
• 11% of callers to law firms will hang up within 10 seconds in frustration about not being able to speak to the person they ask for by name.

Talk to your customers because they are a gold mine. Stop trying to think like a customer. Ask them.
Step into a customer’s shoes by trying out services. Have you personally experienced the service customers are receiving? Go through every touchpoint your customer does from the beginning until the end and see how it feels.

What are the benefits of design thinking in law?

The benefits of design thinking in law are commercial and personal and protect the future of law. Empowered clients are repeat clients and deliver repeat business. Law firms and in-house teams using design thinking create a point of difference and are employers of choice. Innovative lawyers are able to develop new products and services. Curious lawyers are able to determine their role in the legal system, and a design thinking approach helps stop lawyers from leaving the law and ensures Gen Z is able to make the difference their generation expects.

Design thinking builds a client base

Legal design thinking builds a client base and referral business when lawyers do the following.

• Understanding the user’s personal needs and the context to present the information.
• Thinking about the level of understanding the user has about the issue and the level of comprehension.
• Being sensitive to the user’s state of mind and using empathetic language and tone.

Users who receive understandable legal information are able to move forward with clarity, which builds trust. Creating documents or services that motivate the user to engage with them and make educated decisions goes a long way towards making your user feel seen rather than a file with a client number.

Design Thinking is NextGen Legal

Gen Z lawyers and consumers are here. Gen Z is the people born after 1995. The oldest is 28, working, studying, voting, and buying. Born in the full internet era, smartphones, the digital economy, and technology are normal for Gen Z. Gen Z thinks productizing services and automating the routine is part of life.

Older lawyers think the internet era and the digital economy are innovative. Gen Z expect it.

Studies have found Gen Z is inclusive, strives for the truth, and believes in the innate power of dialogue over confrontation. Gen Z harnesses technology to make informed purchasing decisions and align themselves with brands that walk their talk. These folks are true to themselves and the community.

Why does a legal design mindset matter to Gen Z?

Gen Z represents the consumers and potential legal practitioners who will make or break the legal system.

In 2021, the United States Law School Admission Council noted law school admissions increased by almost 13% in the fall intake. The number of applicants in the highest band of admission scores doubled scores in 2020. The Council noted domestic issues like the death of George Floyd and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg propelled discussion about the rule of law and the role lawyers play in producing a more equitable society. The deaths contributed to the increase in admissions, according to a Reuters article titled Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble in 2021. 

Gen Z wants to make a difference and Gen Z has design mindsets.

We now have law students born in the “service on demand” era, actively seeking the truth, and dialogue, inclusion, and equity. How will they cope with the secretive, institutional ways of law, as either lawyers or consumers?

Lawyers need Gen Z lawyers who are able to make a difference. Lawyers are leaving the law. Gen Z has a design mindset already, and if they leave the law, who will do the lawyering?