🤯 From Mundane to Mind-Blowing: How Creativity Is Reshaping The Law

by Tessa Manuello
Legal Creatives Founder

Remember Ripley, the fictional character and the protagonist of the Alien film series played by American actress Sigourney Weaver, inside a robotic exoskeleton to battle the Alien creature? That was a creative concept, 30 years ago, pure science fiction, and yet now it’s becoming fact.  

In this era when tech innovation is transforming every industry, we in the law industry have to recognize that we have an incredible amount of work to do to catch up. To achieve mind blow innovations, the digital transformation should speed up exponentially, the technological adoption rate should increase dramatically, and customer experience should be placed at the center of all innovations.

The world is changing at an accelerating pace, and yet the incremental innovations we see in law will not suffice to create the change expected from lawyers by clients. In this time of seismic change, what’s the most profound change of all? I believe it’s the frame with which we see and experience reality —our everyday expectations are changing. Expectations are changing so fast, it’s actually hard to get perspective on how much they have changed.

We believe creativity is the tool that has been missing in legal practices to respond to new expectations. In fact, most innovations in law are quite mundane. Who has ever been mind-blown when it comes to innovation in law? Most, if not all, innovations are not particularly exciting, we have to admit, leaving us fairly interested in them. Even the most innovatives of us in the law know there is still a lot of work to do go beyond this.

We know the future is creative. We just need to know how to be creative. We have been investigating the potential of creativity for law, researching and analyzing how imagination can be activated to better serve the law, professionals, clients and society at large. We have constructed new concepts, built frameworks, developed tools and tested strategies that are all creative and all relevant for the legal field.

To go from mundane to mind-blow, we need lawyers to be capable of using their imagination to develop new offers, with entirely new experiences and great branding/packaging. And we need to be capable of implementing fresh ideas faster, testing them quicker, to catch up with the pace. It's important to stop seeking perfection and to allow to explore new possibilities: Finding the “perfect product”, is the product clients love.

We understand the origins of law come a long way and that may cause lawyers to look in the past even when it comes to the way law operates. Civilist countries follow Roman law, read "Roman" a word that was coined 2000+ years from now.  And the Common law countries follow the rule of the precedent. Always looking in the past for answers. When it comes to innovation, one needs to look at the future.

The future is bright, for those ready to seize the new opportunities. Together we can work at finding novel legal solutions to better respond to client's expectations and to provide prompt answers to the complexities of our newly inter-connected tech world. In fact, we have already reached some considerable successes, and we can't wait to see yours.

This creative journey to develop and implement innovative solutions requires clarity and bravery in action. This is why the Legal Creatives community exists, to support you, to celebrate you, and to encourage you to become thought-leaders, catalysts for change and influencers at your law firm, within your organization and in society.

We believe in the power of community. Join the movement, we have some exciting training programs for you, both online and in-person. We can't wait to see your innovative success and to be mind-blown by what you will be able to create.