🚀 What are the outcomes of Legal Design Sprints & Workshops

By Tessa Manuello

What are the outcomes of legal design sprints? How these innovation sprints help lawyers and law students in their careers? Why participating in a sprint is no longer an option but a necessity? These are questions I receive all the time when it comes to Legal Design Sprints. 

So I decided to describe some of the results participants get by taking a Legal Design sprint with us. By the same token, I will outline some principles I use whenever I organize innovation sprints for my students that are fun and productive. 

To illustrate such outcomes, I will use some testimonials from both the masterclasses and sprints that introduced the legal community to hands-on experiences in innovation, design and creativity.

Prototyping contractual solutions at the Legal Design sprint in London, UK.

1. Business today is all about the user experience (UX).

Reimagining the customer's journey in the legal field is crucial to stay relevant and to succeed in this increasingly competitive market. This is central to our mission at Legal Creatives. This is why our training programs and sprints are made to help participants tap into their creative potential to improve or reimagine the legal user experience (LUX). 

To achieve that, at Legal Creatives, we have created a Legal UX canvas made to build incredibly attractive legal products and services. We use this matrix for every Masterclass and Sprint we facilitate, and it has proven to be very powerful for participants. This matrix is available on demand. So, go ahead and write to me at [email protected] to receive your copy! 

Some of the most striking and most successful outcomes participants obtained from Legal Creatives Sprints and Workshops include redesigning the content for contracts to make it visually more attractive and easier to understand for the clients and end users; rethinking the format for contracts to make it more accessible to the end-users; drafting privacy policies in plain language with more clarity as to the data being collected and used; and revisiting insurance claims forms to accelerate the process of handling claims and to foster negotiations instead of litigation. 

“No doubt the coolest course I took in 2019. The teaching methodology Legal Creatives is different from everything we are used to in the legal environment.” - Raphael Di Tommaso, Senior Internet & Privacy  Lawyer (Brazil)

Facilitating a Legal Creatives Course on Privacy by Design with Marcel Leonardi, Internet law professor and lawyer, Privacy and data protection expert. PhD (SJD), Postdoc. CIPP/E, CIPP/US, Xoogler.  

2. Use Legal Design to improve existing legal offers, value propositions and business models with a focus on digitalization of legal services.

Any sprint or workshop should be designed to achieve maximum outcomes  for participants and sometimes this means improving what already exists. This can be particularly relevant for private sprints and workshops, where in-house teams get to solve a pre-determined challenge defined by the stakeholders in the law firm or the legal department. Whenever participants work on improving existing services, products and systems, we first teach participants the fundamentals of the Legal UX matrix by Legal Creatives.

Doing so, we show examples of how participants can improve existing by … (1) increasing costs predictability with new business models and scalable offers; (2) enhancing process clarity using remarkably engaging collaboration models with clients; (3) and communicating outcome value with irresistible storytelling campaigns.

Those are secret ingredients (not so secret anymore) for an awesome legal user experience - all backed by academic research. At each Masterclass and Sprint, we drive conversations around those items, invite participants to share customers stories, gather insights and then use creative techniques to brainstorm ideas to improve the existing customer experience.

This approach has proven to be very successful for law firms and legal departments, helping them improve existing legal offers, value propositions and business models. Typically the improved system involves digitalization, as in our sprints we incentivize teams to create new digital products and experiences to match the expectations of current and future customers in the new digital reality.

"I really enjoyed your presentation at the Banco do Brasil event. Congratulations! I believe it has influenced many of those present and this event will lead our Legal Department to a new path, for sure!” - Edson Shoiti Fugie, Regional Legal Counsel (Brazil)

Facilitating a full day Legal Creatives Masterclass in Porto Alegre, Brazil. 

3. Enhance collaboration, creative skills and team spirit.

In addition to getting disruptive products and business ideas incredibly attractive to clients, Sprints and Workshops are deeply motivating for teams, especially millennial new recruits and more experienced talents too …

Typically the Sprints lead participants, teams and sponsors to: (1) add value to their customers with newly designed tools and systems extremely appealing to users; (2) develop the innovation culture with deeply interactive and motivational experiences that can be a great source of inspiration for chief knowledge officers and innovation directors alike; and (3) retain millennial talents by engaging them towards the future of legal services. Not to mention to enhance the brand presence and positioning nationally and internationally.

For participants to experience the sprint in a productive way and have fun at the same time, we recommend a full day of sprint. During a full-day sprint, participants experience the creative process in a fast-paced manner using tools we have created and that have proven powerful to generate an impressive amount of new ideas in a limited time.

The fastest sprint I conducted took just about 90 minutes (plus 30 minutes for presentations), at the Legaltech Fest MX organized by Legal Hackers Monterrey (Mexico). At the IACCM conference of the Americas we invited contract managers and lawyers to redesign contracts in a highly participatory sprint with the objective to make contracts visually attractive and digital-ready. Typically, those 90 minutes sprints give participants a glimpse of what can be achieved in a full day and encourage them to dive more into design.

Facilitating a full day Contract Design Sprint in Stockholm, Sweden.

In a full day design sprint, participants get to move from problem to solution, learning and applying the Legal Creatives method. In Stockholm (Sweden), we gathered lawyers, contract managers and designers at the Future of Contracting event organized by SKYE Contracts to re-design contracts. Participants got to prototype new solutions and present them in a creative way at the end of the day, some of which have been further developed at the office after the event. (If you are interested in joining the new edition of the Future of Contracting on May 28-29, 2020, you will find more information here)

 “Legal Creatives has the best approach to transform the way that legal services are to be delivered in the future.” - Legal Mockup Startup Founders (Argentina).

As a lawyer, partner, general counsel, innovation director, chief knowledge officers or startup founder, you need to make sure the legal user experience you deliver - Legal UX - is satisfying and possibly even incredible. To achieve this, it is critical to get the tools that will get you to take a lead on innovation. With our in-person masterclasses and innovation sprints, you can now acquire the tools necessary to offer engaging user experiences with Legal Creatives Design.

Take a look at our Legal Creatives Masterclass tour and consider joining us in a city near you.As I wrote in my previous blog post, a good sprint challenge is one that has been unresolved for some time and that is critical to industry stakeholders, sprint sponsors and participants. Let's create together!