Innovation Team

Applying design-thinking best practices to empower employees and inspire creativity in clients

Challenge

I managed a team of colleagues that collaborated with students at Stanford University’s d.school. During the 6-week program we learned about human-centered design methods and explored ways to apply them to the legal field.

While our interdisciplinary team of designers and consultants loved the process, we faced a difficult challenge in finding ways to integrate the methods into our client work. How could we get "creatively constipated" attorneys to unlock their own creativity to uncover novel approaches to winning their cases?

Process

To better understand our challenge space we conducted interviews with several attorneys and legal consultants about experiences when they felt empowered creatively. We also researched analogous user contexts from other fields--we observed and interviewed a story board artist, a Pixar animator, and a commercial film director to understand how they communicate their vision to those outside of their creative team. This research inspired us to develop a toolkit of exercises drawn from a variety of sources to help unlock our clients' creative potential.

For example, we developed a unique visual storytelling exercise based on an insight from our user research. One of our clients revealed that he always read the Sunday comic strips because he admired the efficiency of storytelling they achieved that he could never reach on his cases. Based on that observation, we developed a process to help attorneys simplify and visualize their case story by turning it into a 6-panel comic strip.

Outcome

Following the program, we presented our client creativity toolkit and methods in an offsite workshop for the entire company. Inspired by our results, I also co-founded an innovation group at my firm that worked to integrate design thinking skills and encourage creative empowerment throughout the organization through quarterly workshops and trainings.

Project team: Kate McEntee, Ina Lim, Dan Martin, and Scott Hilton