Designing for the Client of the Future

Our final theme for the morning centers on how design can improve lawyer-client relationships.

Our hypothesis: a design approach can help lawyers not only make incremental improvements to help their clients, but can identify more a ambitious future of how legal services might be delivered. This may mean new business models, new communication strategies, new work product, and new types of legal organizations — all focused on how lawyers can get better services, more accessibly to the client.

There is low-hanging fruit in bringing design to lawyer-client relationships. We can improve how we communicate between lawyers and clients, so jargon and complex ideas are clear. We can map out legal out processes, so there is more transparency around price, work product, and expectations.

Beyond this first wave of legal design, how can we foresee where our clients needs are going? Can lawyers not only react to clients’ issues, but proactively predict needs, devise strategies, and create resources?

And what must we be doing within legal organizations — including in our cultures, our business models, and our delivery mechanisms — to improve our ability to proactively serve our clients?