...innovators in legal should consider what companies like Proctor & Gamble taught designers at Apple, IDEO and Google.

What may surprise you about the way Silicon Valley innovates is that some of their design techniques come from the old brick and mortar economy. 

While the products of design often take center stage, it’s the backstage process of innovation - how each company combines their core strengths with customer insights – and the techniques which drive those insights that create the need for products like the iPhone, Alexa, Airbnb and Uber. 

The central challenge for start-ups and established companies alike is to adapt an innovative idea for product market fit. For digital economy companies the way for a business to “create and keep a customer,” in the words of Peter Drucker, requires a focus on team composition and the ability to frame problems as opportunities so that teams can explore a variety of solutions. In an economy where legal expertise is often table stakes and competition for market share is based on distinguishing the delivery of legal services, innovators in the legal market should consider what companies like Procter & Gamble taught designers at Apple, IDEO and Google.

Together Alone

After the Second World War two trends in idea generation began to permeate the Old World economy – brainstorming, as originally defined by Alex Osborn in Your Creative Power, and what became known as multidisciplinary research, originating from the intersection of disciplines in workspaces such as M.I.T.’s Building 20 and eventually at Pixar under Steve Jobs. 

What designers at 37 Signals, IDEO and Google discovered as they put these techniques into play and refined them over time, was that the best outcomes often resulted from individuals working alone and then alongside peers from other areas of a company.

By first working alone, individuals were able to bring a greater quantity of divergent ideas forward, without selection bias or the “Groupthink” of typical brainstorming sessions. Then, by bringing subject matter experts from one discipline together with different perspectives from other areas, teams were able to converge on the best ideas and generate multiple paths forward. 

Innovation is both an individual and team sport...

Margaret Hagan from Stanford’s Legal Design Lab described the typical law firm approach which rewards individual effort and more homogeneous teams in her 2014 Reinvent LawTED-style talk. She said, “You cannot put four lawyers in a room, tell them to innovate and expect anything good to come from that. It just won’t happen. I was part of those training programs as a law student [at Stanford] and they do not work. You need to give them a process, you need to teach them mindsets and you need to put engineers and designers on the team.” 

Innovation is both an individual and team sport. Just as athletic teams recruit the best players and focus on truly excelling in a few key positions, law firms should identify which business areas complement the execution of their core legal strengths and drive insights through multidisciplinary collaboration.

However, it’s not enough to bring a multidisciplinary team together. In Silicon Valley, designers such as IDEO’s Bob Sutton and Google’s Jake Knapp discovered that the best market fit often resulted from teams where individuals who knew the least about the problem were rewarded for being opinionated about ideas that diverged from the product lead or start-up CEO’s perspective, because greater differentiation often resulted in greater market success. 

At Google Ventures Knapp further refined this process into what is now called a Design Sprint. Sometimes referred to as the “Bible” of innovation in Silicon Valley, design sprints are a highly sequenced series of divergent and convergent activities that result in a high-fidelity prototype and customer testing within the scope of one week. 

How can law firms incorporate the “together alone” technique into their innovation programs? 

Husch Blackwell found that a good place to start was in its legal project management workshops that the firm hosts for its lawyers, professional staff and clients. During these sessions partners, associates, paralegals, business directors and other professionals first work on creative problem solving challenges alone at their tables before discussing their ideas with their working group. 

In certain circumstances client relationship managers also invite business directors and project management and pricing professionals to client meetings, where they can observe reactions and listen for context clues that signal unmet needs as well as provide additional insights and solutions.

How Might We

The Harvard Business Review calls “How Might We” the secret phrase top innovator’s use.

How Might We first came about at Procter & Gamble in the mid-1970s during the war for market share on the soap aisle. Colgate had introduced Irish Spring and P&G had spent six unsuccessful months trying to make a better green-striped bar. The breakthrough came when Min Basadur reframed the question using How Might We from the customer’s perspective.

Now open to multiple solutions, the product team pursued a blue-striped alternative as a refreshing experience – Coast – which beat Irish Spring in head-to-head customer tests. Since then, companies from P&G and Lego to Facebook and Google have used this technique to reframe problems into opportunities which have multiple solution paths.

While the How Might We technique is often incorporated into creative problem solving processes like the Design Sprint, innovators within law firms can also use this technique in their day-to-day project work. 

Let’s start with a very simple example. A strategic account team was helping a partner adapt a scoping template used to create an initial budget to one that could track the inevitable changes to scope as a project unfolds. The team first proposed remaking the template into Excel to capture the partner’s handwritten notes into rows and formulas to calculate the impact of scope on the budget. Although the partner used Excel reports on a regular basis, having to design or adapt a scoping statement in Excel from one deal to another was like handing an iPhone user an Android device - a non-starter at least without some additional training. 

How Might We adapt the original template to track scope changes? Instead of jumping to a solution in Excel which was more familiar to finance, the team proposed an alternative in a Word table without the formulas – a step forward and a better fit for the partner, their customer.

In another example a client team responded to an RFP from a Silicon Valley company, which needed a much more efficient legal process to handle an increase in volume. 

The RFP spelled out the phases of work, the expected effort and even the ratio of partner time in order to better compare the responses. The team proposed a Fixed Fee and shared the firm’s experience addressing each phase of work. However, the team also asked the question, How Might We scale this process if the workload grew beyond the team’s capacity? Given the nature of the process, the team envisioned an expertise solution on a platform like NeotaLogic that could guide employees through the steps and use a decision matrix to recommend or automate next actions. 

Finally, when a team of paralegals and associates were tasked with reviewing thousands of contracts under a tight deadline, the partner turned to Kira Systems machine learning software to gain efficiency in the review process. Unlike a typical due diligence scenario, the assignments needed to be derived from columns in a spreadsheet.

Instead of just manually working through the assignments using the UI, the team asked How Might We efficiently assign contracts when they are not organized in folders? Given the service blueprint in the backstage of the software, the team envisioned a development solution that would give Husch Blackwell an edge in the market by allowing teams to review contracts in this scenario at scale.

Together Alone and How Might We are just two examples of the way Silicon Valley has brought brick and mortar product design techniques forward into the digital economy. In order to provide our clients with the most efficient solutions and best customer experience, Husch Blackwell is adapting these same techniques to move its legal services forward. 

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[Lann Wasson is Associate Director of Legal Project Management at law firm Husch Blackwell.]