3 Geeks and a Law Blog

Ed. Note: Please welcome our guest blogger, Susan Kostal, San Francisco based legal affairs journalist and consultant.
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One of the most fascinating ideas out of this year’s LMA Legal Tech West conference was a workshop on design thinking.

Design thinking has taken the corporate world by storm. Intended to build a culture of free exchange of ideas, constant iteration and learning from failure, it is sacred credo in Silicon Valley and at the heart of almost all innovation.

Law is one of the slowest, if not the slowest, industry to evolve, but design thinking has a good chance of changing that.

Design thinking has many definitions, but at its core, whether designing a product or business process, it comes down this: instead of a designer-led process, it’s a user-led process. This concept comes out of the Institute for Design at Stanford (d.school), and launched its most popular course, Designing Your Life.

Mark Beese of Leadership for Lawyers led attendees, myself included, in a design-thinking exercise to improve the onboarding process for lawyers and staff at a law firm. We were paired in teams and assigned to learn as much about our partner’s onboarding process, what they liked, what they didn’t, and then in rapid-fire mode come up with as many ideas as possible to solve their issues, whether they seemed feasible or not.

We were instructed to sketch these out, which, for someone used to working with words like me, unleashed a creativity and excitement about solving the problem that felt fresh and new.

Pipe Cleaner Breakthrough

With 10+ ideas in hand, we went back to interviewing, really digging into our partner’s experience, and then narrowed down our solutions to three. Then, we were given Post-Its, pipe cleaners, rubber bands, paper clips, markers, paper tubes, etc., and asked to build a prototype.

My partner was overwhelmed with the amount of information thrown at her on her first day, and wanted more personal, warmer touch points. One of the offerings I came up with was a branded mug. Sure, lots of people give out branded material to new hires. But along with my mug came a supply of coffee or tea—whichever beverage the new hire had accepted when offered a hot beverage in the interview process. I’m not sure that would have occurred to me absent me taking the time to craft a mug from pipe cleaners. My onboarding solution, while small, told my partner she was welcomed, that the firm wanted her to be happy at work. More importantly, it told her she was valued, and that her needs were noticed and were as important as corporate goals.

Some teams had unworkable ideas, such as a corporate jet to squire new hires for a tour of the firm’s offices. But that prompted me to think about giving each new employee a modest transit or parking voucher. The message the employee gets is that we are so excited you’ve joined us that we want to pay for your commute for your first few days with us.

How It Works In The Real World

Davis Wright Tremaine has embraced design thinking, is using it with clients to find legal process solutions, and has created DWT De Novo, an internal consulting firm to help its lawyers develop more client-centric ways of solving problems.

Jay Hull, DWT’s Chief Innovation Partner, told me that there are about 20 DWT staff and lawyers actively involved and 10 full-time people dedicated to the initiative. Hull, a former transactional lawyer, said the key is multi-disciplinary teams that feel free to pitch ideas, can iterate quickly, and who are confident enough to show clients prototyped options that aren’t yet fully baked, so team members can learn during the design process what features appeal to the client and which aren’t working and need improvement.

“To me, it starts with empathy for the client,” Hull said “and burrowing into what it’s like for them to engage with the product or process.”

Hull’s time in-house helped tremendously, he said, where he struggled with existing processes. “There was a huge transaction, and on the 42nd draft of the agreement, it hit me. What were we thinking? Couldn’t we have done this in 20 revisions? There has got to be a better way.”

Studying the Giants of Customer Service

At the launch of the effort, two DWT professionals participated in a two-day design-thinking workshop hosted by Nordstrom, well known for its top-notch customer service. Then several lawyers, Hull included, visited the dSchool and met with Margaret Hagan, a fellow at Stanford Law’s Center on the Legal Profession. She launched the Legal Design Lab, experimenting in how design can make legal services more usable, useful and engaging.

DWT debuted the concept with a large public company. “They needed thousands of documents reviewed, knew they couldn’t do it efficiently in-house, and didn’t want to pay for a traditional review by a law firm,” Hull said.

Using software DWT already owned, the firm conducted an automated review of the contracts, with human beings doing post-automation quality control, for a fixed set-up fee of $15,000. The audit singled out several hundred contracts that needed further review, for which DWT charged a per-contract flat rate.

Note that this is a process- and solution-oriented approach, rather than a pricing- model approach, although the firm billed the client on a flat-fee basis. It hatched a single-point solution and provided the model for other contract review projects.

Clients “Want a Different Model”

Microsoft, a longtime client, is a big proponent of design thinking. In-house lawyer Lucy Bassli needed thousands of procurement contracts reviewed so she could free up her department’s lawyers for higher-level work. She wanted it structured as an annual flat-fee engagement. She asked for RFPs and “made it clear she wanted a different model,” Hull said.

DWT more directly applied design thinking principles, including empathizing with the client and crafting an MVP (minimum viable product) with rapid iterations based on client feedback. The process analysis included details I’ve heard many in-house counsel complain about, such as how documents are managed, how communication with the client and related firms should be structured, and how projects will be assigned.

“We are ‘all in’ on this concept, and the firm is behind it,” Hull said. Now, DWT partners are coming to Hull and his team for help. “I’ve had lawyers come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I’m not exactly sure what you guys are doing, but the client says it takes way too long and costs too much. Can you help me?’”

Design thinking “opens up pathways to better solutions, where there isn’t this constraint so common in the legal industry that everything that comes out of your mouth better be perfect, and you better be prepared to defend it at all costs,” Hull said.

“That’s just dumb, and very self-limiting.”

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Susan Kostal is a legal affairs PR, marketing and business development consultant based in San Francisco. She covered legal affairs as a journalist for nearly three decades. You can follow her on Twitter at @skostal and view more of her content at www.susankostal.com.

As the Vice-President/President-Elect of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), I wanted to tell our 3 Geeks' readers about the new visual identity and tagline that AALL officially rolled out last night. Leaders within the organization worked on this rebranding effort for nearly two years, and displayed the new logo back at the annual meeting in Chicago last July. I, for one, like the new logo, and the tagline that goes along with it. I applaud those that worked on the rebranding effort and I hope that members of AALL, as well as those that benefit from the work that law librarians, legal information professionals, take a moment to look at the new branding and take a moment to think about all the good work that the Association, its members, and staff provide to the legal industry.

I wanted to focus on the tagline, and the two meanings that it represents.

Your Legal Knowledge Network

Internal Meaning: To members of AALL the tagline represents the community of knowledgeable law librarians and other legal information professionals who identify with the ideals of access to justice, the dissemination of legal information, and the ability to reach out to that community in a way that adds value to the service we provide for our individual organizations. To me, the best thing about AALL is its members. It is your legal knowledge network because we learn from each other, and we form bonds that unite us and allow us to leverage the knowledge of the entire association, regardless of the type of work we perform, or the organization which we work. This is your legal knolwedge network of highly-educated and forward-thinking professionals are willing to give their time and experiences to help others within AALL and beyond is a valuable professional development tool which all law librarians and legal information professionals should feel proud to belong.

External Meaning: For the legal industry, AALL members represent some of the most educated, connected, and resourceful employees of your organization. AALL becomes your legal knowledge network and exposes your organization to advanced educational opportunities to keep your law librarians ahead of the curve for changes in the legal environment. AALL is your legal knowledge network to discover new legal information resources and provide access and understanding of how these resources may bring value to your practices within your organization. AALL is your legal knowledge network to fight and lobby for legal information to be open and available and not locked behind a government or corporate wall. AALL is your legal knowledge network that multiplies the talents and skills of your legal information professional by the diverse talent and skills of thousands of other law librarians and legal information professionals.

I may be biased in my appreciation for AALL and what it does for me, my organization, my profession, and the legal profession as a whole… but I am not wrong. I have written and talked about the value of law librarianship ever since former AALL President and Georgetown University Law Library Director, Bob Oakley, reached out to a very green law librarians some sixteen years ago and asked me to write about where he thought I believed the profession was going. AALL gave me a voice and an opportunity to leverage its members and resources to expand my own career. I hope that in the course of my journey I return the favor to another member of my network.

I think our current President, Ron Wheeler says it best. "AALL's new brand honors our past, embraces our present, and emboldens our future as legal information professionals. The knowledge and talent of our members, combined with their unrivaled dedication to service, make our whole legal system stronger. I have never been more proud to be a law librarian."

For those current members of AALL, thanks for being a part of this network. For those that have lapsed in the past few years, I encourage you to come back. If you're a law librarian or someone who works in the legal information profession, I invite you to come join and make this network your own. For those who employ law librarians and legal information professionals, encourage them to join and leverage this network. After all, AALL is your legal knowledge network.

Technology is cool. There is no disputing that fact. Last month, while travelling for work, I had a video conversation with my kid, while I was 3500 kms away in a relatively remote mountain resort, and he was in a moving vehicle. Last week, while doing some research I came across a data visualization of all of the spells used in all seven books of Harry Potter on a scatter chart, and when you hovered over the data points you learned when the spell was used, by whom and why. That’s cool, that’s technology. Whether we are looking at the vast amounts of data in the world and how we can use that data, make it visible, pretty and useful, or whether we are talking about “smart” technology, machine learning or artificial intelligence as it applies to daily work tasks that can be automated, made better and or make our work lives and products more efficient.

And yet, as I sit here at ARK KM 2016, in NYC, the themes I keep hearing coming out of every session, are around audience engagement, adoption, clarity of purpose, how do we encourage people to share, and clear or shared communication. Fundamentally “soft skills” that technology can’t really impact have been a part of every presentation. Like it or not, while some of us may prefer to engage with robots, as people working in law firms for legal clients, we are dealing with people, clients are people. Implementation of strategically sound KM programs, social for enterprise, efficiency in data visualization, noise reduction, cross firm collaboration, data integrity, whatever it is – people are at the centre and people are necessarily complex. When we talk about getting people to collaborate, share data, engage on client matters together and so forth, we are discussing changing cultures with in individual firms and within the legal industry as a whole. Changing legal and law firm culture, (and related initiatives such as KM – however you define it) start, in my opinion with putting clients first.

I have written here and else where about how clients are or should be at the centre of any significant initiative by firms. Putting clients first to my mind means using a design thinking approach to new initiatives. Design thinking as explained in a recent Lexpert article is “also known as “human-centred design” — an approach that, at its core, is about structured problem-solving with a design flair.” The first step in design thinking that runs through every stage of the process is empathy. Empathy is knowing how someone else feels, whether as a lawyer knowing how a client feels or as an allied professional in a firm knowing how your lawyers feel. Feelings are not always used in the same discussion as law firms or lawyers, but therein, lies the change that needs to happen. In order to successfully innovate and move culturally sensitive initiatives forward we need to think like our clients, we need to feel like our clients. We need to understand our clients pain – their difficulty in solving problems and then very quickly try various solutions in solving those problems or assuage any ill feelings.

Technology can be a tool in helping to achieve resolution, but the tech itself could never replace empathy. The ability to think like others, to feel what they feel and to really understand their challenges and how to address those challenges is really about people connecting with people regardless of roles or capabilities. This is the heart of design thinking – the human element. The EI or emotional intelligence that is required to make AI, KM, BD/Marketing and other projects a success. On the surface it seems simple, and maybe it is, but all too often we are distracted by the technology and the crazy capabilities they afford us. Blinded by the possibilities of the technology, we present solutions to problems people don’t have or we aggregate data sets and taxonomies that make sense to only a few and confuse everyone else. We then push these technology solutions on a varied group of people and expect them to be as excited and ready for the impact of the technology as we are. Who wouldn’t want to know every spell Harry and his friends ever used to defeat He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named. But if those capabilities add nothing productive to my day, or solve no real world issues, then any real value the technology tools provide gets lost. Tie solutions back people. Start prototying solutions only after actually talking to people, all the people, with all the same problems. Use technology to aid in solving real world issues or frustrations and eliminate the pain that real people are feeling. To do that, we need to be sensitive to the human element every step of the way. Once you can do that, the prototyping and ideation gets far easier, but empathy especially in law firm processes can be a fickle friend.

Who wants to take on that session at ARK KM next year???

If I am in a room with an academic law librarian for more than five minutes, I almost always get some form of this question:

What are the tech skills I should be teaching law students to better prepare them for working in the 'real world?'

My answer is a pretty standard one. "Make sure they know the basics… then we can teach them the unique skills needed for our particular firm." The same question came up last Friday when I was on the Law Librarians Conversation podcast with Rich Leiter, Roger Skalbeck, Elizabeth Farrell, Ken Hirsh, Darin Fox, and Michael Robak. Knowing the cool stuff is secondary to knowing the basics.

What are the basics? My guess is that you already know (especially if you've read any of my co-geek, Casey Flaherty, posts.)

• MS Word - especially style sheets and any basic tasks that are automated rather than manual.
• MS Excel - with some basic understandings of formulas, especially simple math formulas, sorting and filtering.
• Adobe PDF - Focus on how to effectively use PDF and exporting from other programs like Word.
• MS PowerPoint - pretty much Google "Death by PowerPoint" and learn the what not to do lessons.
• MS Outlook - learn rules and foldering. Once you're at your firm, learn how Outlook interacts with your document management system (DMS) and be an avid filer and rule follower for the DMS standards of your firm. 

• Accept/Turn-off track changes.
• Cut & Paste.
• Replace text.
• Format font and paragraph.
• Fix footers.
• Insert hyperlink.
• Apply/Modify style.
• Insert/Update cross-references.
• Insert page break.
• Insert non-breaking space.
• Clean document properties.
• Create comparison document (i.e., a redline). 

Craig Ball wrote a great article yesterday on "Six Powerful Points for Better Presentations" where he give some great tips on presenting information in PowerPoint. At the very end, under his "But, Wait! There's More" section, he mentioned that he also uses PowerPoint as a "powerful screen capture and video editing" tool. I thought I'd have a little Friday fun post to show you one of my favorite image editing features of PowerPoint of removing the background from an image.


I have to admit that 99% of the time that I do this is to pull a prank on a friend, usually by editing something they posted on Facebook. It's fast and easy to do once you know where and how to use the tool. Much to the chagrin of my Facebook friend (and Austin rocker), Adrian Conner, I'm going to use her as an example of how to edit a picture in PowerPoint (MS Word also has similar tools.)




Step Two: Resize the photo (if it is too big or small) so that it fits on the slide, and then double-click the image to bring up the "Picture tools - Format" tab on PowerPoint's menu bar.


Step Three: Click the "Remove Background" icon on the Picture Tools menu tab. This will create a 'box' around a portion of the image and PowerPoint will attempt to automatically remove the background of the image. The part that is to be removed will be displayed in a purplish color.




Step Four:  Move the outline box around until it is a close to the part you want to keep as possible. In this case we're removing the boxing bear and just keeping serious looking Adrian. PowerPoint does a pretty good job here of getting most of Adrian's serious stare, while removing the boxing bear. However, despite the glare, some of Adrian's hair is not there. Also the knit-toboggan is missing from her wild-haired noggin. Not to sweat it... we can edit... it.  (And this is the reason I'm a blogger and not a famous lyricist.)




Step Five: To edit the parts you want to keep or delete, there is now a "Background Removal" tab that appears on the menu bar. In this case, we have areas we want to mark to keep. When you click on the "Mark Areas to Keep" tab, your mouse will turn into a pencil and you can click parts of the picture you want to keep. My suggestion is that you click around the very edges to do this. If you click outside the area, you can hit CTRL-Z to undo your click and try again, or you can press the "Delete Mark button and remove them that way. If there are areas you want to remove, you can do the same with the "Mark Areas to Remove." Again, stay around the edges until you get where you have removed (or added) everything you want to keep.
Step Six: Once you've got all the areas you want, click the "Keep Changes" button on the menu. This will remove all of the picture that is currently in that purplish hue. If it doesn't quite look right, you can click CTRL-Z again and add/remove more areas until you get it where you want it.
Step Seven: Crop the image around what is left. I usually do this because PowerPoint will keep the image the same size as the original, and if there is a much smaller area remaining, I want to crop that out. Use the "Crop" tab on the menu and pull the outline around the part you want to keep. Then press "Crop" again to remove the rest of the image.


If this is all you want to do, you can stop here, and right click on the image and "Save as Picture." However, if you want to have some fun, then follow the next steps.


Step Eight: I like to overlay these images over something outrageous. To do that, I have to make the background of the remaining picture as transparent. This will allow me to place this image on top of another image and make it look like it is a part of the picture. To do this, click on the "Color" button on the menu, and select "Set Transparent Color."
Click anywhere on the white portion of the background of the remaining picture, and it will become transparent.


Step Nine: I usually find a Google Image or a Flickr Image (make sure it is creative commons or not copyright protected if you're going to use it outside of your own personal enjoyment, e.g., post it on a Facebook.)


Paste the picture in the same slide as the one you  edited, and right click on the image and click on "Send to Back." This will put your edited photo in front of the image you now want in the background. Align your picture the way you want it by making it smaller/larger so that it begins to look like it is part of the new background. If you're like me, it make take a few tries and different backgrounds to get the effect you want.


Step Ten: You can edit the color of each of the individual images, and play around with the corrections, color, and artistic effects buttons on the Format menu. Once you have it where you like it, you'll want to merge the two images together so you'll have a single final image. You can do this by selecting both images (CTRL-A works, or you can click on each and use the CTRL button as you click), and then press the "Group" button on the menu, and select "Group" from the drop down. You can then right-click and "Save as Picture" to save your final result.


It takes me about five minutes to do all the editing. It takes longer to find a good background to use than it does to actually do the editing. I find it to be very easy, and a lot of fun. Since many of us don't have editing tools like Photoshop, this is an inexpensive way to have some fun editing pictures.