The Lawyer as Designer
How would you describe the work of a lawyer?
Meticulous, ethical, analytical, adaptive, pragmatic?
But ask a roomful of lawyers and another set of words might surface just as quickly: overworked, stretched, reactive, isolated.
Let's get back to that second set, and the reason that the GC Wellbeing Network exists, soon. And how the first set – those core competences of a lawyer – can flourish.
To unlock those strengths, I want to propose borrowing a mindset from another another discipline entirely: design.
Why Design Matters
So, what is at the core of a designer’s mindset? It’s something I’ve reflected on for many years, since first being enthralled by the newly launched degree course of Product Design as a high-school leaver in 1994 and subsequently travelling to Stanford’s Center for Design Research as a visiting researcher in 2001.
In my first wellbeing book, Sustaining Executive Performance, I remember writing about an interview one of the Stanford Design School professors gave in 2010 about what the classroom of 2020 would look like, saying the lone professor would be replaced by a team of coaches, and tidy lectures supplanted by messy real-world challenges, adding that students would:
“work in collaborative spaces, where future doctors, lawyers, business leaders, engineers, journalists, and artists learn to integrate their different approaches to problem solving and innovate together.”
Did such a vision transpire? Yes and no. But that big focus on multidisciplinary collaboration was one of the big selling points for me as a 17-year-old. It is one of design’s biggest strengths and one the legal world can learn from. If the vision gives us initial insight, how can we go deeper?
Here are three core features of a designer’s mindset:
Design is Human
Above all, design is human. It looks to create a world that satisfies the needs we have as human beings. Yet the irony of the modern workplace is that it has mostly neglected these needs. Only relatively recently have we taken issues like belonging, safety, joy and connection more seriously, after long sacrificing them at the altar of productivity. I am all for remembering that the ‘business of business is business’ yet if we lift our gaze from short-term productivity to sustainable performance there is no doubt that meeting human needs supports the business case. I have found this in the research and real-world experience across a 20+ year wellbeing career.
Design is Process
Although often conceived as a noun, design is better understood as a verb. Design is doing, and although there is freedom within a necessarily creative endeavour, structure and process are required for design to work. Indeed, we learn to love the process since it gives us the confidence to deal with high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity. Such states are desirable for innovation, as opposed to simply copying and pasting what has been done before. By following due process, and a powerful set of tools and methods along the way, we drive a deeper understanding and challenge assumptions to arrive at the optimal outcome.
Design is Experimentation
Being process-centric, it follows that design can’t be learned passively. And experimentation is part of that bias towards action. Getting it right first time is often the goal of the ‘insecure over-achiever’ that exists in the legal sector (and many other demanding professions) yet allowing margin for failure is critical for moving forward. The goal is not to fail, but having a fear of failure means never trying anything new. So, test, iterate, start again. Exactitude is needed in law, but perfectionism limits innovation and growth. Progress over perfection.
Applying it at GCWN
One of the methods typically used in design thinking client work—and one of the ways we trust the process—is experience journey mapping. We used this in our first workshop at Pinsent Masons in London for the UK GC chapter earlier this year.
Experience journey mapping involves delimiting an experience for a specific user and digging into the actions, places and emotions that characterise that experience. In our Pinsents workshop we looked at ‘the busy GCs morning, from waking to the start of the first main work-block of the day.’
The logic was to uncover the main ‘pain-points’ of the GCs day-to-day. Of course, these may exist in the main flow of the workday; during the meetings, client calls and contract negotiations, yet what design teaches us is to look in the details, the unexpected places. To sweat the small stuff. ‘How do you spend the first five minutes of your day?’ is an example of looking in the unexpected places, yet something that may have an outsize impact on how the rest of the day transpires.
From such an analysis we identified a suggestion. A ritual that represents the designer’s mindset in that daily morning experience:
Each day, look at the sky before your smartphone.
Small, but significant. Engaging with the outside, natural world before addressing the stresses and strains of your inner, digital world. The lawyer as designer.
Starting Your Journey
You’re a lawyer and will flourish in your life and career by focusing on those unique attributes, skills and competences of a lawyer: meticulous, ethical, analytical, adaptive, and pragmatic.
And in many ways, you’re already a designer: designing clarity from ambiguity, designing frameworks that protect and enable. Designing pathways that allow businesses, and people, to move forward with confidence.
Yet bringing a designer’s mindset to your daily life—human-centred, process-driven, experiment-ready—will help you be even more lawyer.
It will allow wellbeing to power performance.
So, what could you design differently tomorrow?
With thanks to Pinsent Masons for their partnership in supporting the GCWN UK Chapter and advancing the conversation on wellbeing in legal leadership.