In a recent episode of “The Geek in Review” podcast, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interviewed a team of innovation leaders from the law firm Faegre Drinker. The guests included Shawn Swearingen, Chief Innovation Officer; David Gross, Design Lab co-founder; and Ruben Gonzalez, Design Lab Director. The discussion centered around the relaunch of Faegre Drinker’s Legal Design Lab in Scottsdale, Arizona, exploring its origins, evolution, and impact on legal problem-solving.
The Legal Design Lab’s inception traces back eight or nine years when an associate at the firm, Helen Chacon, reconnected with her Stanford Law School friend Margaret Hagan, who was pioneering the concept of legal design. Intrigued by the idea of applying design thinking—a user-focused, empathetic approach to problem-solving long used in other industries—to the legal field, the firm embarked on a deep dive into the methodology. This included David (DJ) Gross auditing courses at Stanford’s D-School and team members like Kate Razavi designing courses on visual advocacy at the University of Minnesota Law School.
The relaunch and relocation of the Design Lab to Scottsdale were influenced by several factors, notably the firm’s merger that expanded its geographic footprint and the practical considerations brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. The move allowed the firm to acquire a significantly larger and more cost-effective space. With input from architects, designers, and Margaret Hagan herself, the new lab was designed to be a flexible, creative environment featuring movable furniture and an industrial aesthetic, fostering collaboration and innovation.
Throughout the podcast, the team shared concrete examples of how design thinking has been instrumental in solving complex legal challenges. One such example involved simplifying a profitability tool for lawyers by using a color-coded system akin to credit score reports, making it more accessible and actionable. Another highlighted the use of tennis balls to demystify crystallography during a jury trial, showcasing how visual aids and empathetic explanations can lead to successful outcomes. These instances underscore the lab’s focus on user-centric solutions and visual advocacy to enhance understanding and efficiency in legal processes.
The guests also discussed the challenges of integrating design thinking within the traditional legal framework, particularly in encouraging open-mindedness and collaborative participation among lawyers and clients. They emphasized the importance of a learning mindset, active listening, and the willingness to embrace creativity and risk-taking. To further disseminate these ideas, the team mentioned an eBook available on their website, aimed at introducing legal professionals to design thinking and visual advocacy concepts.
Links:
- Faegre Drinker Design Lab video
- Faegre Drinker Picks Arizona for the Next-Gen Design Lab, American Lawyer
- E-book – Design Thinking and Visual Advocacy for Lawyers Two Point Oh! (FREE)
- Innovations in Visual Advocacy – Leading the way for design thinking in law, Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession.
- Advancing Company Goals – Design sprints that unlock Innovation, Corporate Counsel.
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Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript
Marlene Gebauer 0:07
Welcome to the geek in review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
Greg Lambert 0:14
And I’m Greg Lambert, and this week, we are excited to have with us a team of innovation leaders from the law firm Faegre Drinker to discuss the relaunching of their legal Design Lab in Scottsdale, Arizona. So joining us from Faegre Drinker is Shawn Swearingen, who’s the Chief Innovation Officer. David Gross Design Lab co founder and Ruben Gonzalez design lab director. So Shawn, David and Ruben. Welcome to the Geek in Review.
DJ Gross 0:43
Thank you.
Shawn Swearingen 0:44
Thanks for having us
Marlene Gebauer 0:45
so all. So to all like you’ve announced the the relaunch of the legal Design Lab. But before we jump into that, that relaunch news, do you mind taking us back a few years to the initial launch and the initial idea of why a law firm would would want to create a legal design lab in the first place?
Greg Lambert 1:02
Yeah, why would you want to do this? Why would you want to do that? What
Marlene Gebauer 1:05
was the strategy behind that idea?
DJ Gross 1:07
Well, I guess, since I’m a co founder, I’ll I’ll take a shot at that one. And by the way, I consider you two friends, so please call me DJ. Several years ago now, I would say, like eight or nine years ago, there’s a random event that occurred, just like all great inventions, whether it’s the chocolate chip cookie or something else, but it was a random event. And the random event is an associate who is in our Silicon Valley office with me, Helen Chacon, bumped into a friend of hers from Stanford Law School named Margaret Hagan, and it was happenstance. It was random, but they just happened to be at an event together, and Margaret said, I’m doing this thing called legal design. And Helen said, That sounds interesting. She came back to our office the next day and said, there’s this thing called legal design that a friend of mine from Stanford is starting. Do you think we’d be interested? And we said yes, and immediately just started learning about it. And what we learned is, it’s a it’s a creative way to solve problems that people have been doing for decades, but they were now starting to use that in the law. And a classic example is, you know, imagine you’re trying to design a better airport chair. You know, well, what you do is, instead of just deciding what chair would be good, you empathize with people who are using the chair, which means maybe you follow people around, maybe you have them draw their thoughts on a board of how they use chairs. Maybe you interview people. There’s all kinds of things you can do to build empathy, but eventually you have a user focused solution, and you take a shot at some prototype, and guess what, you come up with a better chair. And if it doesn’t work. You fail early and you try it again, but that’s been going on for decades and decades. But what if you did that to divorce in Colorado? You know people, people are struggling with divorce, it’s a mess. What if we designed a way for people to to spend less time, less money, more efficient? What if we had a solution for entering a courthouse in California where it’s a mess, what if we made it user friendly and easy for the user and and we’re really excited by that that made so much sense. Why aren’t we applying design to law? I mean, that that’d be another podcast, because a lot of reasons, but we got excited, and so we had a big get together, and Shawn and others were part of this, and Ruben came along a little bit later, you know, maybe a couple years later, but we had this a big get together, and we did a design sprint on our design program. We said we should get into design, and what we learned is we don’t know what we’re doing. We have no idea what this is. So we paused literally for at least a year, a year and a half, and did an incredible deep dive. So I actually spent a year at the Stanford d school, taking auditing the basic design course quarter to design 101, 102, 103 which was amazing. I read all kinds of books. Ruben has been a design scholar for years and worked at Apple, and, you know, brought brought that to the table. Other people designed courses to teach at the University of Minnesota Law School. Kate Razavi, who’s a partner’s ours, one of the co founders, she designed a course and started teaching visual advocacy. And so what we did is we just became a lot smarter, and then about one or two years later, we started inviting clients and people at the firm to do design activities. And that’s when it really took off. But it was a random event, followed by two years of just research and hard work, and then we were an overnight success.
Greg Lambert 4:27
And DJ is pretty brave of you to say the quiet part out loud and that we don’t know what we’re doing on this sort of thing. Do you think it takes a certain mindset to get people to buy into something like this, because this does not sound like something that, you know, every law firm would would want to jump into. Do you think you were in kind of a special situation, or are you just surrounded by people that that jump at these types of ideas? Well,
DJ Gross 4:56
if you asked either Shawn or Ruben or me or anyone else. Else in our sort of subculture, in our firm, our firm is obviously a top 50 firm. It’s over 1000 lawyers, so it’s a big firm, but we have a kind of subculture of people who work together in various ways. And in this subculture, we have what we refer to as a learning mindset, and I often I mentor a lot of people at our firm. And I always say, you know, someone told me a long time ago, after the age of 40, you stop caring, you stop learning, you stop developing. And what I realized is there’s a small percentage of people who, after the age of 40, keep learning and keep growing, and those people can change the slope of their careers. And so I always urge people to have this learning mindset. And I would say it is as simple as that, if you have a love, a passion for learning, then this is exciting. But I don’t know, Ruben, I think you and I have talked about this before. I would think you you have the same idea, yeah, yeah. I
Ruben Gonzalez 5:50
think that’s right. And think, I think what it maybe, it requires, is, you know, there’s an invitation to a different mindset, and if you’re willing to accept that invitation to thinking a little bit differently about what we do then, then this is great. And at least what I’ve learned, and I’ve joked with David and Shawn about this, is that when you sort of introduce, or what I would say is, like, reintroduce some of these tools and concepts to people, this is how people, like, arrange their living room, right? It’s the way maybe they arrange the the gallery wall they may have, or they may look at the work that they’re helping their kids with it, you know, and helping their kids think about their assignments differently. So we’re actually doing this in other parts of our life, but it’s like in some ways, you go to law school, you become a lawyer, and we have to leave behind our problem solving, or leave behind our creativity. And one of the things I love, David mentioned the visual advocacy course that we teach when, when I give that presentation, and I’ve given the visual advocacy presentation to clients across the nation and to lawyers across the nation, I’m like, the only lawyer that shows up at these CLE presentations with colored pencils or crayons, and people just kind of light up and they engage. So there’s an invitation to sort of like a design mindset, a creative mindset, and as long as you’re willing to say, Yeah, I’ll do that, then really the possibilities are huge. So
Greg Lambert 7:11
I know you had this design lab set up in Silicon Valley area, but the relaunch is in Scottsdale. Why why Scottsdale? I mean, I was just there. We were just talking. I went to a wonderful music museum there, Musical Instrument Museum there. But you know what? What were the drivers behind moving it and relaunching it in Scottsdale,
DJ Gross 7:34
like the original development of our design lab, the move to Arizona had a feeling of randomness to it. Two things happened that I wasn’t expecting. Number one, we merged with another law firm and suddenly became a billion dollar law firm and a really, really big, giant law firm because we merged two very big law firms together. And next thing you know, you know, we’re, we’re pretty gigantic firm, which meant we now had an office, not only in Silicon Valley, but one right down the road in San Francisco. So you can have those two offices, but it doesn’t really make sense for our firm to have two offices near each other, like that. It just didn’t make sense. So so we had to think about, should I transfer to the San Francisco office? Should others? What should we do? And the other thing happened is the pandemic, and what the pandemic did was, in addition to all of the difficulties, from a health perspective, global tragedy, from our perspective, it forced us to get super creative about how to collaborate, how to do webinars and other things to stay engaged and active in our cases and with our clients. So we ended up getting very deeply involved in the pandemic, and our Silicon Valley office became less and less relevant, because, as you know, nobody went into the office. So now we have a merger. We’re trying to pick a new office, and the Silicon Valley office is quieting down because the pandemic. And that’s when I said to the firm, you know, I would be happy to move to Scottsdale, and I’m still one hour away from California, and we should look in that. When we looked into it, which Shawn kind of led the way on this, what we learned was we could get a much bigger space, like much bigger than our design lab in Silicon Valley, I would say, you know, 10 times bigger. So significantly bigger, and it’s like 1/3 the cost. So now we’re saving enormous amount of money. And no one hates coming to Scottsdale, because unless it’s July, it’s a really say, I’m a hot weather person, but I won’t bore you with that. But you know, we’re right next to Fashion Square Mall, Greg, if you know, or Arlene, if you if you know Scottsdale, we’re right next to the mall, and there’s hotels everywhere, so it’s basically affordable for clients and others to come here. If you come at the right time, it’s not spring break or something. And so it really seemed like a win win. And then Shawn worked for two and a half years with me to design this, and it was very user centered. Shared a lot of meetings about, you know, what would we like, what would clients like? And on that journey, designing a design lab was probably the most fun I’ve had in my life, and it was Shawn and a giant team of people who kind of led the way to that. And that was really, really exciting. I’ll give you a sneak peek here. I’m cheating, but that’s our design bunker with the light off, and then that’s our
Marlene Gebauer 10:22
knowledge. Greg, is that? Yeah,
Greg Lambert 10:23
I like it. I like it. If
DJ Gross 10:25
I kept going, you could see our we have a mobile courtroom, Greg and Marlene. And what’s really cool about this space, unlike our other space, literally, we have a judge’s bench, we have a lectern, we have chairs, we have tables, we have sofas, everything’s mobile, so in five minutes you can clear out the design lab, bring in 30 chairs, clear out the design lab, bring in design desks. Everything here is mobile, which means you can do whatever you want, and there’s not a single attorney office, visitor or permanent. It’s all just creative space.
Greg Lambert 10:56
And Shawn, what did you tap into to help design the Design Lab,
Shawn Swearingen 11:01
yeah. So we had this really cool process where we brought our architects and designers actually to the D school at Stanford. And I will say they were, like, blown away, and you saw, like, this almost childlike creativity start from them. If any of you have been to the D school, you all know it’s just like this amazing place of creativity. There are, like, there is a conference room that has like swings on it. So like, you’re at a conference table, there are swings. There are whiteboards everywhere. Walls move. Everything moves, like David said. So it was great for them to be there and get that inspiration. And they just really brought it to life with us, for us, and they were a trusted designer of many of our offices, so I think they did this just excellent job of bringing the design from all of our other firm offices we’ve designed. We’ve redesigned a number of those offices in the last few years to make it feel cohesive yet super creative. So really, really fun. And one thing David didn’t mention about the space in that building, we also have access to this huge auditorium so we are able to so we have this nice space where we can do these design sprints, but we could also host a CLE or a presentation or something on a really big scale. So that was really, really, really fun, and the process was just amazing. All around Ruben, David, anything to add there? I
DJ Gross 12:33
was really going to add, we are the official partner of the Stanford legal Design Lab, and have been now for many years, so we like work closely with Stanford Law School on design projects. Ruben and I have been out to Silicon Valley. I’ve helped teach courses at Stanford Law School on design. I’ve gone to the law school for presentations, and it’s all with Margaret Hagan, who is really the world leading expert on legal design. She has a massive Twitter following, and she’s doing all kinds of amazing things in the design field. And Margaret, through the grace of God, flew out here and walked around and then gave her take on the best way to help us reach our goal. And the one thing she said, which stuck with me immediately, she said, keep in mind, you want it to look industrial, so not not a conventional law firm, not carpet. And just to keep ruining this video here, but if you look on the floor, the floor is cement. So you come into a cement floor. There’s no ceiling. It feels like you’re in an ad agency, very warehousey, very industrial. And that was Margaret’s input. You want to feel like it’s a different space. It’s a creative space. And then she actually was involved along the way and giving feedback. And Shawn Wasn’t that wonderful, you know Margaret quite well. Was that wonderful that Margaret was willing to to help us along the way?
Shawn Swearingen 13:50
Amazing. I mean, she is just such a great partner, and she comes alongside you in this awesome way. Like, have you thought about this? Like she’s just a different brain, I think, than a lot of us. And it is just so great to have that, that partnership with her, and having her along for for that with us. Yeah,
Greg Lambert 14:08
I was, I was trying to remember, I remember we had talked about Margaret Hagan on a previous show, and that was with the Jeff Marple and the group that up in Boston on some of the stuff that they were working on. So yeah, she’s, uh, she’s, she’s got her, uh, I think she’s reached out to a few of the legal folks around to to help them on design. And she’s
Shawn Swearingen 14:31
done just amazing sprints with us and our clients. Like Greg, like one of your first questions, like, what was that light bulb moment for you? So David, started this amazing thing. I feel like I got brought along for the ride at a certain point in time when he’s like, Hey, Shawn, come out to the Design Lab. And it was at the D school at that time, and we had this amazing design sprint where we came out with a prototype that actually we ended up bringing to life. And from that moment on, I was. Like, I am sold. This is, this is the way to this is the way to roll,
DJ Gross 15:04
yeah, if I can do 12 seconds on that, because just gives Greg and Marlene this idea of, like, give me an example of it actually working. Lawyers don’t understand profitability. A very few people understand profitability. Say,
Greg Lambert 15:17
just saying the quiet part, out loud again.
DJ Gross 15:20
They just know you’re supposed to be profitable, and then it’s not a good thing if you’re not, it’s better
Shawn Swearingen 15:24
when a lawyer says it, though. So we’ll let David do that.
DJ Gross 15:28
Shawn came out, and we had a new profitability tool. Like most law firms, there’s ways to measure profitability, and it’s, you know, there’s these factors, and it’s complicated, and it’s got algorithms and all kinds of stuff. And so we had this sprint. In the middle of the sprint, we were trying to be empathetic about lawyers, and the idea was, well, when is there other examples in life when it’s really important, but it’s also complex, and there’s an algorithm? And someone said, Well, you know what really helps me? I don’t understand credit reporting at all, but I get this idea of I’m either in red or yellow or green, this idea of a color coded and that simple statement in the middle of a sprint got Shawn and everyone to say, Well, what about that? So we did a prototype, and as of today, right now, I can check my little meter, and I can see I’m in green, that’s good. Or I’m in yellow, okay, it’s all right. Or I’m in red, I have a problem, and that has had a huge impact on our lawyers. And it’s all because we did a design sprint where someone just had this analogy, and it helped bring to life something where we said you don’t need to understand everything, but you should try to stay in the green zone. And it’s had a huge effect. So that’s one example Greg and Marlene of just using design principles to help professionals in a way just you wouldn’t typically expect.
Marlene Gebauer 16:45
So that is one really good example. And I’m wondering sort of, if you have additional ones in terms of how this methodology of design thinking can help solve, you know, complex legal problems. And we’ve had people come on and say, you know, this is what design thinking is. But I’m really curious to hear, sort of what your story is in that regard.
DJ Gross 17:06
Well, let me just say there’s, there’s sort of two paths to go down when we talk about design and this ebook we have is visual advocacy and design thinking for lawyers. Yep, we’re going to get I’m only mentioning that because that explicitly describes the two paths. So there’s visual advocacy and then there’s design thinking. So I don’t know, Ruben, if you want to talk about the visual advocacy for a second, and then I can give a design thinking example from a real case that I think was helpful. But Ruben, you know, you’re the one of our visual advocacy experts. Do you want to just talk about that in the real world for a sec? Yeah. I
Ruben Gonzalez 17:40
mean, you know, one of the, one of the one of the complicated things we have is that we’ve got complicated things that we have to explain, either to the other side or to a court. And some of the wins, they’re really big from a visual advocacy perspective. Others are small wins that have a really big impact. And one of the examples that I love to share is really so basic, we had a challenge where we’ve got a competing consolidated mass torts, one consolidated in a federal court and another set of consolidated cases in a state court. And for obvious reasons, you kind of need some things to track, like discovery, right, depositions, document production, and we were just trying to find the clearest way we could to convince one of the judges that the schedule we had in place and one of those jurisdictions just wasn’t going to work, so we created a timeline. And it’s funny, you tell a lawyer, create a timeline, and they have every single date from the scheduling order, and it just becomes a big mess, right? And so we said, okay, let’s ask some questions, right? And figure out, like, what are just the key dates that we need? And really it was just like key, key discovery dates, and then the trial dates, because all we were trying to do is show one of those judges that if we went with the schedule that was in place, we would still be doing doing discovery when the second or third bow weather trial was was sort of ongoing. And so we created two very simple PowerPoint, PowerPoint slides, one with, like, the status quo, very simple, using colors to show you know, this is, this is first trial. Here’s all the discovery. And then a second slide, which was like, green, right, bright, exciting, like, feel good, saying the way forward. And it worked, right? And it was something simple. What I love, I really, I want to emphasize this point because Shawn has non lawyers on our team that sometimes help us with the design component. And it was collaboration. You know, one of the things that has bothered me since I was, since I was an associate, is like, we may have an issue. Maybe it’s design, maybe it’s PowerPoint, it’s something else, and the lawyer just passes it off right and says, Here design person make this look pretty, but when we came up with those two slides, it was a real collaboration between a couple of the partners. I wasn’t a partner yet, you know, but I was running sort of the discovery aspect of this, and two of people from Shawn’s team really collaborating on this piece late at night, and we got what we needed, and it was super clear, and when the judge calls it out, right? It’s always a win. So it’s one of my favorite examples from a visual advocacy, advocacy perspective, where we have a real impact on litigation.
Greg Lambert 20:07
Did you have your colored pencils out for that slide? Because I can kind of see it, you know, I
Ruben Gonzalez 20:12
so what I often do is, I’m not a great artist, but I often will sort of sketch it out. You know, we used an example, David, you know, David. David was nice enough to welcome me on board with this. You know, early on in my career, I come from Deloitte, where we did Deep Dive. Had we had design thinking? And then I became a lawyer, and I’m like, man, what was I thinking? And then got introduced to David early on. And David actually my very first trial, we did a design sprint, which, which I’m sure David could talk more about. But then the opening presentation and the closing presentation, for the opening and closing arguments, I would sketch out, oftentimes, the graphics that were going to make sense in this complicated medical device case to the jury, right? And again, you know another example, there’s slides, but super powerful, really effective for a judge and a jury, yeah,
DJ Gross 21:00
so and so, that’s visual advocacy, which can apply not just to courts, but also to a CEO presentation, a presentation to the GC, a training presentation to business people. So when we say visual advocacy, we mean in all all meanings of the word for business people, not just for judges, but on the design thinking. I’ll give you one example. We had a case involved crystallography, which is, you know, think molecules and atoms and how they’re arranged. And, you know, very few people in the world understand it. And our trial was outcome determinative on whether our version of the science was right, and is all about how atoms are stacked and and what does it mean for something to crystallize in atoms? So it was obviously incredibly complicated. So we had a design event with the client where we tried to talk about this, and then we had internal design events, but we invited normals, you know, into it. So we invited animals, you know, people who are just around. So it’s like, just come on in, and they were really struggling to understand what we were talking about. So we kept working on it, kept working on it, and then the more we looked at this, the more we thought, well, how do people learn about crystals? So I and others spent hundreds of hours searching the globe to learn how they learn. That’s one thing I really love to do. And I found a YouTube video of someone in India who was teaching high school and college students about crystallography, and the teacher had a bunch of tennis balls and was building crystal structures with tennis balls. And I was blown away, because I understood what he was saying. So then I went to our non lawyer team, like the receptionist in Silicon Valley, an assistant who you know, works with lawyers on scheduling and filings in Silicon Valley. So non lawyers, and I don’t mean like paralegals, I mean real non lawyers just working like they’re working at a company, doing their thing. And I tried to explain it to them, and then I had them explain it to me, and I did that maybe 25 times. But when we got to this billion dollar jury trial, which was in Pittsburgh just two or three years ago. I had done that so many times with real people that I felt very comfortable. So my cross exam of their expert, I had a handful of about 30 or 40 tennis balls, and I put them on a table, and the entire cross was me holding tennis balls up and getting him to confirm things. And we want a complete defense verdict, and I guarantee it was in part, if not in large part, because we were teaching the jury the science where they were saying, I understand what you’re saying, and that expert is agreeing with you, because I the first thing I said to the expert was, you’ve used tennis balls to explain crystallography, haven’t you? Yes, in fact, you know, people been doing that for decades. Yes. Well, then let’s get going with our tennis balls. And I started doing that. I would have never done that without this design process, and I would have never done that if I wasn’t interacting and collaborating with a diverse group of people, people all different walks, people who know science, who don’t know science, who are super sophisticated, not as sophisticated, and so it was very designy in the sense of, it’s democratic, it’s collaborative, and you do a lot of listening. And as you’re listening to the users, you start looking for an answer. So I kind of stumbled on it hundreds of hours into the project. But it was, it was really amazing to watch that work out. Greg
Ruben Gonzalez 24:19
and Marlene. What I what I like to say is this draws out the aha moments, right? So it’s the aha moment with the tennis balls. And actually, the space in Scottsdale is really conducive to this. And you know, a lot of credit to Shawn for this. Shawn was on the ground, but watching people interact with the things that we’ve got in the Tower of learning, but also elsewhere, can really inspire sort of these creative aha moments and the process itself. So we get, we get to AHA answers if we do the design process correct. But even the process, the brainstorming process, Shawn and I were involved in a in a big design sprint for a nonprofit offering a few months ago, and we had a lot of different nonprofit organizations all. Generally meeting the same mission, but trying to find a way to coordinate. And these are folks that are knee deep. They are the experts on what they do, but when we kept asking the why questions, like, you know, David has, like, really helped us, you know, understand this. And Margaret just keep asking the why questions. In the brainstorming session, they all came up with what was an aha moment, sort of the eureka moment that they realized that even though they all knew these processes and they knew the issue they had was bad information getting out, they hadn’t really, like figured out where the first interaction between the people who use their services. They hadn’t been able to pinpoint, like this is where the bad information might be originating. How do we focus efforts. There was just completely, just hadn’t come up before. And that is an aha moment. And the process can drive that. Obviously the solutions can drive that. And if you’ve got the right space, you’ve got the right things in front of people, they just, they start thinking about whatever their given challenge is differently. Well,
Greg Lambert 25:57
like I can see, you know how you can, over time, convince your your lawyers into seeing the value of the of the lab and then maybe even showing your clients the value of the lab. But how do you get them to work together on this and convince both sides that whatever issue they’re facing, they’re going to benefit by coming together and looking at at this design style of approaching their problems. That how do you convince them to do this? Yeah,
DJ Gross 26:31
Greg, it’s feel, I feel like you’ve watched some of our design sprints, because it’s really painful when they don’t get it, or when they don’t want to get it, it’s, it’s really painful. So just to give you a real, like vibrant, explicit example of a design sprint, if all of you were right here sitting in this little phone pod with me, and we were, we were on this table, and we were brainstorming with post it notes, and Greg, you had an idea, you said something like, Well, if we if the Navy was talking to us, they would say, you need to listen better, or you had some yet, something we would be telling everyone at the table. Remember when Greg is talking, you are looking at him and listening, and then we’d be saying, Greg, remember when you give your idea, you write it down, and then Greg, remember you put it up on the wall. Well, how often you you just never do that in life. You never sit around. And when Marlene starts talking, we go, Wait, hold on. Marlene is talking. Everyone look at Marlene, and then Marlene write down in two or three words your point, not put it on the wall. Well, when you do that for six straight hours with a group of colleagues, it is remarkable how much engagement you have. It is remarkable how much you can accomplish. You’re actually exhausted. Sometimes you’re, you know, you’re emotionally drained. But here’s the thing, a lot of big shots don’t want to do that. When they show up, thinking, Wait, I don’t listen to everyone and watch them write down post its I have a meeting and I tell people what we want to do, and then we do it. That’s what I do. That’s why I’ve been successful. So to your point, Greg, I often have to say to people, pull them out and say you’re not helping and you can’t do what you’re doing, because this isn’t design. If everyone in the room is waiting for the general counsel or the executive vice president or the head of the business unit to speak. That’s not design. Design is democratic with a small d, so we have to not only indoctrinate people before, but often during, to say this is actually about everyone. And you know what? We want a billion dollar trial because of what receptionists and other people were saying to us, not because of what Ruben and I were saying. So it actually really matters to listen to everyone. So Greg, unfortunately, sometimes you just have to shake people up. And every once in a while, unfortunately, you say, I’m not sure this is going to work, because the dominant powerful, either executive vice president or in house lawyer, or maybe it’s a partner in a law firm. Whoever it is, they just can’t get there. You know, Greg and Marlene, when they can’t get there, sometimes you have to kind of give up, but that’s the rare example. Usually they’ll at least try. And then the last thing you got to do is convince everyone else it’s okay. Sometimes you have to say to the powerful person, could you please tell them it’s okay for them to talk? And he’ll say, It’s okay for you to talk. It’s okay you can you can have ideas. So that’s why we do all these tricks like secret voting for ideas, or everyone write down your post it, but don’t say it and put it on the wall. You have to do all these things to do as a workaround to this. Exactly so for the dominant personalities, for the dominant people. And I’m really, of course, expressive, and, you know, I can, I can fill up a room with my energy level, but I’m actually in listening mode, and kind of enforcement mode where I’m just telling other people listen. I mean, Shawn and Reuben. You’ve seen it, where we walk around like you need to listen to everyone. You need to write it down. You need to. Listening, write it down, and I will rarely get involved, because it’s all about the people in the room. So everyone has to kind of change gears. I know Ruben and Shawn, you’ve been doing so many of these. I’m sure you’ve had a similar dynamic, but that’s to me, Greg, what you just raised is probably the central most difficult issue for what I call law firm, legal design.
Shawn Swearingen 30:19
I will say I think sometimes it’s a little bit if you build it, they will come like, you have to sometimes experience it or talk to someone who has experienced it. So, David, I have also seen those same people that you have described right there. By the end of the day, they are like, this was the best thing I have ever done. Like, for an entire day. They’re not on their computers, they’re not on their they’re not like checking voicemail, email, nothing. They are like in the moment of thinking, in putting their ideas out. And how might we do this, or how might we do that? And it can be a little transformational. So it’s kind of both ways. And once you’ve kind of been through that transformation. This sounds very like as a religious experience, almost. But once you have been through it, you’re like, wow, I can see the power. And I want to do more. I want to bring more people in. So I think a lot of a lot of the success here has also been kind of the word of mouth, the ground game. We
DJ Gross 31:17
affectionately refer to that as we think they may have joined the cult. Oh, wow. Like they’re in. So all of a sudden they’re the biggest proponent. They go from skeptic to suddenly, we need to do more of this, which we get all the time.
Marlene Gebauer 31:27
Yeah, when a design sprint is successful, I mean, there’s such a positive vibe, you know, going on, and people are very excited about it. I did have a couple follow up questions, so I thought it was interesting that you’re saying, Okay, if you, if you’re, you know, you tell people like, Okay, you need to stop and listen. Sometimes, like, when people are talking and they’re coming up with their ideations, like, people are kind of like talking over one another because they’re so excited. And I thought it was interesting that actually pausing and let everybody speak is actually more successful than kind of that, that kind of ideation jumble. And the second point I had is, what about the introverts? Like, you’re dealing with people saying, Okay, it’s, you know, with bosses in the room saying, you know, it’s okay to talk, it’s okay to say something. We vote, you know, we vote in private. But what about the introverts who it’s just internal, like, I don’t necessarily want to say anything right here. I might think about it and come back later. Well, I
DJ Gross 32:27
think with introverts, there’s sort of introverts and there’s introverts. So I mean, there are CEOs who are introverts. So there are people who are very comfortable in a design sprint, they just happen to be an introvert. And then there’s also people who are socially introverted. And so for them, someone forced them to come into this design lab, and they’re just miserable if they have to talk and because they want to process, and they really don’t want to just be talking off the top of their head. So for some people, you just have to allow them to be quiet. So you know, if they have fewer ideas, it’s okay. And if you have to write that down, and they do write that down, that’s great. If they don’t write anything down, you let it go. You don’t say hey, hey, hey, hey, you’re supposed to write something down. So, so there’s a category, I think it’s pretty small, of people who you can just tell are miserable in this setting. But most introverts, as long as you work with them, can come up with the best ideas. We all know this well. I mean, we know this is true empirically, that introverts have amazing ideas, so you just have to set it up where, as long as everyone’s listening and they’re calm and there’s no judging. That’s another huge rule. I’m sure you know this, but a lot of times, people will say, That’s a great idea, and I’ll always say, let’s not do the that’s a great idea. That’s okay. I like that. You’re not here to judge ideas. Just just put the ideas on the wall. We’ll vote later. So when the introverts realize that everybody’s just kind of giving ideas, writing stuff down, you know, we’re okay. But Marlene, it’s a real challenge to navigate. And if no one, like Ruben, does this exceptionally well, Shawn does this really well. If no one’s monitoring, if you’re just letting it happen, then you have a problem. But don’t you think Ruben, when you’re actively monitoring, you can protect the introverts and get them to engage that
Ruben Gonzalez 34:10
the I yes and yes, I think that’s exactly right, David. And you mentioned a couple things, David, that I think are key, and that is the ground rules, Marlene and Greg, so we actually start our design sprints with very simple ground rules, right? And we refer to the ground rules on breaks, maybe between sessions, and sometimes David and Shawn and I may hear some of the things that we’re talking about now, and we’ll take a quick pause and remind everybody about the ground rules. And then one thing that I like to do is when we do take those breaks is, is talk to folks, but especially if I maybe do encounter sort of an introvert and have a conversation, and if there is an opportunity at some point to say, hey, Marlene, you and I were talking on the break about X, Y and Z, what do you think? And I’ll tell you we had one of those experiences. We kind of created like a mock setting so that we could put. Together our video, which I think the two of you have seen, and it was, I forget what the challenge was, but one of our introverts said, Well, it’s influencers. That’s where I’m getting my information from influencers. And all of us were like, that is really influencers to start talking about this big challenge that we came up with, you know, just so that the film, people could do it. So there’s different strategies. But I love the way David phrased it, that if you can sort of protect the way the introverts go through their process, you know, it works out at the end of the day. So,
Marlene Gebauer 35:32
DJ, right. DJ,
DJ Gross 35:34
we’re saying thank you, wow. Marlene, okay,
Marlene Gebauer 35:36
so you, you, you gave us a really compelling story about the tennis balls as as a way to do storytelling. And I know that the design lab focuses on, you know, creating these types of narratives. So how do we how do you do that with with technology and design to tell these stories? I mean, tennis balls, I guess, are a type of technology, but not quite the same as what I’m what I’m thinking. So, yeah,
DJ Gross 36:04
well, I mean, technology is your partner, and so you want to think about ways to use technology creatively in a way that can bring about cool design solutions. So first of all, we use, we use technology in our design sprints. So that’s one thing, but also sometimes we’ll have a design sprint where it has something to do with technology. But I will say we are not strategic consultants or technology consultants. So I’ve had clients who have said, you know, we have a really complicated spreadsheet program and we just need to make it work better. And I’ll say, Well, you should find someone who can help you with that, because that’s not going to be us. Not going to be us. You know, I’m not going to, like, look at your spreadsheets and then give you a fee. That’s not what we do. We’re not consultants. But if you, if you can, you know, not boil the ocean, which is a trite phrase, but it is important to say, Everyone comes in and just wants to have a design problem. That’s everything. But if you can actually tell me what it is about your spreadsheet project that you think is getting in the way with your team? Ruben and I and Shawn can help you, but we’re not going to be doing like technology solutions that are heavy into technologists. It’s just not what we do. But I wanted to answer your question a different way, Marlene, which is use of technology is different. So for example, you know, you can use post its and all that kind of stuff. But you can also, as you know, use virtual post its if you’re doing a virtual design sprint, which is kind of neat. Margaret Hagan has been a leader and has done virtual sprints with us, where we’re doing everything virtually the big thing and Marlene and Greg, I listened to your podcast last week about AI, the big thing we’re experimenting with right now is using AI in a design sprint. So imagine if there’s four tables. Tell us more, there’s five people at that table. I was
Shawn Swearingen 37:47
gonna say we came this far. We almost
Greg Lambert 37:51
didn’t what we’re 40 minutes in before we mentioned AI. Just imagine you have
DJ Gross 37:56
five people at this table, five people at this table, five people at this table, and a single person at this table, and the five people are brainstorming all the different ways that we could solve some problem, whether it’s a working with a pro bono, you know, pro bono working with a community organization, or working with a client on their business challenges, or you’re dealing with some sort of complex transaction, or case, whatever it is you’re working on, you know, we’re trying to brainstorm a solution. Table number four is someone sitting there with a laptop asking questions. And I did this experiment. I spoke on AI with Ruben. Ruben and I gave a talk to an AI, and we showed an example where you had to come up with all the different ways a product might be successful, other than the trademark, because, you know, you’re trying to show the trademark didn’t drive the sales. So, so we’re sitting there thinking about it. And I said, I think I’ll just ask my AI tool. And I, you know, did all the right prompting. And said, you know, please be creative. Brainstorm. Tell me all the ways that this could be a product could be created without the trademark. And I got 20 amazing ideas, of course, in 3.4 seconds. Well, that means, you know, if I had table number four, table number four is saying, Yeah, I have 20 ideas. How’s table number one doing? We have three. How about table to two? Table number 340, well, table number four is doing pretty well. This AI is pretty fast. And so if you’re willing to allow AI to participate, you know, AI is an extrovert. They’ve got a lot of ideas, and they want to share them, and they don’t, they don’t listen to the others. They’re just giving you ideas. So we’re going to be trying. Ai Marlene, it’ll be really fun to see that. And then the other thing we do is, whatever people in their early 20s are doing with video, we do as well. So for example, there’s a camera you may be familiar with called the Insta three, which is a 360 video camera. So it actually takes 360 video and then you can choose what you want and do all kinds of stuff. I’ve actually been in one of those. Yeah, wonderful. Then you know all about this violin. It can get pretty it can spin around, yeah, faster. So yesterday, we put one on one of those invisible selfie sticks in the center of the design lab, and we did a practice session. And and started recording, and it blew us away, how much you captured, which means, if you and Greg came for some event, and then you are on your way, and we’re going to send you one of Reuben’s classic videos. Ruben and I both know Final Cut Pro and we know how to do video stuff. We’d like to sometimes send some sort of, you know, video celebration of the event. Well, imagine, you know, the idea of an Insta 360 video vibe with music, as opposed to, like me holding my phone up. And so we’re always trying to find the fun, exciting technology to increase collaboration, increase joy, but we tend not to do design sprints that focuses on the technology, because that’s just not our specialty. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 1 40:37
sometimes you get to the point of you’ve kind of drawn up a prototype, and, like, David’s example, earlier of that dashboard, the profitability, perfect example. But we didn’t create that there. Then we took that and over many months, that became the prototype for the thing that we created. So, yeah,
Ruben Gonzalez 40:53
and, and, I think on the storytelling piece Marlene, I guess the one thing I would say about because people do, do ask from a visual advocacy perspective, you know, what can I do to make this more engaging, to make it better for the user? And one thing that I often do, particularly when I do mock trials, is I kind of try to use PowerPoint to the limits, right? And that’s with transitions. It’s making small animations, maybe in a PowerPoint presentation, to show what it looks like when the inside of a boiler fails. But the other thing it helps with is cadence. And if you’ve got good cadence and you’ve got a PowerPoint presentation with transitions, that helps you with the cadence, you can become a really good storyteller. And it’s not just in trial where we’re where we’re sort of saying, hey, what if we do a PowerPoint presentation, or what if we do a movie, but there are other aspects of our business where we can be helpful to the lawyers and say, Hey, did that client tell you what they were looking for when they asked for deliverables? If they didn’t tell you, like, specify, why not take a little risk do what you would normally do? But let’s put a video together. And like and like David mentioned David, David and I are really good at that, so there are other things that we can do. And what I like to say is, sometimes I, you know, in my practice, I’ve only been a partner for a year. I’ve been practicing for 10 years, sometimes I have to do a little bit more convincing, which means a little bit more risk taking so that I can show folks, show people how these tools, how this process, how these concepts, can be successful to them in their own practice. I
Marlene Gebauer 42:17
think it’s important to point out that you’re taking, you’re doing risk taking to convince others, whether it’s, you know, clients or other people on the team. Because, right? I think it’s key, and I think a lot of people don’t do it. No.
Ruben Gonzalez 42:29
Marlena, I think that’s exactly right. When I was a brand new associate, I had a partner ask, tell me, we had a prepare, a business person to go to court somewhere in California where we couldn’t send a lawyer. And I sort of and he said, create a memo. You know, just draft a memo so that we can send it to this business person. And I’m thinking to myself, What business person wants to read a memo on going to court? So I did the memo, because that’s what I was asked to do. But then I did a PowerPoint presentation with putting myself in the shoes of that business person, right? Here’s the here’s the address of the court you’re going to walk to the third floor when you get to the courtroom. And I had a picture of what a courtroom would look like, you know, walk to the right. That’s the court clerk. Introduce yourself right, step by step. And this was a fortune, you know, Fortune 100 industrial gas company. The client then called, and he can be pretty tough, and he told the partner. He said, I took that PowerPoint that Ruben sent me, and I went straight to the General Counsel, and I said, look at what this first year associate at Faegre. We were then Fagor Baker Daniels. Fagor Baker Daniels put together that took some risk taking and so, and that’s, you know, that was a perfect segue into getting to meet David and starting to exercise and flex those parts of my brain to be useful to partners and clients and risk pieces huge,
DJ Gross 43:43
yeah. And the reality is, in my what I affectionately refer to as my day job, which is is a trial lawyer. That’s what I do full time as my day job. One of the downsides of being a trial lawyer is you every once or I happen to lose, and when you lose, it’s awful. It stays with you for decades, haunts you, so you’re signing up for something where, if you win, that’s great. Everybody’s happy. You can go celebrate and talk about it for us your careers, but if you lose, that’s devastating. I think it’s similar in design, where you, you know, if you if you say, Hey, let us try this and you fly everyone out. If it goes well, like we’ve been talking about, it’s great if it doesn’t go well, you know, it didn’t go well. So you have to accept the fact that it might not go well and that you’re not going to have that, you know, be the end, but you’re going to learn from that and try to be better. But, you know, Marlene, this idea of risk is real, and you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. And in design, there’s so much resistance to design, so much because of who lawyers are and who professionals are, that you know you got to be you got to be willing to say, Yeah, every once in a while, might not work. And if that happens, you know you got to accept that. And that’s not easy.
Greg Lambert 44:56
I know that the the examples that we talked about hit. Have been, you know, large litigation matters. It sounds like that’s kind of the typical scenario that that lends itself to design thinking. But are there situations where, you know, there’s use in transactional practices or or even in the administrative side of there’s the business side of the law firm, where what you’re doing with design, with these sprint designs that would work in those situations.
DJ Gross 45:29
Yeah, we, we obviously use design to work on major, complex matters. And you’ve definitely understood Greg that’s like, definitely keeps the lights on, pays a lot of bills, because those are always, you know, multi 100 million dollar ventures. So there’s a lot of budget for using design, but we use design for a bunch of other things. So for example, we’ve had in house legal departments come to our design lab, and they’ve said, you know, and we’re talking, you know, very significant companies, where they said, you know, there’s a new business unit. We need to figure out how to interact with them. And we had a design sprint about how to interact with this new business unit. Spend the day doing that. That was amazing. We had another fortune 500 company fly out to Silicon Valley and went to the Stanford d school with Margaret Hagan and us, and team of us, and we were just talking about how their internal legal department can communicate more effectively in certain areas. And that’s what we did the whole day on. It’s just, how could an in house legal department communicate? Department communicate effectively? We’ve worked with organizations that are interested in all kinds of different perspectives. You know, one of the things I did many years ago, back then, they were called Facebook. Now they’re meta. A very small group of people at Facebook came in and said, we really want to increase the diversity of inventors, you know, so that it’s the inventors have are from a wider array, and we spent a day focusing just on that. And over time, what developed with the Jeremiah Chan, who’s now the he’s the head of patents at meta. I’ve known Jeremiah for years. He’s a big design fan, but now they develop all kinds of programs, and they have a national program for increasing diversity for patent practitioners. They have a national they have incredible programs for increasing diversity for inventors, but it kind of started out years ago, just sitting there square one, what do you think? And so you can apply design to almost anything. And we do a lot of community service, we do a lot of client work, we do a lot of internal work. I’ve had the entire management board of our firm out to Silicon Valley, where we worked on ways to get more partner engagement so you can use it for everything. Greg, but the reality is, we’re a business, and so, you know, you can do a lot of things where you’re investing in client relationships and helping out with community, but you also want to do certain things where, yeah, it’s actually helping you with some major matter on the issue of transactions. I just think that’s a hill we still have to climb. Obviously, deals could be run better. Obviously, you know, things could go better. You know, we’re in, we’re in a world where design would be, would be helpful. And I’ve certainly had conversations with deal people who’ve said they want to come out to our D lab and do stuff. So I think we probably will, in a year or two, have done some of that, but that’s been one of the hills that I’ve been really pushing Greg, which is, there’s, there’s no reason you couldn’t use design to be more effective deal lawyers, more effective corporate lawyers, more effective transactional lawyers. No reason, but you need advocates. You know, you need champions. And so we’re working on it, but I think we’ve kind of had some mini breakthroughs when just breakthroughs. Wouldn’t you say Ruben on the on that front?
Ruben Gonzalez 48:24
Yeah, yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And part of, part of the process, or I think part of that success, has been by helping our lawyers think of different ways we can use design. So David mentioned a few, some of the really successful examples where we’ve used design from like a business perspective, or business of law perspective, it’s pitches, right? You know, we we all different types of clients in all different places. And I think everybody’s guilty of this. I think consulting firms are guilty of this. We go back to the materials that we use for somebody else, and we recraft, and then we keep our fingers crossed. But you can use this process to say, Okay, our client is in this industry. Let’s think of what we’re trying to communicate for this client in this industry. And let’s think of the way that that client would communicate the terms that they would use, the phrases they would use in their industry, maybe with their business team. And boy, how crazy would it be if they got a pitch from a law firm that seemed to be speaking the same language. So if you can start in places like that, you know, then, then we bring the transactional people together, or the regulatory folks, whoever it may be, and say, how else can we apply sort of that brainstorming session, you know, to what you do? Because the fact that matter is like, I’m not a transactional lawyer, so I, you know, I don’t know the day in and day out of their business, but they can tell us, right and we can facilitate David and I and Shawn can facilitate those conversations the same way we would if we were dealing on some challenge that a client had somewhere else. We don’t. We don’t necessarily have to be experts in their business or what they do to ask the right questions to maybe get to a good solution somewhere.
DJ Gross 49:58
I’ll just add one thing that I. You know, phrase we often use is utter simplicity. We’re looking for utter simplicity. We’re not using design to make things more complicated or more difficult to understand. We’re doing the opposite is utter simplicity. And I did a training session for a Fortune, you know, 100 company, bunch of people, and what I wanted to show them was, your PowerPoint presentations are terrible. You’re awful at training business people. You’re awful at communicating with your GC. You’re awful. It’s just terrible. And so what I did was I said I’m going to do a presentation that says that, and then says how it could be better, but I’m gonna have no text. So the presentation was like eight photos. There was a photo of, like a think of a river with pollution, which is what most slides are like, and then a river, a lake, Crystal Clear Lake. And I said, this is what you’re shooting for. And I just had some pictures and this pretty sophisticated Silicon Valley Tech company, and I was expecting these forward thinking people to say, Wow, I’m going to try to be more simple. Some of them did. Some of them said this was life changing. But a lot of them were like, Well, I would never put a picture in a presentation. And this is the tech company who’s creative, and out in front it’s like, no, you put the heading in the three bullets, and you give your presentation. And I just was realizing, wow, just the utter simplicity of a photo that makes your point. Everyone gets it. Is terrifying to professionals and to lawyers, and I think part of it is you have to make choices. And Ruben talks about this all the time. You have to have judgment, and you have to say, no. This is the one message I want to give where, if you put up a slide that has 14 things, anybody can do what they want with it, but it’s terrifying. Because back to your point, Marlene, about risk, it’s risky to say this is my point. That’s risky, because if they think it’s a stupid point, you got a problem. Oh, go ahead, Marlene. Oh,
Marlene Gebauer 51:49
yeah, sure, we touched on the ebook. And so I want to make sure that we talk about the ebook. There’s an ebook on your site that you can download, and it’s on design thinking and visual advocacy for lawyers. So let’s take a little deeper dive into that. What, what? What brought that on? Why did you do it? And what’s what’s in it?
DJ Gross 52:12
So many people say I don’t understand legal design, or it sounds stupid, or what’s visual advocacy, that we just thought we should communicate what it is as simply as possible. So we did one version, and then we did another version, and the the 2.0 version is the version that is now on our website and is at Apple books that you can download. And we’ve gotten it down to, I think, roughly 4344 minutes to skim. And we basically have tried to make it as easy as easy as possible. There’s a lot of pictures and very little text and a lot of diagram. And the idea is just if you fly through this in under an hour, you’ll get the vibe of what is design thinking, and also what is visual advocacy. And there’s all kinds of resources, because it’s based on my training that I did when I audited Stanford stuff. And Ruben has done all kinds of stuff in design. We have all kinds of books and sources that we’ve looked at over the years. So it’s, you know, legit, but it’s just the idea is high level skim. And the whole point Marlene is, very few people get what design thinking is, and they don’t have time to learn and visual advocacy. What’s that? So this is just saying. If you want to know what design thinking is, here’s what it is, boom, boom, boom. And if you want to know what visual advocacy, here are a few things you could think about, boom, boom, boom, and then we’re done and, and we declare victory. So it’s just a quick way to get a sense of things and, and it’s been really well received, which is great, and it’s kind of accomplishing its objective, which is introduce people to design in a way that’s easy and
Ruben Gonzalez 53:41
maybe a quick yes and on that point, because what I love, what I love about it. And Shawn, Shawn has been in Chicago many times, and sits down and looks at the little library I have what I’m looking for, an inspiration somewhere, running a better meeting ideas, right? Taking Little Bets, right? Peter Sims spoke little bets is one of my favorites. Or, you know, the stuff Chip and Dan Heath, right? All of those things are by non lawyers, right? I always feel like, I’m going to the non lawyers, I’m going to the business people, MBA folks. Just look for ideas to maybe spruce things up here. This is something published by a law firm, which is, you know, it’s awesome, and that we can now look at a resource that is, that is really thought provoking and creative and colorful with really serious concepts. I mean, you know, we like to talk about how this is. This is fun because it is. It’s a lot of fun, but these are serious concepts, and it’s a very serious process, but it’s in this unintimidating form, published by a law firm. I don’t know that anybody else is is doing that. And I think, I think David with design lab ebook has, has really tapped into something here. And
DJ Gross 54:51
Shawn, with your support, it’s at a good price, right?
Shawn Swearingen 54:53
That’s at a great price, just to be clear, because it’s really free, we’re giving away the. Wonderful thing because, like, truly, I think it really uplifts the entire legal industry, and that is a really good thing.
Greg Lambert 55:08
Yeah, we definitely love three are free. We’re
Marlene Gebauer 55:11
very pro free. Well, we’re
Greg Lambert 55:13
at the point in the episode where we ask everyone our crystal ball question. So Shawn, I’m gonna throw it to you first. What changes or challenges do you see on the horizon for projects like the design lab that will help firms like Faegre Drinker over the next couple of years?
Shawn Swearingen 55:29
Yeah, I guess I would point to like, it still has that very human, centered approach. And I think, you know, I’m a technologist too, just like you Greg and you Marlene, right? Like that is our that is what we do, and it’s very important for us to continue to like find new products, new technologies transform our organizations. But there is still that element that you always have to start with, the person that you are designing this for, and there is always a person at the core. And so for me, I think it continues to keep us focused there when all of these other things are coming at us, like I love that we’re experimenting with AI, because I see that even in the design lab, I see that as an absolute idea generator, and it’s going to just make us even better at design thinking. But for me, I think it’s kind of continue to stay grounded in the human human and
Greg Lambert 56:20
Ruben, how about you?
Ruben Gonzalez 56:21
Yes, I think Shawn is exactly right that. I think our practice is going to continue to change, and so I think, and it’s going to change really quick. It’s already happening, right? And so I think that the Design Lab offers an opportunity to help us adapt to that change, and, more importantly, make the firm a destination for people, right? I think it’s going to get I could be wrong about this, but I remember when I was in law school, there was, you know, this, there’s too many lawyers out there. Ruben, you know, what are you thinking? You’re going to be one of like 200 lawyers for every person. And I think that’ll continue to remain true. But the number of folks who are going to want to consider firms destination places, if firms kind of keep doing what they’ve been doing forever. I think it’s going to be tough to find the right people and the design lab. The fact that we’ve got this, that we’re investing in this, and that it’s growing in what we’re doing, is going to create a real opportunity for us in the future.
Greg Lambert 57:13
And DJ, any other quiet parts you want to say out loud on this?
DJ Gross 57:18
I think it’s really important in the years to come that we continue this learning mindset, that we listen and that we ask questions. You know, I don’t understand what this new tool is. I don’t understand what this technology is. I don’t understand why we’re doing this. And I think a lot of people just are quietly miserable as technology increases. And, you know, we have zoom meetings with their videos turned off. And, you know, firms are telling people they need to come into work two or three days a week, or whatever it is. And, you know, it’s just kind of a battle out there. Or Greg, yep. And so, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, I just think it can, it can feel kind of bleak, you know, when you think about the empty offices and the people kind of just doing their thing. And what I like about the design lab in the years to come is it’ll it’ll be a way to say, no, come out here. We’re going to listen to each other. We’re going to talk to each other, we’re going to generate ideas. We’re going to be together. And guess what? It’s okay. You know, if you have some issue with the technology, let’s learn about it together. If you have a worry about this eventual, you know, something’s taking over your practice. Let’s talk about it. And this idea of a real, physical safe space. I mean, this is a safe space in the sense that come on in here and collaborate in the future. I think it’s going to be critical. Because if you just look at where technology is going, where law firm practices are going, where profitability and realization and all those metrics are going. You know, it can be terrifying to think about being a professional, you know, whether you’re talking about law or other fields, and this is a way to say, no, no, it’s not terrifying. It’s exciting. And guess what? We’re all going to work on this together. Come on over to design lab. Let’s collaborate. Let’s engage. It’s going to be okay. And that’s what I get most excited about when I think about our our D lab,
Marlene Gebauer 59:01
well, the learning mindset at work and in life, I think is a good way to end the podcast. So Shawn Swearingen, DJ Gross. Ruben Gonzalez, we want to thank you so very much for taking the time to talk with us about the relaunch of the design lab and for coming to the geek in review. Yeah, thanks. And of course, thanks to all of you, our listeners for taking the time to listen to the geek and review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on LinkedIn, and
Greg Lambert 59:30
we’ll post make sure we put the links on the show notes. But what’s the best way for people to find out more about the legal design lab or to reach out with more questions, sure. Well,
Shawn Swearingen 59:41
if you search Faegre Drinker Design Lab, it’ll be your first hit on Google. So right there, you’ll see us, and you can reach out to me or David or Ruben anytime.
Greg Lambert 59:52
Awesome. It’s good to have good SEO, right?
Marlene Gebauer 59:56
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Yeah, thank you so much, Jerry.
Greg Lambert 1:00:01
Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene still made.