Co-Authored by Hadassah Drukarch, Marco Mendola and Anna Posthumus Meyjes
Legal technology is only as effective as the experiences it creates for those who rely on it. When tools are designed to align with the needs, workflows, and pain points of legal professionals, they become a powerful means to achieve desired business outcomes and meet client needs.
User-centric design serves as the bridge between cutting-edge technology and the realities of legal work, focusing on practical experiences to ensure that technology enhances, rather than complicates, daily tasks. By prioritizing empathy and collaboration, user-centric design offers a means to revolutionize the way legal professionals interact with technology, empowering them to focus on what matters most: delivering quality legal services.
This blog post explores the power of user-centric design as a transformative tool for legal innovation. By examining the intersection of legal practice, technology, and design, it highlights the importance of building solutions that prioritize user needs. Drawing insights from a gamified workshop we sponsored at the Legal Tech in the South West (LTiSW) conference in Bristol (UK) this past October, this piece delves into how design-driven approaches can help lawyers and legal teams avoid common pitfalls and unlock the full potential of legal technology.
A legal, tech and design perspective on building user-centric solutions
At the heart of user-centric design lies empathy: deeply understanding the frustrations and challenges that users face daily. For legal professionals, these frustrations often include inefficiencies in document review, difficulties managing deadlines across complex cases, or struggling with tools that fail to reflect the nuances of legal workflows. Empathy allows innovators to identify these pain points and design solutions that genuinely address them. This process starts with thorough user research: interviewing legal professionals, observing workflows, and using simulations to replicate real-life scenarios. Feedback is not a one-time activity but an ongoing loop, ensuring that solutions evolve alongside user needs, creating tools that remain effective and relevant over time.
In legal innovation, technology plays a transformative role, but its success depends on a clear understanding of the underlying problems it seeks to solve. Too often, organizations jump to tech-first solutions without fully grasping the use cases and business outcomes they aim to achieve. Effective solutions, especially where these have become more accessible to readily usable by experts and laymen alike thanks to the proliferation of AI, succeed because they emerge from a foundation of user understanding. These tools transform repetitive, manual tasks into streamlined processes, freeing legal professionals to focus on higher-value work. However, it is critical to view technology not as the answer but as a tool in the legal service delivery toolbox – one that works best when grounded in the specific challenges and workflows of its intended users.
Empathy and innovation require collaboration across disciplines, bringing together lawyers, technologists, and designers to develop impactful solutions. This multi-disciplinary approach ensures that diverse perspectives, expertise, and experiences inform the design process, leading to more comprehensive and effective outcomes. A key element of this collaboration is communication, in other words, creating a space where stakeholders can articulate their needs, align on objectives, and translate insights into actionable tasks. Building a culture of user-centric innovation requires champions, individuals first and then teams, who are eager to embrace change and lead by example. These early adopters can drive momentum, making innovation contagious and setting new norms.
At its core, user-centric design is about putting users – lawyers and clients alike – first, ensuring that legal services and tools are both intuitive and effective as much as possible. For lawyers, this shift offers more than just better client outcomes, it fosters deeper job satisfaction by optimizing for value-creation across the relationships that underpin their day-to-day work. By rethinking legal services not as ends in itself but as a pathway to broader client goals, innovation can transform the experience of those providing and receiving legal services at large.
Missing big without design: a recap of our gamified workshop at LTSW 2024
‘Show don’t tell’ stands out as one of the most impactful design thinking mantras.
At the Legal Tech in the South West event this past October in Bristol, we embraced a singular mission: to spark a BS-free approach to legal innovation. True to our commitment, we sponsored a unique workshop on user-centric design in legal tech, led by Marco Mendola and Anna Posthumus Meyjes, founder of Aclara Legal Design and an invaluable advisor to our team.
In our previous article, Driving AI Adoption in Legal Through Gamification: A High-Level Roadmap to Get Practical with Legal AI, we explored the transformative potential of gamification. While not an exact science or a guaranteed business strategy, gamification can, when thoughtfully applied, act like a DRS (Drag Reduction System) in Formula 1 – boosting performance metrics across the board.
For this workshop, we focused on the 3 M’s of Gamification outlined by Janaki Kumar and Mario Herger:
- Manage the mission
- Monitor motivation
- Measure the metrics
Although their framework is tailored to business software, we hypothesized that simplifying the medium – from digital to paper – wouldn’t compromise the effectiveness of our game board prototype. This allowed us to test its applicability while maintaining alignment with our research goals.
Marco Mendola, Co-founder at The Law of Tech"Testing has always been the most thrilling phase for me in any project. With this gamified workshop, we aimed to push the limits of user experience by bringing multiple stakeholders together to tackle the same challenge simultaneously. Their responses exceeded our expectations, but what truly caught our attention was the players' demand for deeper complexity when discussing the problem. Could fostering a more open mindset be the key to more successful implementations?"
The workshop’s starting point was a bold problem statement: legal tech often falls short without applied design thinking. A prime example is the lack of thoughtful User Experience (UX) design, which should account for diverse user perspectives, the differing needs of all parties involved, and the careful balance of resources and incentives throughout the user journey.
This hands-on session wasn’t just about ideas – it was about igniting a paradigm shift in how we approach legal tech design. By prioritizing user-centric innovation, we hope to inspire solutions that truly meet the complex demands of the legal industry.
Crafting a simple problem statement might sound straightforward – but let’s be honest, it’s anything but. A touch of healthy sarcasm helps keep us grounded as we tackle complex challenges head-on. With this mindset, we moved to the next chapter of our journey: reducing complexity and honing in on a more tangible research question.
Enter the “How Might We” approach. This method allowed us to zero in on a foundational principle for success in legal tech: empathy. By deeply understanding and prioritizing clients’ needs, we set out to demonstrate how empathy can drive meaningful impact in the design, development, and implementation of legal technology.
To structure our efforts, we identified three key pillars essential to an empathy-driven approach:
- Tech – Ensuring the technology meets user needs and expectations.
- Legal – Balancing innovation with compliance and legal frameworks.
- Client – Focusing on the end-user experience to create value.
These pillars became the foundation of our research and experimentation, reinforcing the belief that empathy isn’t just a soft skill—it’s the cornerstone of impactful legal tech innovation.
As we prepared to present our model and test our work with the audience at the event, we needed a framework to align our research scenario with the event’s core themes. This required a model that could help us navigate complexity without getting lost in over-analysis.
We found alignment with the approach outlined below for one compelling reason: too many existing diagrams attempt to be overly specific, often addressing elements beyond our control. Instead of providing clarity, they risk becoming speculative and abstract. In contrast, a well-designed framework should identify broad categories, enabling us to make sense of the chaos step by step while maintaining focus.
While this model isn’t flawless, it resonates with our core belief: design, simplicity, and user-centricity should drive every legal tech conversation. By keeping these principles at the forefront, we aim to create meaningful tools that prioritize practical application over theoretical perfection.
This is where the most exciting element of the workshop took center stage: a gamified approach to problem-solving, right at the event tables.
Here’s how it worked:
- Two Teams Per Table: Encouraging collaboration and a touch of friendly competition.
- Dice to Navigate the User Journey: Adding a dynamic, interactive layer to the experience.
- “Problem to Fix” Cards: Presenting real-world challenges for participants to tackle.
- Unexpected Event Spots: Think surprise scenarios like “Disaster! IT Bug!” to keep teams on their toes.
- The Goal: Be the first team to complete the board game by addressing at least two problems and collecting actionable takeaways to share.
This hands-on activity brought design thinking principles to life, fostering discussion, creativity, and practical insights—proving that gamification can be a powerful tool in making legal tech innovation both engaging and impactful.
To enhance the game experience and mirror real-world scenarios, we introduced a set of five problem cards for players to draw during their journey. These cards served as task missions, guiding participants through challenges and sparking creative problem-solving.
Each card was designed to simulate real-life situations, complete with unexpected factors and additional technical information. The goal? To shift the balance, introduce complexity, and inspire participants to think critically as they navigate their user journey.
By weaving these dynamic elements into the game, we created a more immersive and realistic experience, highlighting the challenges of legal tech implementation while encouraging innovative solutions.
Here 3 takeaways we wanted to highlight with our pioneer players:
So, what’s the takeaway from our gamified workshop experiment?
First and foremost: people had fun! Laughter and smiles filled the room—undeniable evidence that the activity was engaging. Creating a lively, positive atmosphere is a key success metric for exercises like this, as the energy in the room speaks volumes about its impact.
However, fun is only one piece of the puzzle. The real question is: Did the gamified experience provide tangible value to participants? Did it enhance their understanding of the user journey and equip them with practical takeaways for legal tech innovation?
We’re still in the process of analyzing the feedback from participants and will share detailed insights soon. For now, we’re excited to share the raw results collected immediately after the session, giving you a direct and unfiltered glimpse into the outcomes.
| What has worked | What to improve |
|---|---|
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Clear research question and mission
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Rules of the game should have been clearer
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Easy to relate to problems raised for a wider group sharing
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Some groups finished the game very early, and some others were still playing after the 15 minutes session
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Pen, paper and dices make the experience real |
Although the general incentive (winner price) was clear, the game lacked of interim rewards
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Problem questions card relevant and specific
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Essential rules book/vademecum to be provided together with the board game
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A clear and playful design board
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A memento frame board or list of completed task should be considered
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Open sharing from players before, during and after the session
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What about time as a factor?
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Supporting your legal innovation journey
At The Law of Tech, we are all about driving legal innovation by connecting the dots between people, processes, and technology. Through our content and workshops, we focus on aligning innovation incentives with the real-world needs, workflows, and pain points of legal professionals. By fostering collaboration, sharing actionable insights, and providing practical tools, we empower legal teams to streamline their processes, enhance client outcomes, and stay ahead in an evolving industry. Whether you’re exploring new technologies or refining existing solutions, we’re here to help you turn challenges into opportunities and innovation into impact.
The Law of Tech is your number one Legal Tech do-tank. We empower legal professionals to learn by doing, apply practical insights to their work, and leverage peer-to-peer learning to drive widespread legal tech adoption and drive better legal service delivery. Learn more about us on our website.