Jamming - the way forward for legal service design?

What do musicians do when they come together? 

They jam.

They each bring their own instruments, their own skills - someone sets up a theme – maybe a chord, maybe a rhythm - and the rest start to play around it. They don’t overanalyse. They don’t discuss it endlessly.

They just get on with creating something none of them could have created alone.

‘Service Design Jams’ work in the same way but with ideas being jammed, instead of chords or tunes. Could this work for the legal industry?

The answer is a resounding ‘yes’, as we found at when LexisNexis, working in collaboration with Janders Dean and The Bio Agency, hosted a ‘legal service design jam’ at Janders Dean’s ‘Horizons’ conference in May this year.

What's your flavour?

We started by identifying three headline topics, with a focus on the legal industry. These were focused on the “user” and included:

• organisation/people problem (People Team)
• legal process (Process Team)
• legal service (Technology Team)

Twenty participants were divided into (you guessed it) three teams – one to focus on each of the three topics listed above.

Preparation was simple: turn up with an open mind, ready to be inquisitive.

Five rules for a successful Design Jam

To set the tone and parameters for the event, we set five simple rules:

1. Have fun

Don’t take the day too seriously.

2. Be open and collaborative

You are creating something together, which you couldn’t have done alone.

3. Thou shalt not kill...ideas too quickly

Less discussion, more action - instead of over-debating, create something and then you can test it.

4. Don't stress!

The jam is equally about the intangible outputs, such as meeting new people and learning from those around you.

5. Don't worry about fidelity

Visualise in the way that works best for your proposition and based on the time you have. There are no key deliverables.

Getting started

With these rules in place, the teams were given eight hours to “jam” on their respective topics – and to come up with a design for a better world.

The teams themselves drew together people with a wide a range of skills and experiences both inside and outside the legal industry. Teams included specialists in design thinking and service design well as those with a diverse range of roles within the legal industry such as Legal Knowledge Engineers, Enterprise Architects & Senior Associates.

The experience of having “fresh eyes” on the legal industry allowed us to start wide, mapping out the landscape of ‘big’ problems, before narrowing in to focus on what to work on in detail.

A wide lens - problems and the big picture

The first session aimed to capture the “flare” or