Service design is one of the most useful skills for lawyers in the age of AI.
It is also a great market differentiator to maintain a competitive edge and create positive feedback loops to help us prepare for the future.
Yet, it has a long way to go. Legal services are often provided in highly idiosyncratic ways (according to the specific preferences and personality of a lawyer), and lawyers would hardly refer to themselves as service providers.
This is why in this introduction, we are going to take a look at:
- What is service design?
- Why is service design useful for lawyers?
- How to apply service design in practice?
- Useful resources and further reading
What is service design?
Service can be defined as something that helps someone to do something (Lou Downe). In the legal world, this can mean services being delivered by a law firm or an alternative legal services provider as well as the internal services provided by an in-house legal department, within a legal clinic, and more.
Service design is a holistic, intentional, and user-centric approach to designing services.
- Holistic, because it takes a step back a looks at the legal service in its entirety, from start to finish (not just spot solutions such as document automation),
- Intentional, as it recognises that good services don’t happen by chance or gut feeling, and
- User-centric, since it doesn’t matter if the service is beautiful or fancy if the user (client) doesn’t get what they wanted: “Although a consultant’s product may appear as a bound report, what the consumer bought was mental capability and knowledge, not paper and ink.” (HBR) – they came to get divorced, not to get a shiny paper to put on display.
Legal service design can be also considered a subset of legal design or design in legal operations.
Why is service design useful for lawyers?
With Generative AI on the rise, my favorite question is: if your client could use an LLM powered chatbot to query a law, how would you make sure that they still want to ask you for help? (I had some thoughts on this one here)
The answer lies in service design as a method for defining the value-add that is good for everyone: your customer, your organization and the people that work there, the society, and the planet.
If your clients would be able to self-service, how would you incentivise them to come to you and pay you to do that work?
Beyond mere survival and market differentiation, well-designed services can lead to, for example:
- more delighted clients that either come back or at least leave nice reviews,
- opportunity for standardisation (=higher margins)
- better risk management (if everyone knows the process, things are a lot less likely to fall through the cracks).
How to apply service design in legal practice?
The first step is realising that you are providing a service. That means defining who is your customer, what service you are providing, and how you know you are doing it well.
A big hack is to create yourself a user persona so that your discussions are a little less abstract. Ask a GenAI chatbot to get you started (like I did below to illustrate this point), but then make sure to make it as tailored to your use as possible.
The second step is mapping what you actually do. You can gather inspiration for this step in this article about the first thing you should do before you start innovating.
What are the touchpoints – the moments when your client interacts with your service?
This may be best done with someone from outside your organisation. But if you are not ready or don’t have the budget, even making the map yourself is a start.
Third, analyze your findings. Ideally, if you have some client or customer feedback, make sure to consider it as well. What are you trying to achieve? Are your legal services a 5* hotel on the beach or a hostel for $5 a night in the city centre? Because both are ok, and both will find their customer – but you need to be very clear about which bracket are you shooting for.
Are your legal services a 5* hotel on the beach or a hostel for $5 a night in the city centre?
Once you are done with this exercise, it is time to decide what are the spots that you would like to improve. This is best done with the help of some design methodology – so this intro to legal design will give you a hint.
Where to look next?
The first step is to start looking, really looking around you and noticing, whenever you are receiving a really good service. Notice splendid hotel concierges, fabulous hairdressers, and how going to the doctor’s office is making you feel. Note if you hate your banking app, despise calling anyone on the phone, or love your food delivery.
The second step is checking out the rest of the internet. Among my favourites are (in order of time commitment):
- Service Design 101 by Norman Nielsen
- (If shooting for the 5* experience) Unreasonable Hospitality
- Good Services (here is a short version of the 15 principles)
- This is Service Design / This is Service Design Doing
Final Provisions
Service design provides a starting point for a healthy mindset shift: from lawyer-centric to client-centric.
There are so many ways to make it right (and wrong), but being mindful and intentional is a good start to make it well.
Do you apply service design in your organization?
Baru
