How jam can reinvent the future of law

04 August 2016 | Russell Port

Legal Service Design Jam Sydney

The Legal Service Design Jam generated inspiration and innovation in Sydney on 27 July 2016 as part of the Janders Dean legal transformation conference.

Participants who were lucky enough to attend the Design Jam were challenged to use innovative problem solving techniques to collectively solve the problems that law firms face today.

What are the ingredients for a legal jam? And no we're not talking sugar and fruit.

For a truly exceptional jam, we followed this recipe:

1. We chose a variety to create – from the 3 flavours on offer on the day: People and organisation, Legal process and Technology in the legal industry.
2. Then we mixed. We combined 30 participants or 'jammers' with a range of backgrounds and skill sets from 12 top law firms, in house teams and partners in the industry.
3. To fine tune our jam, we included a few extra ingredients: 'hard' fun, trust in the process and lots of collaboration. To make things happen and facilitate our recipe, we were lucky to have the passion and creativity of our 'Master Chef' team from CoSquared.

Using jam to reinvent law

We found there were four main stages to the jam process:

• wide lens - brainstorming to identify potential issues to work on;
• focus - identifying which ideas to take forward;
• concept creation - starting to map out potential solutions; and
• prototype development – developing the prototype and sharing the solution.

The entire recipe took just eight hours. It was a fast-paced day and a firm stretch on our normal way of thinking.

The combination of the Janders Dean conference taking place simultaneously, the eclectic mix of participants from the legal industry (by invitation only), the creativity, innovation and pace of the event all came together to deliver an experience that was fresh, fast and fun.

Legal Service Design Jam Sydney involved 'jammers' with a wide range of skills and experience, both inside and outside the legal industry

LexisNexis readily agreed to sponsor the event and work in collaboration with Janders Dean and CoSquared to add a new dimension to the Janders Dean conference by inspiring and enabling people to generate innovative ideas and workable solutions to real issues in the industry.

The Legal Service Design Jam has created momentum. Customer focused innovation and change management in the legal industry is happening. And it's worth a taste test.

Read more about the Jam's designs:

• Report 1: Process
• Report 2: People
• Report 3: Technology

Also, watch how the day panned out and what the participants had to say.