“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein
Innovation can mean many different things—it can be a new invention, the reinvention of something tried and true, or even just a refreshed perspective that reimagines methodology, approach, and ultimately, a better solution.
Legal innovation is becoming a household mainstay of our legal vernacular. It covers the context of how we work and explains the tools and skills we use in our everyday workflows.
But at its core, legal innovation is a human-centered approach to reimagining our profession. It’s a way of seeing ourselves as problem solvers who can form problem statements that are tailored to, and anchored in, the uniquely human angle of the problem at hand—rather than the technicality.
Classic legal training teaches us to think about questions surgically and deductively. We’ve been trained to spot the issues and anchor them in a precedential argument. We deduce (issues) and construct (arguments), but the focus is narrowly tailored, with the technical solutioning taking center stage.
“Make it simple, but significant.” Don Draper, fictional character on “Mad Men”
But the landscape of our problem statements is changing. With emerging technologies and advancements in society, we have to navigate new spaces with more ambiguous and cross-disciplinary questions—such as automation, robotics, space architecture, Web3, blockchain, new data privacy categories, and autonomous artificial intellgience.
And it seems we need an expanded problem-solving toolkit to meaningfully practice the applied art of the law.
“We spend a lot of time designing the bridge, but not enough time thinking about the people who are crossing it.” Prabhjot Singh, director of systems design at the Earth Institute
Human-centered design thinking allows lawyers to be more expansive, textured, and expertly skilled problem solvers. Applying human-centered design thinking in the way we work is a core pillar of innovation.
The guiding and anchoring ethos across our own department is that “professionalism and passion”—a term coined by our chief legal officer, Pierre Gentin—is what ultimately enables us to reach the highest professional peak and greatest personal satisfaction.
In other words: We appreciate and value the humanity of the colleagues and friends around us, and in turn, we ourselves feel seen and valued. This is the platform from which we’re inspired to do our best work.
“Innovation comes from people who take joy in their work.” W. Edwards Deming
This energizing perspective propelled our legal department to aspire to true leadership in legal innovation. In designing the innovation architecture that paved the path for our transformation journey, we focused on the four pillars of thought leadership, client centricity, legal tech, and our people mission.
To put these pillars into action, early this year, we identified monthly milestone markers for transparency and accountability.
For thought leadership, we set a target for published pieces for McKinsey Legal’s blog and focused on content, audience reach, and metrics. We encouraged collaboration across our global legal team for access to external speaking and writing opportunities through a central repository of events—organized and maintained by our legal ops team—to enhance each other’s networks and reach, relevance, and engagement.
Keeping our business clients top of mind, we kicked off a reimagination of the look and feel of our legal function’s visual identity. The goal was to develop a bold, beautiful, and sleek visual language in our internal and external deliverables, and visually represent our lawyers as dynamic, innovative, transformative, expert, and humane.
To get there, we worked with our design team to draw inspiration from the imagery below, arriving at these images after thoughtfully pinning down how we aimed to represent ourselves and working with our design team to align imagery that articulates that character visually.
For legal tech, as the year unfolded, generative AI became a real opportunity, and we shaped the strategy and direction for identifying the leading use cases in the industry mapped against what legal tech vendors were able to offer.
We then determined the scalable and most high value use cases for our department, and we identified the vendors that would optimize for what we were looking to achieve. This took quite a bit of thought, strategy, collaboration, industry learnings, current state assessment of our needs and positioning, and collaborative problem solving. This strategy set us up for launching pilots and exploring internal and external legal tech capabilities.
Lastly, for our people mission, we’re teaching and implementing design thinking—and soon, prompt engineering for working with generative AI—across the global department. This involves developing dedicated working teams committed to specific innovation projects and a commitment to purposeful engagement and wellness.
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou
We’ve seen this year that innovation is an opportunity. It’s a way to lean in and to learn and grow—to experiment with a reimagined approach to the way we work and the toolkits that we have on hand to do that work in the best way we can imagine.
The legal industry is seeing a rise in legal innovation, particularly as applied to generative artificial intelligence. Lawyers are developing their own legal tech tooling, experimenting with fine tuning large language models, piloting use cases with vendors, and participating in hackathons. They’re exploring data science, data visualization, and social sciences like anthropology to augment, accelerate, and improve the way they work.
For our department, innovation has brought together a community of interested lawyers working together in teams (or “sprint squads”) to identify pain points and solutions, come up with prototypes or playbooks, and pilot them into action.
Innovation is embedded in our culture, workflows, and broader mindset. Importantly, it’s anchored in a human-centered approach that puts our people first and lets us show our authentic and unique selves, which in turn fuels the expertise, professionalism, and passion of our broader department.
This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.
Author Information
Ilona Logvinova is associate general counsel and head of innovation for McKinsey Legal.
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