 So, hi again. This is Margaret Hagan. Margaret Hagan is cool. She is a fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford Law School and lecturer at the Stanford Institute of Design or the D-School. As a fellow at the D-School, Margaret launched the Legal Design Initiative, an R&D lab for legal services. She teaches project-based classes with interdisciplinary student groups tackling legal challenges through user-focused research and design of new legal products and services. She also leads workshops to train legal professionals in the design process to produce client-focused innovation. Margaret graduated from Stanford Law in June 2013, where she served as a student fellow at the Center for Internet and Society and was the president of the Stanford Law and Technology Association. While a student, she built the game app Law Dojo to make studying for law school classes more interactive and engaging. And I am now going to turn it over to you, Margaret. Hi everyone. I'm going to share my screen. Hopefully, let me do that. They taught me. Okay, start. Can you see my screen? Okay, I'm going to go in presentation mode then. Just let me know if the slides are showing up like it should. Does it look good? Okay. All is good, technology-wise? Yes, you're good. Okay, then welcome everyone. I am really happy to be talking to you virtually. I wish I could see your faces. I wish I could be there with you. But this is the next best thing, and I hope that what I have to say today is really interesting and relevant to you. Please interrupt me if it's not, and we can talk more about what you're interested in. I'm hoping that today is kind of a way to get a glimpse into how I work and the wonderful people I have in my lives as collaborators and the interesting stuff that we're doing. Hopefully, we'll be in touch after this on Twitter online and maybe even in person. So the topic that I'm really excited to talk about today is how we can bring innovation into the world of law. And particularly through this method of user-centered design that I'm really happy to be taking from the world of the design school at Stanford and bringing into the world of the law school. Let me see how to advance the slides just a second. There we go. Here we go. So today's talk is really this journey, both from my own personal experience going from law school to the design school and then back to the law school, which is generally in the profession and from the consumer's perspective too, how we get from law that's intimidating and bureaucratic and really off-putting to law that seems more approachable, that seems more satisfying and clearer, how we get from law that's kind of buried in books or PDFs or other static documents that aren't necessarily responsive or easy to make use of. And it's just something that's more, again, responsive, more quick to respond to exactly what we're looking for from it. And this is kind of the territory that the whole talk is about how we can bring this world of law with all of its noble aims to make society better, to empower people and also then combine the power of design, which is a discipline that's all about how, how we can make things that are better, how we can engage people better, how we can build the kind of next generation of services and products. So bringing these two worlds together, I find there's an enormous amount of power as well as a really interesting way to work. So I'm here to kind of offer a little bit of the vision that I've been formulating as I do my experiments. And then I'd love hopefully to hear from you about your thoughts on this. So let me, before I jump into exactly what I do, I'll give you a little run up kind of my path, how I found my way into this territory. So I started at law school at Stanford, which is a wonderful law school. I wouldn't say anything bad about it, but it was not the place for me, at least the law school lecture hall. I dropped in there now five years ago, five years ago. So September 2010, I started off my law school career in the giant lecture halls. And I had come to law school really prepared to use those three years to become, you know, a citizen of the world, a changemaker, somebody who understood how the system worked and kind of what the levers were to make really effective change. And I think the other part of the problem was I had already been very overeducated. I had done my PhD in Northern Ireland on politics and, you know, I had overdosed on reading and writing. By the time I ended up at law school, I wasn't really the most literate person. I was still able to read, but just that capacity to read huge amounts of information was like beyond me. So I showed up at law school feeling like, holy crap, you're just going to make me read and try to pretend that I'm a judge. And that's not what I want to be doing with my career. I want to be, you know, on the front lines with real people talking about real human problems. So I ended up just drawing. That was kind of my allergic reaction to everything, trying to pull it back down from the abstract discussions and abstract writings. And I just started cartooning everything, which is a skill that I had a little bit before. I was always a doodler in all my long academic career. I would be drawing at the margins of notes, but it really kind of inflamed during my first year of law school, where I just had to draw everything. So it also helped me make sense of the insanity of the amount of data and the amount of kind of content that the law school classes were throwing at me. And it was also the kind of the rise of tablets and kind of styluses. So I had some more digital tools to play with. So I was having a lot of fun in the back of the classroom. My grades weren't that bad. I did manage to pass law school and everything and pass the bar. But I really did not enjoy the typical way that law is taught. But at the same time as I started to draw, I started to get more confident in that part of my brain of just kind of learning how to visualize things, learning how to make stuff that even if it's not the clearest, looking back on it some of it's a little bit messy, or there's this kind of visual or it's just a little bit overwhelming. But it was just kind of fun. And for me, it brought it back to what this actually means on the ground in real humans' lives, what civil procedure really means besides these lists of rules. And also I just started putting my stuff online at the same time. I had a blog and kind of I wanted to have a release valve for all the notes and randomness I was just creating during 1L year. So I just put everything online and I started kind of this open work process where it's like, even if I had an idea or a sketch and it wasn't the best one, just put it online and see what comes of it, maybe tweet it, maybe not. And just getting comfortable with kind of working in the open. Because I knew from people who sat behind me in class, they are always interested in what was going to come out of my notebook. So I decided, okay, let's just put everything online and deal with any criticism or bad comments. I think before I was afraid of being too public with my work, just not wanting any scrutiny or to hear any criticisms, but it's lovely warming up to that. And it got to that at the end of the year, so at the end of first year at Stanford at least, I was allowed to take classes outside of the law school, which was a godsend. So I ended up in Stanford design school, which looks like this. So it's again, not to say anything bad about Stanford Law School, which is wonderful. The D school is a completely different environment as opposed to kind of hierarchy or the lecture room. The D school, both in its organization and its space, is a completely flat, open, modular kind of place. So it's a strange kind of institution in that there's not necessarily a dean or a faculty. It's kind of just a collection of people who come with their passions. Usually around some social problem, there's a lot of people really passionate about reforming K through 12 education or medicine, patient care, or youth groups and kind of keeping people out of prison. So I ended up taking a class that was nominally cross-listed in law school, and it was all about how to help people in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, kind of get through their social and political and legal problems in a better way. So there was some social element, that's why I as a law student got to take it. And I thought, hmm, this is something that's very practical, so we're dealing with real people, their problems on the ground, and then the promise of the design school is that you can use creative, user-centered, kind of new out-of-the-box types of methods to come up with new out-of-the-box types of solutions that might actually make a change where change hasn't happened before. So I knew nothing about Nairobi, I knew nothing about Kenya, but I thought, hmm, a way to actually try to solve problems on the ground and learn these new methods. So I signed up, and from that moment on, I was a total convert to this way of working, this way of interacting with people, and this type of model for innovative kinds of organizations. So here's one of the early sketches from my group. We spent nine weeks trying to come up with ideas on how to make women who are walking alone through the slums of Nairobi at night, how to help them walk more safely. So we ended up prototyping a lot of different ideas, and we came up with a project called Safe Matari that would allow her to text, to have a group of people walk with her from her bus stop to her home, and we got a big grant to actually deploy it in Kenya. So we went to Nairobi, we did lots of user testing, we got money to hire people to be that kind of group walk escorts for women, and we piloted this concept, this safe walking concept, for three months. That was in 2011 to 2012, and it was a total failure. We had all of the best intentions, we had done our training, we had done our ethical approval, we had done our research. We in Palo Alto, the four of us very idealistic young students, and we had a very nice mix of students on our team. We had an engineer who could actually build the SMS system. We had a political scientist who did all the kind of surveys and research of people. They had me as the kind of artistic slash legal person, and we had a person who was a project manager. So it was a really great team to come up with a great idea, but it was a really hard lesson to learn, but a very important one that... Well, first of all, you can build something that seems really great, and everyone who you show it to tells you, oh, this is wonderful, it will totally work, and then it can completely fall apart. And for us, it was even that was compounded threefold, because we were living in Palo Alto while the pilot was running in Nairobi, and we couldn't catch anything that went awry before it kind of spun out of control. So there were lots of political economic factors at work that kind of completely blindsided us, but for me, it was also that failure was also somehow invigorating to think, okay, so you got this one wrong, but there's still a chance to, whether it's with this project or with other projects, like an initial failure after a pilot of three months is not a death blow. It means that we should be going back to the drawing table and either totally scrapping our original idea or coming up with a new one, or maybe solving a different kind of problem. But I think in my previous life where I was more type A, I would have taken that as something to be shoved under the bed and never talk about it, it's like, it's an embarrassment. But that way of working at the D school is like, no, you pilot something, you're honest with yourself, but whether it's actually working or not. And then you kind of go from there, but you really kind of embrace the failure as a learning tool. So then I ended up taking some more of these classes that the D school offered, sorry for the insanity of this map, but it's all the ideas. We were partnered with the UN High Commissioner on Refugees. And again, our interdisciplinary students who are all interested in improving the welfare of refugees living in a camp in Jordan. How we could promote better information sharing, communication technologies in the camps. So the UNHCR came to us at the D school, almost like a sandbox, where we students could play around with ideas, propose all kinds of stuff, and then they at the UN that could then possibly test them on the ground. So this was another kind of class at this intersection of law and design. That was a lot of fun. We've got to come up with a lot of ideas. This is more of our refinement. We went from crazy amounts of ideas to thinking about it in different camps. We ended up kind of around the idea of communal radio, communal radio stations. This is the system we ultimately proposed that we would kind of have radio kiosks and roving radio studios inside the camps to try to build community and help people share their stories and just kind of create internal entertainment inside the camps, which was great. The UN, of course, took the idea and it disappeared into the nether. But we're hoping that somebody will pay attention to it. I think there was another learning I had from that is that, you know, I have lots of ideas. I didn't realize it until then is how many ideas in the right environment can kind of spring out of my head or in that kind of collaboration, especially if you, if I sit down with an engineer, a designer, other people who know kind of what's possible. They know the technologies and things inside out. You can come to really wonderful, rich ideas that sitting by yourself, either with a piece of paper or an open word document in front of you, you can never do. And the other learning I had from that is that maybe I didn't want to work with big bureaucratic like organizations like the UN, where even if you have ideas that seem to be testing well, they disappear into bureaucracy. So I started to think, maybe I need to be kind of, if I have all these ideas and I can get these teams together, maybe I should be trying to be a little bit more small and agile and not work with the big organizations. Because my original idea at law school was that I was going to go work with the State Department and practice 21st century diplomacy, where we used all these digital tools to improve human rights reporting, improve knowledge of people's situations on the ground. But I think after that experience with the UN and another with the State Department, I decided maybe it's better to stay outside and be a little bit small and quick to really get change happening. And so as it was mentioned in the introduction, I also started playing around with developing apps. So I built my own little app, essentially for myself, where I plugged in all the questions, all the content I was learning in my law school classes. I made them into multiple choice questions and then had just a little quiz that would kind of present the multiple choice questions. You win points, you lose lives. It was my first experiment in coding, but it was really fun and a good way to make a few hundred dollars a month just in the app store. And just to start to realize that I as a lawyer with absolutely no science technology background could learn how to actually produce things, put them out into the world and kind of have an effect. So it was kind of building up this creative confidence to try my hand at engineering, try my hand at kind of actually publishing something that other people would then use, which is a really amazing and intoxicating feeling. And then at the same time at my third year at law school, I decided, hmm, probably the typical law path is not for me. I was kind of running on these design fumes, so excited about the potential to use these creative methods to solve problems. But I didn't know exactly what that would look like as a professional track, like who would pay me to do this? There's not a typical organization to just go and say, hi, I wanna come up with ideas for your organization and how to make it better all day long. So I have a wonderful piece of advice from someone in the law school who just said, if you want this other kind of track, you just have to start writing about it, putting it out there publicly. And blogging was the easiest way to do that. Just kind of saying, hey world, I am interested in these topics. I'm going to keep posting about interesting stuff going on there, about my own ideas that are just floating and then tweet them out, but just kind of putting that really strong foot in a digital ether saying this is my territory. So that's what I did. I just decided, okay, I know that there's something there, there, bringing law and design together. I don't know exactly what that looks like. I don't know what career that will lead to, but I'm just gonna put it out there and hope for the best and hope other people get excited about this too. So I started this thing called open law lab and I just kind of stuck all kinds of stuff on it, like a Pinterest board, like here's what this court is doing, here's what this startup is doing, here's an interesting idea of how we could improve access to justice. So I just started interesting essentially on my blog, but it started to gain steam and the best thing that came out of it is that then people started to think I was an expert in this world of law and design, which sure, why not? Okay, and that was enough to get me kind of the best thing that ever happened to me, which was a one year fellowship at the D school. So as I graduated from the law school, I had a corporate job lined up, but the D school said, if you wanna stay here for a year, we'll pay your salary, we'll give you 10 months to try to figure out what heck you're working on, what kind of organization you either wanna start or be a part of, but basically just kind of a year to incubate yourself and your own ideas because it seems that you've got something going in this law design world. We don't know exactly what it is yet, but here's a year to just try and figure it out. So that was quite a privilege to have that kind of incubation year and spend full time on it. And that's during that year, I started to really refine my point of view about what actual work I wanted to be doing and what kind of impact it could have, what value it would have for the legal profession. So really, I found that not to be anti-technology, I'm a big believer in the power of technology, but I also am just a strong advocate for having design at the table whenever we talk about innovation because I think I've gone to a lot of legal tech conferences, I don't know if you're part of these circles too. Often we develop tech because it seems exciting, because it's worked in other fields, because it seems to have this potential, but often that can lead us astray from what people actually need or how they actually work and consume information on the ground. So having design at the table to really be an advocate for the user's interests, the user's preferences, so that we actually build things that people want to use, that they can use, and we're not developing tech for tech's sake. So I found myself going to all the legal tech conferences or legal innovation conferences and being kind of the design voice in the room, that we need to be talking to people more about their current frustrations and problems, as well as understanding their workflows better so we can understand where to be intervening to have better innovation. And then also the process. So this is the process that I use, this is all cribbed from the D school, but it's kind of, I'm trying to make the design process work in the legal setting, which as we know is a little bit different than other environments when it comes to persuading people that change is necessary. But the method is, it's all about coming up with ideas quickly, building them quickly, and then testing them quickly. So instead of staying in the world of just ideas or just talking, because that's the other phenomenon I keep seeing, is that when I go to meetings about innovation in the law, it's usually a boardroom kind of setting with lots of very intelligent people around the table, but then it's just kind of popcorn of ideas floating around and then maybe they're put into a report or maybe they're put online, but there's very little forward motion. So my perspective again in response is, we need to actually be investing in prototyping this idea of building quick, rough and ready versions of your idea, putting them down on paper, even a sketch, putting them in front of the potential target users and getting feedback. And then if the feedback is good, we're finding the sketch into something more real and then evolving it with more money, more time, more refinement. And so this is, again, in the legal innovation community, I'm trying to bring this more agile, prototype-driven approach. And along with that process, it's all about the mindset. This is what I really love about the D-School. It gives you these concrete but new lenses to look at problems around you. And these mindsets I find to be very powerful. Several of them don't come naturally to lawyers or don't come naturally to most people, like the working with interdisciplinary teams, really building to think, not just kind of thinking in your head or thinking with your words, but really trying to actually build the things that are floating in your head as a potentially good idea. The other ones that are interesting are the idea of pausing feasibility, which is a really hard one for lawyers. It's always what we struggle with in my design workshops is you have to kind of take off the status quo lenses that you normally wear that tell you what's possible, what's affordable, what's legal, what's ethical. Well, ethical is important still, but I'm talking about regulatory around the practice of law. And take off those lenses and see if we took all these constraints away, what could we be doing? If we had infinite amount of money or we didn't have the regulations that we had right now, what else could we be doing? It's starting to open up those new channels of ideas that you can then scale back and say, we do have a budget, we do live in a regulatory environment, but starting to stretch what we think is possible and getting beyond our kind of status quo. And then of course my favorite is being visual and I try to encourage as many of my students, as many of the people in my workshops to really stop talking so much and really drawing more, diagramming more, mapping more and using that as really a tool for power. It's a way to get people to understand you. It's a way to get people to support your ideas, to build momentum, to get funding. So trying to convert from this very text-centric way that we live as lawyers into a little bit more visual. So let me tell you one little story. This story floated around my head for a while as I was trying to figure out, what did those mindsets actually mean in the world of law? So Doug Dietz is a designer at General Electric and he was tasked with how to make this machine more user-friendly. His General Electric had built this PET CT scanner and it's a wonderful piece of technical machinery. It works quite well when it has to scan somebody and see if there's tumors or other problems going on inside the body and they had built it for the technicians in the hospital who were their main kind of purchasers. So lots of hospitals purchased them. The technicians were very happy with it. They had amazing insights into what was going on inside the bodies of their patients. But the problem is that the patients were not happy with the machine. They, especially the children who had to go through the scanner, often had to be anesthetized in order to go through the experience. There was just so much resistance and trauma and high emotions around the machine that GE got a lot of pushback from the hospitals about what they could do to make it better. So Doug Dietz was tasked with how to make kids like this more amenable to the PET CT machine. And so what he did was he interviewed a lot of the kids. He watched the environment. He played around with a few ideas and he slapped a new interface onto that PET CT machine. So instead of this giant scary tube, it was an undersea adventure. Or it was, oh no, that was the pirate ship, or an undersea adventure, or a camping trip. And this dramatically reduced anesthetization requirement rate. Kids were happy. Families were happy. And it was all a matter of seeing it through the kids' eyes, seeing why are they so unhappy? Why are they so frustrated? Instead of just kind of treating the symptoms of the frustration, trying to get to the root of the experience from their perspective and figuring out what kind of intervention, especially a low-cost, lightweight one, not redesigning the entire machine, could be done to placate them. So it was an enormous success. The rates all moved in the right way. The metrics were satisfied. And I kept thinking, there is something there. There is an analogy to the legal system. All the frustration, the disempowerment, the emotional kind of roller coaster people go on when they're going through court, when they're going through other legal procedures. What if we put better interfaces on top of the legal system? What could we do that's not a matter of long-term policy change or huge investments in a Watson or AI system for law? Though I think those are both great possible tracks for innovation. What can we do in the short term in a lightweight way to really start seeing the experience from the consumers or the law students or even the legal professionals' perspective? And then what are the small interventions we can make to start that road of better change and a better user experience for law? So I got the privilege. The law school hired me to play around with this lab idea. I started building it at the D school and then the law school said, there's something interesting there. Spend a few years and try to build it up at the law school. So this is what I'm doing right now. This is my work. It's called the Legal Design Initiative, though I think I just got approval to change it to Legal Design Lab. Everything is, you know, words in law schools are very important, but I'm finally getting some more buy-in for this idea of an R&D lab. And the main things that we focus on in the lab is training. So of course, we're at a law school. Our main goal is to develop a new generation of leaders from JDs and other tracks who are really going to be leaders for innovation and very thoughtful and user-centered. And then our other tracks is actually researching, you know, the user perspective, what they need, what they don't like, what they want, and then developing those technology tools or non-tech service, new services, new organizations that can meet those needs. So challenge up. It's really hard to opt for a guardianship California State Force and a lot of people try to do it, pro se, and a lot of people screw it up and then get all kinds of bad side effects from the legal process, screw-ups that they've made. How can we make this better? So we brought together all kinds of people for a three-hour, like, design mixer. We had everyone from judges to court investigators to clerks to technologists and designers and some litigants even. We had them, you know, kind of brainstorm, identify key needs, identify key frustrations, and then leave by the end of the night with a short list of what interventions, what new kind of ideas had the most promise going forward. So it was really fun. Also, it was just a nice, you know, people are on their feet. They're talking to each other. They're playing short little games or doing five-minute sprints of ideas, 10-minute sprints. It's quick moving. It's a very lively environment to be in. So it was just fun as well as being very productive. And so we've run a bunch of these. Many of them have been aimed at students, but then trying to pair students with actual practitioners or litigants, people going through it. So we did a hackathon slash design experiment on F1 students who want to stay in the U.S. after they graduate and how we can make the immigration process more user-friendly to them. We did one paired with Fidelity Investments who were interested in the Sandbox model where they came and said, maybe we want to open a consumer-friendly estate planning service for our Fidelity clients. What would a consumer-friendly, kind of tech-enabled estate planning service look like? So we had 50 different users come in and the students interviewed them. They came up with ideas. They tested their ideas with the users and then went back to Fidelity with a short list of ideas. We did one with the plea agreement process. Prosecutor had come to us and said, we know that the defendants, when we hand them the actual text of a plea agreement contract, they don't understand it. We want to help them make sure that they actually do understand the text that they're signing. So we had five sessions where we met with a lot of prosecutors and defense attorneys and started to play around with how we could possibly present plea agreement first in ways that would help comprehension of the defendant or at least facilitate their discussion with defense attorneys so that they were more aware of what they were signing if they signed the plea agreement. We did another one with Fidelity Investments where it was all about communication design, particularly around privacy notices and financial disclosures that Fidelity has to make whenever it has somebody using one of their apps or even their watch app or something for really small screens. How do we get better legal disclosures and how do we actually get people to pay attention to legal disclosures which is a really hot topic with the regulators and with the companies. So that was a wonderful class. And now we're doing a very similar class with Apple. This quarter we're working with Apple's legal team who focus on security and privacy and we're playing around with how we can dramatically differently present their privacy terms to their users because they also want to play around with how do we make our legalese less legalese a better user experience so that people don't just tune out or distrust us because of it. So what that looks like in practice, what happens with all these workshops? I'll just give you a little glimpse behind the scenes, behind the posters. So this is interviewing, interviewing with experts, kind of debriefing on ideas, what you heard during interviews. Oh, I heard say that. Oh, that I heard her say that, trying to find patterns in what people said. And then from that, then starting to brainstorm about how to solve those needs, getting lots of ideas on the board and then voting on which ideas are actually the most promising. So we try to get way more ideas that are actually practical or actually doable and then refine down or combine ideas. Then from ideas, we actually try to start building which is why we like to have designers and technologists around who can without their laptop and just start programming or start laying out a first version of what the idea is, getting from the posted version to an actual real screen, a nice mock-up. So these are like first versions of ideas, just like a headline, a little sketch and a little caption, just so that we can test these ideas with our users really quickly. We test them with each other, with experts. We try to get maximum feedback, maximum criticism. And then usually we have some kind of share-out at the end where people show what ideas have tested well, how they would change their ideas. These classes have been pretty short about five sessions or two sessions. So it's a really quick turnaround but we try really hard to pack in as much ideas and then focus down to some promising ones so that we always leave with a short list of what we should be taking forward. And then usually if we can get funding or other support then we can start to take that idea, flesh it out, actually hire designers to build it out. So let me show you a few examples of what have come out of those sessions. So we're building a tool that came out of the immigration session and the guardianship. We heard similar needs from both our court design night about guardianship as well as immigration. So we're building a much more visual interactive way to get through the legal process, follow all the steps, assemble the forms, get through it, as well as a more visual tool to understand what you're eligible for, what legal relief, legal paths are actually open to you. The other thing that we hear pretty consistently from our surveys and from our workshops is how much people want non-lawyer support for their legal problems that although some of them do want to hire lawyers or will hire lawyers, they want other kinds of service models, other kinds of products to also help them, especially in more conversational story-based or peer-to-peer ways. They almost want to have their expert lawyer and then they want to have almost like a friend like product service person to help guide them through that they can actually talk to honestly and more conversationally. So to that end, we're building a court messaging system that lets the courts and SMSs to litigant with an upcoming hearing about who went to go, where to go. We're working on what bus to take, what clothes to wear, what jargon to use or not use, but how we can kind of provide some of that procedural guidance through something that lives in people's pockets that has information in small stages instead of long worksheets or long web pages. And that's just in time so that it's time to get to that person when they're thinking about it, when they have that need, that question floating in their mind. The other thing that we're learning from all of this is that we really need to think about legal support for services in a service design mode and that's, I know, a little bit jargony, but really it's about thinking about a person flowing through a whole choreographed series of steps so that even if we build one technology tool, say for document assembly or for intake, we need to be thinking about kind of how we make a seamless journey for the person, not just through that one tool, but through everything from when they've spotted their problem to actually getting to a resolution. So this is one, so process mapping is a great way to do that to actually document all those different steps along the service journey. And I had my students in my most recent class, my ninth class do these kind of service-like things where they not only design one product or one technology thing, but a whole series of interactions. So this is how Starbucks designed its experience inside its coffee shops. If you haven't noticed, Starbucks has a specific script as well a choreographed plan of how you'll walk, who you've talked, how you'll pay, how you'll get your drink, how your name is called, how you'll get your sugar or lid or whatever, and then how you'll exit. They spent a lot of money on service designing your flow through a Starbucks coffee shop. And I want to do the same for courts, for clinics, for anything where we have to get a person through a number of interactions. And then the other big thing that I've taken away from all of this is the refinement of my own process, of that process, how we actually innovate, how we get people to support change. And this is a little bit sketchy, I didn't have time to convert my notebook into a proper visual when it's coming. So really what I'm figuring out is that there's this kind of early design stage like you'll see at the top of the screen where it's about doing a lot of user research, doing these kind of workshops where we get ideas, we get users, we get stakeholders all together coming up with ideas. And we also scout what's the best practices out there right now. And then that all then feed into a more refined design cycle where we have the designers and the developers, the professionals in the room, we can build the prototypes, do some more testing, more pilots, start to build partnerships and get some funding in place and then really gather great research data because that's my big motivation is really gathering strong data research about what works, what doesn't and what people actually need. And then from that, then you can get to successful projects and research findings. So in my first years, I had done a lot of the kind of top screen stuff, lots of workshops and lots of ideas. Now I'm refining and actually building. And so it's kind of a work in progress. But the other thing that I'm learning is to have everything be outward facing. Just like with my blog, like having that blog live got me a fellowship and got me this title of legal design expert. I'm starting to just, or I have been publishing everything we do and starting to kind of gather together insights, innovative practices, the tools. Again, sorry for the sketchiness of it, but it's just the idea that all the small learnings are worth putting online and that this starts to build a wider network of people who want to collaborate, who want to fund, who want to in other ways support the work. So I'm a big believer in everything online and being really open and open source about work and work product. So we just kicked off our school year here at Stanford. So I've got four fellows and I find, or five fellows actually. So I finally have capacity. It's not just me doing all this work, which is wonderful. So we've got a few themes. We're really focused on court user experience. We're doing a court user experience lab where we're going to be running a lot of different user research experiments, as well as actually trying to deploy new interventions. The students are really excited about that. We're also convening a working group to think about how we can make the internet better for legal searches and legal help. This is one of my big passions, one of my big research topics is that when people search the internet as they increasingly do, to try to figure out what legal problem they have or how to deal with it, they get a lot of spam, they get a lot of sites that aren't satisfying for them. So we're working with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to think about what we could actually have on the search page itself with the results if you could have some kind of good, public, reliable legal information or at least direction to it really prioritized on a Google search results page so that people don't end up wandering through results. And then getting dissatisfied or not knowing what to do. And then the final theme of this year and other fellows working on is how to get better on-ramps to legal services throughout communities. And it could be tech enabled, it could be with more SMS or app website on-ramps where people can be online and find a way to get legal help. Or it could be getting more things into hospitals, churches, libraries, schools, all these other touch points inside the community that could be possible ways for people to figure out, oh, I really do have a legal problem and how do I actually get help? So we're experimenting around that too. I feel like I might be at time so I think I'm gonna stop there. If anyone has questions I'd love to hear. I know I've talked a lot. Thank you Margaret. So I'm gonna ask people to either step up to the mic and state your question or do it loudly enough so that I can repeat it for Margaret so she can hear it and answer your question. Questions? That's out there, huh? Diane, go ahead. So I loved all of your design work and I love this idea of making things more visual for our students, right? But what advice do you have for people? Some of us love to doodle, some of us have different levels of doing that. You clearly are very artistic and have a really wonderful skill at it. For us who wanna kinda implement some of these things in the classroom to make learning more helpful in these approaches for students, what's your advice for people who aren't really great at doodling or writing these things or don't have the technical skills to use tablets to make these things? Did you hear that, Margaret? I think so, let me just make sure about how we can get better visual skills or visual tools for people who aren't necessarily trained in visual design, is that right? Yeah, so I'm actually running a session on that next week because I have a new class of JDs and LLMs who are all very nervous about their own creativity skills and we're asking them to produce wild new privacy policies to sketch all the time. So what we're gonna be doing with them is a three hour boot camp where literally, I haven't told them this, but we're just gonna start off drawing. So I'm gonna, this is what I did with my students in spring quarter class and it was by far the most popular class of the quarter which maybe is not a good thing, but essentially I put a big word on the PowerPoint hands and we spent five minutes drawing hands on paper and I had a Elmo, you know, a projector to show what I was drawing and they could see that, you know, I'm just like, I'm not even looking, I'm just like, just who cares what your hand looks like? Because a lot of it is unlearning the overthinking or the kind of hesitancy about just putting pen to paper. So I try to loosen them up where we draw hands, we draw faces, we draw stick figures, we draw courthouses, we draw books, we draw papers. Like I went through about 15 different nouns and just had them draw out. So the idea there was that after 30 minutes they would start to have a sense, first of all, of how to put pen to paper more quickly and be less critical of their own drawing skills. And then second, that they would start to have a visual language of their own because then you can combine those nouns, the hand with the book, with the paper, with the figure to then create meaningful diagrams almost like hieroglyphs that you're putting the different nouns together to create these meaningful figures so that they can whiteboard. They can go to the whiteboard and draw out how their service will work. This person will hand the papers to this person and then they'll interview this person. So that kind of just loosening up drawing session is quite helpful. And the other thing that I'm teaching are several of these new wonderful and free design tools online, like Canva, if you have heard of Canva. It very quickly lets you drag and drop a broad array of stencils, templates, pictograms, all kinds of, they have a huge stock of elements that then you can lay out onto the canvas, it's C-A-N-V-A. I think it's free, it was free three months ago, hopefully it still is. And then you can, they also have some guidelines and templates to follow so that if you're not comfortable with composition or you don't know that you can kind of follow their lead. But it's a very easy way to be visual because it's not about actually dragging your mouse or a stylus around, it's mixing with elements and laying them out, image, text, background. So I think that's been a really good bridge for people who again are a little bit hesitant about their own creative skills but are okay with the idea of clip art and remixing clip art. And I'm trying to get them away from PowerPoint clip art which, yeah I don't hesitate to say that online, it just sucks. Like it just doesn't, it looks old and it's the easiest thing to do when I understand why people use Microsoft clip art but it just, I'm trying to, yeah, it's showed that there's another world of really things that look 2015 and that will make your visual stand out and not look like another Microsoft PowerPoint clip art creation. So Canva is something I tell a lot and then for the people who are a little more adventurous who are willing to kind of play around with more freedom, I recommend OmniGraphil which is a tool that I think has a free version but it's essentially a more user friendly version of Adobe Illustrator. So it lets you lay out kind of diagrams, maps, other kinds of complex visuals in a nicer interface than Adobe Illustrator's kind of crazy amount of options. Yeah. Hi Margaret, can you spell that last product that you mentioned? So it's OmniGraphil, O-M-N-I-G-R-A-F-F-L-E. F-F-L-E, thank you. Yeah. Other questions? How they see things. So the question is, one of the faculty members works with visual persuasion. And the law. And the law. It's how juries receive information not just verbally but visually and whether you have done any kind of work in that area. So we haven't. My general scope of work is all of our work is about helping people navigate legal systems better. And so I've stayed away from the persuasion stuff just because it's a foreign territory for me. But actually we have several collaborators who have been coaches and advisors who have come from the jury consultancies. They're designers who are not lawyers but they've spent the past 15 years working with law firms to create these stories along with visual presentations for that jury persuasion. What I've heard from them anecdotally is that their work is enormously powerful. It's that combination of narrative, having the clear story and then doing it definitely not through bullet points but showing the map, showing the faces, showing the even cartoons. That combination of narrative plus visual is incredibly persuasive. It seems less serious. Videos that are more cartoonish and fun and easy to engage with. Are you afraid that it makes the law seem less serious? Yeah, I've played with that because I started just doing it for myself, the cartoons. So I didn't think about an audience. And that was one of the things I had to learn about as a designer is know your audience and choose the format and choose the style and mood based on that. So I've had to increase my repertoire. So now with the different people I work with, when I'm producing a possible new worksheet for a self-help center in California, I tend not to do cartoons. I tend to use more professional looking. And I've had to teach myself. So I've had to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator. I've had to learn how to use different iPad tools to create visuals that are not so sketchy looking. But actually, once you learn how to cartoon, you can make the jump into more kind of clean looking visuals because of how easy digital tools are now to use. So I've had to kind of learn how to calibrate the style of drawing. But that cartoon-ness, and now actually I, like I'm kind of suspicious of cartoons too, just because they don't tend to test well. Because even if it's amusing for JD students who are basically my main audience during my law school years is just amusing my classmates. When it comes to actually people who are going through a legal problem or definitely professionals in a law firm or a court, they really don't like, it's funny, they don't like games, they don't like cartoons. So things that seem to test well or have promise because they're more user friendly. People, it just, it's a mismatch, it's a dissonance with the mood that they want, which is usually something like I'm in crisis or I'm really stressed out. Just give me clean information. Some amount of figures or visual elements are useful, but I don't want a full-blown cartoon. Okay, could you, would you mind on sharing your screen so we can see you a little bit bigger as we go along? Other questions? I will figure out, have to do that. Hi Margaret. I really appreciate what you've been, the way you've been talking about user-centered design and that's something I think we think about a lot in the library I work in. I've been thinking as you talk about this, how do you think about taking, when you're doing, working with systems that are really not user-centered or very sort of the opposite of that in their sort of root, like maybe the court system or maybe law schools, how do you, how do you think about applying those principles? You know, how do you start that process? So I think the biggest thing that I've learned is that you can't do it, you can't come running at the system from the outside and throw yourself against it and hope to get anywhere, that for me it's a lot been about using my politics PhD to figure out kind of stakeholder management sounds a little bit creepy, but really it's about trying to figure out who you can bring into the table and into the process early. So now what's really worked well is mixing up the people who are inside the system working, you know, part of that bureaucracy and exposing them more to the users and also exposing them across their own hierarchies and roles. So that's where I really love designed workshops in small form, in longer class form, where people are taken out of sight of their usual comfort zone and ways of working, ways of having conferences, ways of meeting each other. So they're not sitting down, they're not at a conference table and there is not the usual hierarchies, but instead they are forced to do, like I run my workshops like a kindergarten teacher. Now you will spend five minutes and you will create a visual that represents your idea. Now you will spend 10 minutes and you will come up with the three main things that your new idea will offer. So I try to kind of almost shock them out of their usual ways of working with these really like, you know, clear but very constrained heavy tasks. And by then they submitted to me, they can't like, you know, sneak out of the back of the room, I have them captive. But after a little bit of that, it's amazing how much they can open up, especially when they're meeting new people or in this new environment. So if we did this in the law school actually, we had people from all different levels of the law school, unfortunately no students, but we had everyone from, you know, the IT and the tech people and the AV, like people who do that, all the way to the dean and the senior faculty members and like all the people from the centers and the staff. We had them all in one room and we spent eight hours thinking about what Stanford should be like in 30 years. So we had them mixed up in different teams. We had them coming up with ideas and then reviewing each other's ideas. And I was again at the front of the room, kind of giving these short tasks, short check-ins and people who don't usually talk to each other, we're talking to each other, criticizing each other's ideas, building up with each other's ideas and starting to get excited about, especially the ideas they come up with themselves. So part of it is kind of inviting as many people into the creative process early on, implying them with food and drink or using some other mandatory meeting they already have to go to. So you capture them and then once they start, they get a little taste of that design work, but they start to feel like they're generating something, they're coming up with something, they're seeing insights. Usually then they become the biggest backers for the idea going forward. So that's kind of the participatory model that I really have found a lot of success with. Use your testing any plan, or like each stage you wanna test here, through the institutional review board, you have good tasks, you have to actually interview people, you have to make a focus group, so or sometimes you have to observe like how people actually interact with each other based on these plans. So do you have any plans for testing on your concepts and visualizations? So the question is about how to test ideas well or how to test the concepts? Yes, and visualizations as well. How do you test them, so empirical testing of the ideas and concepts that you work with? Yeah, so typically we do more informal testing at the beginning where it's like either one-on-one interviews or focus groups. So we come up with the concepts, we put them in front of either the expert or the target user and we just collect qualitative feedback and that's just for the refinement cycles to go from the sketchy version to a more robust thing that we could pilot and then once we get to the pilot phase, that's when we go into more research or kind of controlled research design. So we're doing that right now with our SMS system. So we're partnering with someone in Santa Clara County here in San Jose and we have one metric we wanna move, which is failure to appear at a hearing rate. So we've got the metric, we've got the different kind of samples, we're gonna give half of the litigants the messages, we're not gonna give the other half, we're hoping that the metric will move. So that's one way we're going to do it in a real pilot. When we're not actually piloting something in the in-between stage, we tend to use a combination of focus groups where we pay people, we recruit them from Craigslist, we have them come in for an hour and give really detailed feedback on the design, what's comprehensible, what's not comprehensible, what they think things mean, where they think they can click, that kind of usability testing, as well as the value that they see in it at all. So we get that really deep qualitative stuff through focus groups and then we use Mechanical Turk and other online survey tools to get a lot more eyes to pass through it and then to rate it. And usually the metrics that we're looking for in those types of testings are usability, can people use it intuitively? Do they understand how to use it? Usefulness, do they find value in it? Would they actually use it? Would they actually download it or spend money on it or whatever that use case is? And then the engagement factor. So do they find it engaging? Would they come back to it? Would they pay attention to it if it was on the wall? And then this year we're gonna experiment with a few other kind of testing things where it's like inside the courtroom, we're talking with California courts about kind of doing kind of pop-up testings where we come in to say a self-help center and we introduce our new version of a worksheet or our new version of another kind of tool and just spend one day, like just do a one day pilot of it where we put it there one day and then try to get people to give some either survey feedback or post experience interview feedback. So that's where we're playing right now. I've been talking to a few of my more empirically statistically oriented colleagues at Stanford about some more controlled studies because I think there's a lot of value in gathering the higher quality data. But I think in these early phases for our first year and a half of this lab, we've been playing in a very qualitative space. Thank you, Margaret. Another question. I was intrigued with the example you gave about court messaging, the court giving people going to court all the information they need. I think it is a marvelous idea for victims' advocates. I would like to pass the idea on to my department. I'm an attorney general office librarian. I'm not sure what the next step is or the first step is here. Any ideas? Yeah, that's great. So that's the goal is modularity. So I think it would be wonderful if we should definitely be in contact over email, but one of my fellows is working on this so that once we can tell if the messaging works or even if it seems to have value to another professional, another expert that we can make an out-of-the-box version of what we did. So not just the open source code that we've developed, but also kind of the steps that any court or other office would have to take in order to implement it with their case management system or other database of people. So it would be wonderful. Maybe we could do a test case with you about how we can make our kind of overall tool implementable in your office. Thank you. We have time for one more question. If there are no other questions, we want to thank you, Margaret. This was a wonderful talk and you are really a cool person. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, I'll sign off, but please send me an email if you're interested in anything. Okay, bye.