Ask almost any lawyer and they’ll tell you there’s room for change in the legal industry—but you’ll get just as many answers about what that change is. That’s why Michigan State University (MSU) is launching the Center for Legal Services Innovation.
“In the legal industry, in many areas, we are really doing a lot of things that are pretty much the same way we did them 100 years ago. It’s like if a car company today were to say ‘I’m going to build cars one at a time in a garage,’ while everyone else has computers and assembly systems,” said Daniel Linna Jr., assistant dean for career development and director of the center. “We want to be part of the solution about how to figure out how we can, in fact, do more for less, improve the quality of legal services, and bring the law to more people.”
Called LegalRnD for short, the center hopes to bring a level of scientific pragmatism to the art of improving legal service delivery. The idea was conceived by Linna as a multidisciplinary approach that could teach law students new skills—like project management, process improvement, strong communication, and sales—while also doing research about how we can improve the legal service delivery process.
The goal is to create “T-shaped” lawyers, as Linna calls them, who go beyond the pure legal expertise that the Bar and typical law schools typically ask of them. T-shaped lawyers have developed other skills and understand basic technology—and most importantly know how to apply those in a way that makes the practice of law more accessible. With LegalRnD, Linna hopes students gain a better understanding at how excel at (and potentially improve) the field of law.
“I believe you can’t dispute the facts that it is a challenging legal market right now, but there are also lots of opportunities for lawyers who are willing to innovate and be entrepreneurial,” said Linna. “One of the things I think about when I went to law school was that there were a lot of people going to law school who said ‘I want to change the world, and law school is one of the ways to do it.’ And now if someone is saying that they are not really thinking about law school—and that’s a problem in our field.”
And while students learn the ropes and knowledge of the legal industry, they’ll also be compiling data and experimenting with different approaches in order to develop more effective legal service delivery options.
“It’ll be similar to what you’d see a professor do in other disciplines: Looking at what type of results you get from this theory, and where we think we could go next,” said Kenneth Grady, Seyfarth Shaw’s lean law evangelist and author of SeytLines. “We’re applying more discipline to the study of legal service delivery.”
For some classes it could mean working with legal aid institutes; others might work a kaizen event at a courthouse working with judges and clerks to improve the efficiency of court operations. There’s options to learn about data collection and analytics, quantitative analysis for lawyers, and even privacy and security law. The “constellation” of classes offered to second and third year law students will allow them to design their own trajectory.
But the core principles at the center will remain the same throughout: The commitment to lean thinking. Using that, Linna and Grady hope law students will learn to objectively approach their processes and understand how to streamline it.
“What we’re saying is if we’re serious about exploring legal service delivery, let’s put some rigor and discipline behind what we’re doing,” said Grady, who will teach a course through the LegalRnD this Fall. “It’s a $275 billion service industry in the U.S., and yet we don’t really have people studying a rigorous way to deliver the legal services.”
Part of that problem is accessibility. Linna is all too familiar with the story of families with good jobs and decent incomes who can’t afford a lawyer. Past research by government agencies has found that for every legal aid attorney there are 6,415 low-income people.
As Grady notes, that’s a lot of people who could feel the difference if, for example, courthouses ran more smoothly.
“We can improve a lot of things just by going in and using traditional process improvements, and as [the LegalRnD does] this, we are going to start adding to it by building a body of knowledge of how to improve operations of courts,” said Grady. “And that’s something we might be able to present to a wider body of judges. We can say we’ve learned some things that can be done—and they may be things that can be implemented in other courts at little to no cost”
And as any lean thinker will tell you, being challenged to do more for less is central to the lean philosophy. But Linna and the other minds think it may also be key to figuring out the legal industry’s accessibility woes—and ensuring a brighter future.
“Far too many people are not receiving legal services, and that’s an embarassment. As a lawyer I want to do more…Law should be accessible; law is very important. [LegalRnD] is a way that I want college and high school students who want to figure out a way to solve this problem,” said Linna. “We need to create a legal system for the people, not just the lawyers.”