Hi!

Thanks for checking out this working prototype of a book. I have written it to sum up the process I use and the things I’ve learned in bringing a creative, user-centered, collaborative way of solving problems into the legal system.

I hope it is of use to lawyers, court professionals, paralegals, judges, and beyond — to figure out new ways to solve problems, and improve the dignity of people using and working in the legal system.

In the spirit of design, I also ask for your feedback, thoughts, and possible collaborations for this book.

• Is something unclear, or too jargon-y? Let me know what I need to re-write.
• Do you want to help translate this into other languages? That would be terrific!
• Are you hungry for more examples and cases? Those are coming soon, that’s my next scale-up of this working book. I’m working on a chapter that explains some strategies for bringing this approach into legal orgs, how to lead design processes yourself, and some cases of how this plays out.

And a little about me: my name is Margaret Hagan, I work on bringing the design approach to the world of law. I’m a lawyer who was allergic to law school and it’s approach, and ended up at the design school to start thinking through what other strategies and tools we could be using in law to serve people, clients, and ourselves better.

Now I work at Stanford Law School & Institute of Design, where I direct the Legal Design Lab on. We use the human-centered, agile design approach to teach students (law and otherwise) how to solve problems in the legal system with more creative methods. Much of our work is around access to justice and self-represented litigants.

I also maintain a personal blog called Open Law Lab, that I started as a law student and have continued on with, where I collect cool examples and random thoughts about the design approach and law. I built the app Law Dojo for studying legal doctrine in quick, fun games (and now some other awesome developers and designers have helped bring it even further along). 

You can find me at twitter here — please reach out and say hi!