LEGAL DESIGN: ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET TO INNOVATE IN LAW The user experience in legal services was designed by lawyers in the 19th century and has barely changed since then. Judicial proceedings are based on ideas and technologies two centuries old. Everyday people don't understand how the legal system works, and this is a big obstacle for access to justice. How to develop a justice system for users of the 21st century? Design thinking is a methodology for product development very popular in tech companies. It seeks to create user friendly products by following a structured method of observation, ideation and experimentation. In recent years, Stanford professor Margaret Hagan has proposed the use of design thinking for legal innovation. This discipline is known as legal design and works in the following way. The first step is empathizing. It's gaining a deep knowledge of the area where we want to innovate. Imagine our goal is to foster the legal inclusion of rural workers in Honduras. The first thing is to understand who they are, how they think, how they live and how they interact with the law. For this, we need to conduct interviews with workers and experts. The second step is defining the problem. After the observation phase, we need to summarize the problem in a sentence. For example, rural workers in Honduras suffer abusive conditions because they often don't understand the contracts they sign with employers. After stating the problem, we phrase the challenge to tackle with a question starting by: how can we…? How can we make rural workers in Honduras understand the contracts they sign with employers? The third stage is ideation. For this, we can use the well-known method of brainstorming. The goal is to generate as many solutions as possible. The more ideas, the better. In this case, an idea could be to make contracts with graphical content instead of text to make them easier to understand. This would lower the risk of abusive clauses. Another idea could be developing a mobile app for contract analysis. The worker could take a picture of the agreement so it can be reviewed online by a lawyer before signing. The fourth step is creating prototypes. These are simple paper sketches of the solution ideas from the previous step. The goal is to visualize what the solution would look like. For example, how would a contract with images instead of text work? How would be a mobile app work for a lawyer reviewing the contract? The prototype doesn't have to be perfect. It can be done in a matter of minutes with just a pen and paper. After it's done, we have to share it with a few people from outside of the development team. Based on their reaction, we can decide with which idea to move forward. In the case of the rural workers, we may find out that the idea of graphic contracts is hard to implement and decide to move forward with the mobile app. The fifth step is testing. Now we've developed a more advanced version of the product, we can make a more rigorous test. In this case, we will give a simple version of the app to a group of rural workers in Honduras and analyze its impact on the agreements they sign with employers. Is there a reduction in abusive clauses? With these results, we can go back to the problem definition phase. And the cycle starts again. In the final evaluation of the program, you will have the opportunity of doing your own legal design exercise. You will have to choose a problem to solve. Improving access to justice of vulnerable populations? Easing the understanding of contracts for the customers of a bank? Or building a faster service in a courthouse? There are good opportunities of applying design thinking in different areas of the law. In general, lawyers were trained to think, write and reduce risks. But legal design is the opposite: it's doing, building and accepting risks. Innovation moves forward through learning by doing. The user experience of the legal system was created with the mindset of a lawyer of the 19th century. It's high time we reform it with the mindset of a designer of the 21st century. New legal products can make a huge contribution to justice inclusion.