Clifford Chance

Design Thinking for Lawyers


Clifford Chance

Clifford Chance is a multinational law firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom, and a member of the "Magic Circle" of leading British law firms. It is one of the ten largest law firms in the world measured both by number of lawyers and revenue.


Although the legal industry is not known for creative problem solving, law firms face the same challenges when it comes to disruption as other organisations.
Clifford Chance wanted to introduce a Design Thinking mindset to problem solving in the context of legal services. They engaged Collective Campus to upskill lawyers in Design Thinking, including the tools required to apply it in their day to day roles.


Collective Campus delivered training for the Clifford Chance team to help them:
-       Understand the importance of creative problem solving in the legal industry
-       Understand how to apply Design Thinking in their day to day roles
-       Understand how organisations have successfully applied Design Thinking to drive innovation
-       Understand the Design Thinking methodology and application of the different tools and techniques at each stage of the process
-       Understand how to pitch learnings/findings from design thinking to leaders to gain buy-in


The Clifford Chance team gained a deep understanding of the value in applying Design Thinking to problems in the legal industry. The course helped facilitate an end to end understanding of Design Thinking and provided the team with a key selection of tools to develop, prototype, and pitch their ideas. The processes and tools learned allowed participants to use Design Thinking to not only develop big new ideas, but improve things in their daily roles. Further benefits for lawyers that attended the session included:
-       Ability to identify opportunities where they normally wouldn't (both internally and for clients)
-       In this era of rapid disruption, become more relevant in the legal industry
-       Learning how to apply a proven methodology to help drive innovation and solve real problems