As Jodi Goldstein explains in “Marketplace of Ideas,” invention is not the same as innovation. The former is about creating something altogether new—where “newness” itself is often viewed as the end goal—while the latter is more about coming up with novel ideas and new ways of thinking with the express purpose of solving specific problems. This distinction provides a foundational understanding of what innovation is, but questions remain around how to act on that understanding. Broadly, how do individuals and organizations, including law firms and in-house legal departments, actually do the work of innovation? Of course, this question can be applied virtually anywhere in the legal profession. To take an example that has plagued law firms for decades, how might a firm innovate to increase the recruitment and retention of diverse lawyers? Or, elsewhere in law, how might an in-house legal department design a career path for the nonlawyer professionals who are increasingly joining their ranks and playing increasingly important roles?

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Another example is the work of Stanford’s Legal Design Lab. The Lab, an interdisciplinary collaboration between Stanford Law School and the Stanford Design School, claims the intersection of human-centered design, technology, and law as the locus of their innovations. The Lab’s mission is both to train law students and professionals in design thinking as well as to design innovations in law—particularly in areas like access to justice, better internet legal help, smarter legal communication, and new models of legal organizations. As one example, the Lab has created a new tool called Wise Messenger, which sends automated text messages from a court or other legal organization with the goal of improving appearance rates at hearings, appointments, and other important legal events. As with IDEO, the Lab’s explicit goal is to bring design thinking principles directly to the legal context.

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