From March 20 – 22, 2018, Northwestern Law had the pleasure of hosting Margaret Hagan, the Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School and lecturer at the Stanford Institute of Design (the d.school).
Margaret graduated from Stanford Law School in June 2013. She served as a student fellow at the Center for Internet & Society and president of the Stanford Law and Technology Association. While a student, she built the game app Law Dojo to make studying for law school classes more interactive & engaging. During her fellowship at the d.school in 2013-2014, Margaret launched the Program for Legal Tech & Design, experimenting in how design can make legal services more usable, useful & engaging. She now teaches a series of project-based classes, with interdisciplinary student groups tackling legal challenges through user-focused research and design of new legal products and services. She also started the blog Open Law Lab to document legal innovation and design work.
During her visit, Margaret had a chance to interact with faculty, staff and, most importantly, students. Here are some highlights of her visit:
Roundtable with MSL Students
Margaret was kind enough to sit down with the MSL students and have an informal chat with them on their studies, their career paths, and how to market yourself when you don’t fit a traditional profile of a legal professional. Her advice? “Do the thing where you have the ability to create stuff and have more autonomy.”
Planet Lex Podcast Episode: Approaching Access to Justice with a Designer’s Mindset
Margaret recorded an epidose of Northwestern Law School’s podcast, where she gave some further insight into her work. Host Dean Rodriguez talks to Margaret about the use of design thinking to help close the access to justice gap. Together they discuss what design thinking’s methodology is and its application in legal structures, the importance of centering technology around the human experience, and how lawyers can incorporate a creative and empathetic mindset to their work.
DPELC-MSL Speaker Series: Q&A with Margaret Hagan, moderated by Dean Rodriguez
A lot was discussed during the Q&A event, but these tweets share some of Margaret’s words of wisdom:
“When people are heading to court, it’s because they’re in the middle of a crisis. It can be dehumanizing, but not because of bad intentions but because of a lack of good design. " –@margarethagan on why design is vital to improving legal services.
— Northwestern Law (@NorthwesternLaw) March 20, 2018
“The question is how to make it transparent for you so you can make informed choices. That’s the design mindset I advocate for. You don’t need a lot of technology either. A lot of it is intentional design.” –@margarethagan on #LegalInnovation
— Northwestern Law (@NorthwesternLaw) March 20, 2018
