This document discusses tensions between legal culture and design culture and opportunities for cultural exchange. It outlines some key features of legal culture, such as formality, risk aversion, and adversarial thinking. Design culture emphasizes visuals, simplification, empathy, and experimentation. While cross-functional cooperation can be difficult due to different languages and perspectives, cultural intermediaries like service design can help facilitate exchange. Cultural change occurs through acculturation and natural selection as cultures examine and adapt practices. The role of legal design is to honor legal culture while facilitating progress through contact with different modes of thought.

1. Legal Culture
Design Culture:
Tensions and Opportunties

2. Hei!
Minun nimeni on Michael
Doherty
You can find me at @DohertyLawTeach
2

3. ● Q: How does an attorney sleep?
● A: First he lies on one side, then he lies on the other.
● Q: What do you get when you cross the Godfather with a
lawyer?
● A: An offer you can't understand
● Arguing with a lawyer is like wrestling a pig in mud …
sooner or later you realise they like it.
3
😂

4. TRANSFORMING STRATEGIES
(INTO A CULTURE)
Culture as, ‘the sum of a social group’s patterns of behaviour,
customs, way of life, ideas, beliefs and values.’ (Fox, 2004).

5. How is there a ‘legal
culture’?
Self-selection
Smart and literate
‘Academic Tribes’
Education
‘Thinking like a lawyer’
Language and skills
Hidden curriculum
Professional work
Recruitment
Ethics / standards
Artefacts / signs
5@DohertyLawTeach

6. Features of
legal
culture
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Formality, restraint,
logic, attention to
detail
Legal
framing and
sequential
thinking
Textual and
verbal literacy
Risk aversion,
precedent &
hierarchy
Adversarial
&
competitive

7. Design Culture

8. Features
Visual
Emphasis on
connection and
understanding
Simplification
Cognitive
Empathy &
emotional literacy
Experimental
Holistic
Artefacts
Physical – the
Post-It note
Process – the
sprint, the hack
Language – fail
fast
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9. “ Why oh why oh why can’t
lawyers just …
Why are lawyers so resistant to
...
9

10. Cultural
exchange
&
Cultural
change
10
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11. Intercultural competence
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 Stickdorn et al, ‘cross-functional cooperation is
extraordinarily difficult, as each delegate honestly argues
for his point of view using his own specialised language’
 Service design as a cultural intermediary? (Kimbell)
 Tactically – use ‘stealth projects’ (Stickdorn et al),
‘unsettle without alienating’ (Perry Kessaris)
 Role of education in developing collaboration skills – c.f.
medical professions (Hall).

12. Cultural change
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 Culture – persistent AND plastic
 Acculturation – ‘quite consciously, deliberately, cleverly and even mockingly
pick and choose among the behaviours and customs of their host culture’
(Fox).
 Natural selection - ‘Cultural change is primarily a process of adaptation and
what amounts to natural selection’ (Keesing).
 Competition between cultural customs to ‘develop familiarity with alternative
ways of life leading to constant examination of one’s own’ (Rathjie) with the
chance to appropriate or reject practices and values that no longer fit.
@DohertyLawTeach

13. “
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● ‘It is hardly possible to overstate the value … of
placing human beings in contact with persons
dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought
and action unlike those with which they are familiar …
Such communication has always been, and is
peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary
sources of progress’
And so …
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848)

14. And so …
(cont.)
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@DohertyLawTeach
 The role of legal design in
honouring and facilitating
the better instincts of legal
culture

15. “
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Bibliography
o Fox, Kate, Watching the English (Hodder, 2004)
o Hall, Pippa, Interprofessional teamwork: Professional cultures as barriers, Journal of
Interprofessional Care (May 2005) Supplement 1: 188-196
o Keesing, Roger, ‘Theories of Culture’, Annual Review of Anthropology 1974, Vol 3, 73-97
o Kimbell, Lucy, Rethinking Design Thinking: Part 1 (2011) Design & Culture 3(3)
o John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848)
o Perry-Kessaris, Amanda, Legal design for activism, policy and research,
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3295671
o Rathje, Stefanie, The Definition of Culture: An application-oriented overhaul’ 8
Interculture Journal 2009
o Stickdorn, M. et al, This is Service Design Doing (O’Reilly, 2018)
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