Legal Innovations Consultancy of the Year - SME News Legal Awards 2023 
Design Thinking
for law
Learn how we can help you
Treehouse is a trusted change partner for the legal sector. We help law firms get closer to their clients, differentiate in the market, and identify new avenues for growth.
Why Design for law?
Changing client demands, emerging technologies, shifting market conditions and regulatory frameworks all create both opportunities and challenges for law firms. Clients want more innovative pricing and delivery models. They also want legal teams to help them find fresh ways to tackle strategic problems.
To stay ahead in this changing market, the most successful firms are embracing new ways of working - both internally and with their clients. Treehouse has helped leading firms in the UK, US and Europe integrate the principles of design thinking to win new clients, collaborate across practices, and build more agile, change-ready cultures.
Changing client demands, emerging technologies, shifting market conditions and regulatory frameworks all create both opportunities and challenges for law firms. Clients want more innovative pricing and delivery models. They also want legal teams to help them find fresh ways to tackle strategic problems.
To stay ahead in this changing market, the most successful firms are embracing new ways of working - both internally and with their clients. Treehouse has helped leading firms in the UK, US and Europe integrate the principles of design thinking to win new clients, collaborate across practices, and build more agile, change-ready cultures.
How we can
help you
We’ve helped law firms around the world drive growth by integrating design thinking into their day to day practices. We help our legal services clients with:
Legal design thinking training
Equip your people with the skills to lead with empathy, discover unmet client needs, and creatively respond with fresh solutions that create new value for clients and the firm.
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Client focused workshops
Partner with us to tackle strategic challenges, develop innovative approaches to winning new work, and run engaging workshops and events with key clients to better understand their needs, deepen relationships, and co-create solutions.
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Transformation
partner
If you are a driver of change in the legal sector, we can help you build the internal capability and firm-wide engagement required to transform your culture to create greater impact for clients, your people, society and the planet.
Talk to us
How we help law firms build more agile, innovative cultures:
Interested in discussing how your law firm can use design thinking to drive change?
Get in touch
"I loved that when we met the Treehouse team, you used design thinking to try and understand our challenge. You live the approach and methodology. It meant that when I walked away, I knew that you got it and that you’d work with me to make it happen."
Design thinking?
Used by some of the world’s most forward thinking companies, including Apple, Google and Procter & Gamble, design thinking enables you to deeply understand what your clients care about, so that you can develop innovations they will want. It's a fast-paced, highly collaborative approach, that involves a range of analytical and creative approaches (including storytelling, visualisation, business modelling, rapid prototyping and structured experimentation) to come up with new, innovative solutions that will better meet your clients' needs.
McKinsey & Company research shows that “Design-led organizations realize 10% more revenue than ones that aren’t.”
The Design Management Institute found that design-driven organisations outperform the S&P 500 by a whopping 228%.
Design Thinking is now being applied by innovative law firms globally to help them:
Differentiate in the marketplace by engaging with clients in new, more innovative ways
Create competitive advantage by anticipating emerging client needs
Develop innovative and disruptive new service delivery and pricing models, and growth strategies
Increase organisational agility and responsiveness to change
Approach day-to-day challenges more creatively to increase client satisfaction and matter profitability
Improve collaboration across practices and locations
Boost employee engagement and fulfilment with a more creative working environment
"It’s increasingly important for lawyers to be familiar with Design Thinking. At a minimum this is so they can speak the same language as their clients, many of whom are using Design Thinking at senior levels, but even more importantly because so many of the elements of Design Thinking are helpful in enhancing client relationships as well as developing innovative solutions to new client challenges."
Thought leadership
Why lawyers make great designers. No, really.
In an increasingly competitive market, subject to multiple pressures from evermore demanding clients, advancements in technology, and more businesses offering legal services, law firms have to do something to make them stand out from the crowd.
Why law firms need design thinking now more than ever
Every article about law firms and innovation starts in the same way. They talk about the pressures the profession is facing...
Building a Culture of Innovation in Legal Services
What does innovation look like for a traditional industry such as law? "Building a Culture of Innovation in Legal Services" (Ark Publishing 7/2015...
How global law firm DLA Piper is using design thinking to transform the business (Page 18)
“If our clients don’t want something, it doesn’t matter how excellent or radical it appears. It’s just not going to work.”
Jana Blount, change maker, DLA Piper
Slaughter and May - The Lens: Design thinking - listen to your user... but not too much!
In a legal context, design thinking can be applied to challenges being faced within a law firm, or by clients within their organisations.
Roundtable: GCs draw their nightmares
Over the past six months, an incessant stream of worries has troubled the minds of in-house counsels across the world...
Managing Partner Magazine - Innovation Cover Story
Can design thinking help law firms be more innovative? Design thinking is new to legal services, but as innovation continues to rise as a top...
Success
stories
How DLA Piper is transforming its culture to deliver greater impact for clients
Like many industries, the legal sector is facing a variety of disruptive challenges - from digital transformation to ever changing client expectations.
Global law firm DLA Piper - now Law.com International’s Law Firm of The Year 2020 - saw an opportunity not only to address these challenges head on, but to capitalise on them to build stronger and more innovative client relationships. The result is an organization-wide Radical Change programme.
The programme is designed to fundamentally change the way the firm operates and enable it to better meet client needs by embedding new mindsets and ways of working, embracing new technologies, and developing and expanding its services.
read the full case studyWe were delighted to partner with DLA Piper to deliver one of the key strands of their Radical Change programme; Design Thinking. But it was clear from the outset that some ‘off the peg’ design thinking training was not going to deliver the radical change DLA Piper was looking for.
Working as a joint team, we agreed a brief to develop a framework, tools, training and support programme that resonated with lawyers and legal support staff, in order to drive change centred around what clients really want.
This ongoing project has led to a whole host of positive results for DLA Piper, including new client relationships, genuine co-creation between lawyers and their clients, and a shift in mindset amongst internal teams.
