Yesterday, I was fortunate to work with Dan Jackson of Northeastern’s NULawLab, Dan Linna of Michigan State’s Legal RnD, and Victor Quintanilla of Indiana University Law to present a talk/workshop on “Design Thinking for Law Professors” at the AALS annual meeting in San Diego.
We each presented on our work on bringing innovation, design, and process management into law school curriculum, research, and service. Then we ran a workshop for all of our participants — a mixture of professors, staff, and deans — through an hour and a half design thinking workshop on how they might use this process to improve how they teach, how they serve the community, or how they do research.
The participants were incredibly lively, and the ideas that emerged were wonderful — ranging from new statute-reading games, to bitcoin for law professors’ obligations/work, to new cross-university service models. And we found many crossovers with our methodology and that practiced by professors in everything from negotiation, to civ pro, to empirical research, to clinical work. Many connections were built — and we look forward to working together more!
