Often, we think about challenges the legal system faces in terms of ethics, or economics, or management issues. But what changes when we think through these issues with the lens of design?
Our guest today is on a mission to improve the legal experience for all through thoughtful digital design. Nicole Bradick is the founder and CEO of Theory and Principle, a legal and justice technology design and development agency. At Theory and Principle, they're helping global law firms, foundations, legal aid organizations, and legal tech companies to design and build digital products that can make legal work more productive and accessible.
Learn about the importance of user experience design for the future of the industry on this episode of the Filevine Fireside. Find out more about Theory and Principle, Nicole Bradick, and their mission to change the legal industry by visiting their official website.
Full Transcript
Katie Wolf:
Welcome to the The Filevine Fireside. I'm Katie Wolf.
Katie Wolf:
Often we think about challenges the legal system faces in terms of ethics or economics or management issues, but what changes when we think through these issues with the lens of design? Our guest today is on a mission to improve the legal experience for all through thoughtful digital design. Nicole Bradick is the founder and CEO of Theory and Principle, a legal and justice technology design and development agency. At Theory and Principle, they're helping global law firms, foundations, legal aid organizations, and legal tech companies to design and build digital products that can make legal work more productive and accessible. Nicole, thank you so much for your work. Thanks for joining us today.
Nicole Bradick:
Thanks so much for having me.
Katie Wolf:
Nicole, you were a practicing attorney for years. Now you are the founder and CEO of a company. Can you tell us how did that transition happen? What brought you from practicing law to doing something quite different?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah, sure. I started my career as a trial lawyer. I was a trial lawyer in a small city of Portland Maine. After about six years of doing trial work, I realized that I wanted to do something different. I did all of the standard informational interviews of alternative JD Advantage roles. Because I'm in a small market, I didn't really find anything that was interesting to me. It sort of forced me to be creative and think about where are their opportunities to innovate in the industry. At that time I had small kids at home and was finding other women who were sort of dropping out of the law because they had small kids at home. I started my first company while I was still practicing law, that sort of brought those high end talented women and paired them law firms that needed just in time talent.
Nicole Bradick:
I started that while I was still practicing and then that company took off. Then within a couple of years, I left the practice and went to run my own business full time. Theory and Principle is now my third business. I've been doing a lot of this. Again, I've been doing this for a long time now.
Katie Wolf:
Yeah. What are some of the things that you've seen in... I mean, the legal tech world has gone through such astonishing changes since you were first looking around into that realm. What do you think about the changes that you're seeing?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah, it's been wild. Back when I saw started in this industry, I would say there were maybe like a couple dozen of us, truly, that were immersed in this space and really understood the space. We all knew each other. Since then, it's just an explosion. Even like the last two to three years alone have been really interesting to see the number of new companies that are entering the market, the amount of funding that's entering the market. It's great. I think it's sort of the natural progression for an industry that was lagging in its innovation and use of technology generally.
Katie Wolf:
Nicole, when you were first looking at issues of digital design, who were the kind of thinkers and creators who were inspiring to you? Who are the people who seem to understand what really works with design?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah. Honestly, when I first started in the product world, there wasn't a lot of good design work that was happening within the legal industry at all, which is why have we gotten this business to start with. I would look more towards the consumer digital products like Google and Microsoft and Airbnb. What are they doing? What have they sort of settled as best practices? A lot of them have been real leaders in a lot of core design principles. Like Microsoft in universal design. They have led the way with their design team in concepts of universal design and designing for accessibility. It's more looking outside legal, for sure, than looking within the legal industry at all. I do have a couple of women in the industry that I have followed for years and that have inspired a lot of our work. There's one woman, Laura Klein, who's wrote a book called Build Better Products. That's the book that I keep by my desk. The one I like to give to people who are new to product.
Katie Wolf:
That's awesome. If a lawyer or legal professional is listening and is saying, "I practice law, I'm not a designer. I don't do technology." What's the basic message that you'd like to get across to them about why this is important.
Nicole Bradick:
Well, I'd say that that's okay. I think you need to be a user of technology. I don't think you need to know or understand design. You don't need to know or understand technology at any deeper level other than to use it. I think that as a practicing lawyer, technology is a necessity. You can't get away from it now. When I practiced, the only thing that we really cared about was the Microsoft suite. We had Sanction, but I never touched that. My assistants touched that. Technology was not really a part of it, but at the same time, then, we didn't have other competition. We weren't forced to be efficient. We weren't forced to find new ways to communicate and collaborate with clients because they just didn't exist.
Nicole Bradick:
I think that clients now have... Their expectations have rapidly changed. You need to be able to be a user of technology in order to create those efficiencies and adapt those new sort of communication and collaboration methods with your clients. I think that from a design perspective... The only thing I ever ask for a practicing lawyer to do, because when you're a practicing lawyer there's so much to do, right? You've got to generate business. If you're a trial lawyer, you have to be really good at writing briefs, but also really good at oral advocacy, but also really good at negotiation and business development. There's too much on the plate of an average practicing lawyer.
Nicole Bradick:
The only thing I ever sort of suggest is just look, just keep your eye out for those opportunities. Those mini baby moments where there's some frustration happening either in the way you're practicing or the way that you see your staff working or the way that your clients are engaging with you. If you see those frustrations, there's usually some way to resolve it, either using technology or better processes. It doesn't have to be rocket science. You don't have to be building the most innovative law firm on earth. Just, you need to be constantly looking at making those improvements and figuring out how can I get to those improvements?
Katie Wolf:
Nicole, design is interesting to me because it has to stay grounded in this living embodied human experience. I feel like when we're thinking about issues, I at least can be prone to fly off into sort of the abstract, but design always brings us back to the real world. Is that sort of your experience dealing with this realm?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah. I mean, that's why I love design, right? It's just a problem solving mechanism. It is a way to solve the most difficult challenges that are out there and we can't do it without thinking about it through a design lens. I think that there are all these sort of new methodologies out there and you hear a lot about design thinking and all of this, and I don't really care about any of that. In the end it's a human being has a problem, what are the options we have to solve that problem, which option is going to work best for this human, and then let's try to make it even better from there. Nothing about design for me is rocket science. It's sort of a natural logical progression of how do we best solve this problem for somebody. I think people can think of design as being sort of flighty or amorphous, but for me, it's quite concrete.
Katie Wolf:
Tell us about Theory and Principle, sort of the nuts and bolts of it. You nurture new legal technologies and apps into existence more or less, right?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah. We do a combination of things. We work in three markets, as you mentioned at the outset. A third of our work is with large law firms. A third of our work is with legal tech companies. A third of our work is with nonprofits. The work we do for those organizations is all a bit different but at our core, we're an end to end design and development agency. We have the capability to go from idea to launch of a product, with all of the sort of multidisciplinary team required to make that happen. For law firms, we're often building client facing products for them, finding new ways for them to engage and interact or find new revenue streams through technology.
Nicole Bradick:
For legal tech companies, by and large, we're doing UX/UI work. A lot of times we're coming in and doing the researching, talking to the company's clients, try to understand where there are pain points and help to support a design or redesign of a product. Then for nonprofits, we're typically building free consumer facing products. Again, typically they'll come to us with an idea and we'll sort of flesh that idea out more, we'll talk to users, we'll prototype, we'll test, and then we'll go through the whole build launch cycle from there.
Katie Wolf:
Yeah. Such interesting work. In terms of that last one, working with nonprofits and legal aid groups, do you think that design can help with issues of access to justice, for instance?
Nicole Bradick:
I think design is the solution. The one to one direct services is not, we know that. That's not going to solve our problem. I don't think we need any fancy technology to solve the problem. I think the most basic tech that we have out there is useful enough. I think it really comes down you, how do we design services and products that help somebody navigate the system on their own or help them to find somebody, a human being who can help and make that human being as efficient as possible so they can help more people?
Nicole Bradick:
It's about sort of providing a continuum of offerings to that middle gap in America, where there's no access to legal services... doing that either through helping them help themselves, which is a big part of what most justice tech is doing, or getting them to the right person at the right time to provide them just enough legal services to help them on their way. Most people don't want to fully engage with an attorney and most attorneys don't have capacity to handle the amount of demand that's out there. I really believe in this sort of designing this on this continuum,
Katie Wolf:
There's also some of these question... I mean, it's a highly regulated industry, right? Sometimes these issues come up where someone's created an app that I don't know, it maybe helps people stop their evictions, but then someone else will come in and say, but this is practicing law without there being a lawyer who does it. What are some of the complications that you've seen exist in that space?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah. I think by and large, the regulations have not meaningfully impeded the innovation in this space as far as unauthorized practice of law. Actually I'll take that back. It has not meaningfully impeded the current solutions, it probably has impeded unknown innovations. Things, ideas and concepts that we haven't even thought about. We did just get in Florida a ruling in the TIKT case, saying that they were engaging in the unauthorized practice of law and that I think can be a real hit for this industry. What we always tell our clients is that yes, you're operating in a gray area, but as long as you stick to the side of providing legal information and not advice, you should be fine. I'm sticking to that.
Katie Wolf:
I'm originally from Utah. We hear a lot when we talk about some of these issues about Utah's sort of regulatory sandbox. Do you want to kind of explain like what's going on there and what that could open up?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah. It's interesting. Utah has recognized that the current modus operandi is not going to solve the access to justice problem that they have in that state and indeed everywhere else in the country. They have created a sandbox, which is basically, we're going to give you a pass on these regulatory issues. We're going to sort of waive the UPL requirements. We're going to make it easier for you to innovate and you can apply to be a member of the sandbox. Then I think it's sort of experimental. An organization will apply, they'll get accepted, they'll be able to operate in a way that typically wouldn't be allowed under the regulatory landscape. I think they're sort of waiting and seeing. Do we cause harm to people or is there a net positive benefit here?
Nicole Bradick:
It's such a smart way to go about it because I think in the end you'll have some data, right? Either we've improved people's lives tremendously by lifting these regulations and allowing this to happen, or it's been a total flop, people have come to court with things they have that have not allowed them to proceed in court because it's all wrong. I think that the whole idea is can we create more good than cause any damage? I think those are really exciting to watch.
Katie Wolf:
If you had to guess, what do you think will be the result or how do you think legal regulation will shift in the future?
Nicole Bradick:
I think that we're going to have more liberalization for sure. I think people yell a lot about these regulations and about the Guild trying to protect the consumer, but really not trying to protect the consumer, trying to protect lawyers and their businesses. I do think there is a consumer protection issue and I'm not blind to that. I think that we have an obligation as officers of the law to ensure that people are getting a net benefit in their interactions with services that are designed to help them. That's across the whole system. I don't fully object to some process to ensure that these solutions are not going to be nefarious in any way. I talk a lot about this in legal. We have this concept of MVP, a minimum viable product in technology, which is like, let's get out the smallest, easiest, fastest thing so we can get it out to consumers and learn from that.
Nicole Bradick:
I think in legal, we have quite a bit of a larger ethical obligation. It can't be minimally viable from a technology and value perspective. It has to be minimally viable from an approach to legal perspective, right? Like we can't give somebody half the answer. We have to give them the whole answer. We can't set them on a path and have them file the claim that they can't then pursue or will cause problems for them. I do think we in technology also have a greater obligation to create technology that's not doing any harm. I'm not entirely opposed to some oversight of the solutions that are coming to market.
Katie Wolf:
Has your dealing with different digital products and looking through the world at what exists, what are some common snafus or design mistakes that you see in the legal world?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah. It kind of depends on the segment. If we're talking about the nonprofit space there's a host of problems. I would say overall the challenge is a lack of design. We still have a lot of products that are being brought to market with no design touch at all. Somebody just has an idea, they all sketch something out and a developer will go and build it without any real thought to how this will operate. You would be shocked to learn how many enterprise or legal tech companies come to us to do redesigns or design work. They have tons of users, but not a single designer on staff. It's incredibly common. I think that design is usually the last thing that's hired when somebody's starting a legal tech company, which I think is a weird and an unfortunate mistake. Overall, it's really a lack of attention to design, although that's certainly changing and definitely improving.
Katie Wolf:
Yeah. Do you think design is just seen as like, oh, you put a pretty hat on it at the end, just a pretty bow or...?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah. Yeah. Although I don't think we do a great job at that. I don't think we do a great job making it look pretty even.
Katie Wolf:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nicole Bradick:
I think it's just there's a focus on functionality and like, oh, if we can bring this functionality to market, we're going to win. It's really not that way any longer. You've got to have the functionality that brings value, but you no longer can... It's sort of a baseline now that you need to have at least decent design. Otherwise you're going to have a real problem both with saleability and then with adoption if you do manage to sell, it.
Katie Wolf:
What are the sort of digital products that you want to see more of in the legal world? What are you excited about?
Nicole Bradick:
I think the most exciting space right now is the direct to consumer space, for sure. Again, I think we have this massive market opportunity with the justice gap. I think that we're seeing a lot of great people like Erin Levine at Hello Divorce. Bringing divorce to the public. Upsolve, obviously helping with bankruptcy. These are really, really, really good ideas. I'd like to see that happen more because I think that, A) there's a great opportunity from a business perspective, and then there's a really good opportunity for impact that sits next to that business opportunity.
Katie Wolf:
I want to go back a little bit to something that you mentioned right at the beginning of this conversation, when you talked about your work helping law firms who needed some part-time help connect with lawyers who were looking for some more flexibility and a better work life balance. I read about you being recognized as a quote "legal rebel" by the ABA for doing some of that work. I guess I just want to know what your thinking is about these big questions of work life balance in the legal industry. How those come up against questions of gender and lifestyle and parenthood, because I know a lot of the lawyers you worked with were mothers of young children. What are some of your thoughts about that? How have those evolved?
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah, there's a lot more options now than there were when I started that company. A lot of these large firms for example, are starting their own staffing models where you can work in a more flexible environment. I'm not going to pretend that's the most engaging work ever, or that it leads you on a path to a really successful career, but it gives you options. Options are better than no options. It's better than your options being work or don't work in a legal profession. I think that the sort of work from home components and the ability to be okay with having your children around when you're working has been the one silver lining to come from pandemic. I think that will help a lot out of people who are struggling trying to figure out how to balance it all.
Nicole Bradick:
When I had babies at home, I still remember being on a call with a client and like walking rapidly around my house in circles with my two toddlers following me like screaming and then having to unmute to save what I wanted to say really quickly, and then hit mute again because I was terrified they would think it was horribly unprofessional. We don't have that anymore. I think that's magic. That's so new and it's such a relief. I do think that will open up more opportunities. I think general remote work will open up more opportunities. When I was looking for new opportunities back when I was practicing law, I really had to look locally. There really weren't other things I could do in the law that were interesting to me. That's all changed. I feel more optimistic about the ability for women to succeed in law now than I ever did before. But, the numbers. We'll have to see what the numbers say about that.
Katie Wolf:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to see how technology has changed that. You think what would've happened if the pandemic had hit even just 10 years earlier, how lawyers would've coped with that, what they would've done. It is pretty remarkable to think about.
Nicole Bradick:
Yeah.
Katie Wolf:
DO you think that... I mean, now you're in a different field, you're in the technology world. I feel like a lot of other professions have more openness to achieving success while maintaining... or achieving at least an idea of what success can look like while maintaining a better work life balance and being able to have vacations and weekends and some flexibility. Am I being too down on the legal world, or is that something that you think is true too?
Nicole Bradick:
I think so. I think you're being too down on it because... Think what you may about the billable hour. For firms where that is the driving force, which is most firms, that means that as an attorney you should be able to work from anywhere doing anything, just as long as that gives you accountability without having to have FaceTime. It's like, oh, she's keeping up her hours.
Katie Wolf:
Yeah.
Nicole Bradick:
If you think about medicine, I've had so many friends who have dropped out of medicine because of calls being just absolutely impossible to balance with having children, especially in two physician families. I don't think we're alone here. I think the market has been trying to handle how to deal with these lady folk for a while now. We're finding new ways to do that. I think we're on a better trajectory now than we've ever been. I don't think legal is particularly behind.
Nicole Bradick:
It also depends on what you're choosing to do. I went to law school knowing I never wanted to work in big law. I went to an inexpensive law school because I knew I wasn't going to make big law salary. Had I chosen to go to one of the big expensive schools, I would've had to go that path. I would definitely have burnt out and I definitely would never like want to have anything to do with law again. I think also some of it's the paths that we take and the positions we get ourselves in by going to the best possible school even though it's going to cost an arm and a leg. Again, we have more options.
Katie Wolf:
There's different trajectories.
Nicole Bradick:
There's different trajectories, and I think that also the ability to just be a little bit more genuine and see different faces of success now really help. When I was looking at going to law school, I thought that people who went to law school were hyper geniuses. Like crazy smart people that I could never be on the same plane with. It turns out really anybody can go to law school. I was completely wrong. But the only reason I went is because I had a job as a paralegal where I saw two young female attorneys who were just like me. They weren't crazy geniuses. They were pretty smart, but normal too. They were practicing law. I was like, oh, I guess I can do it. A lot of it is just this next generation also being able to see women doing things in different ways that will open up those options as well. Prior to that, the option was foreclosed for me in my own brain.
Katie Wolf:
Yeah. Yeah. Love that. We're running out of time unfortunately, but I just want to ask you as a final question, what do you see as the big picture future of the legal practice with new technologies? What do you think are the big changes that legal professionals are more and more going to be encountering in this future?
Nicole Bradick:
I think it's just going to get easier to practice law. I think that if you embrace technology, your job is going to get a lot less stressful and it's going to be a lot easier. I think you need to let those opportunities in. If you look at some of these drafting suites. If I had those when I was writing briefs, 80 page briefs on a weekly basis, oh my gosh, I would've had so much less stress in my life. I just feel like it's going to make lawyering a more enjoyable career path for people, I hope. I love the law. I'll always love the law. I hope that people continue to find happiness in the practice of law.
Katie Wolf:
Well, thanks so much for sharing that vision with us, Nicole, and for the work that you're doing to make it a reality. That's really exciting.
Nicole Bradick:
Thank you so much for having me.
Katie Wolf:
Check out Theory and Principle online to learn more about Nicole's work, and for more conversations about legal technology, join us next time for The Filevine Fireside.