My hybrid design and law skillset draws on an ability common to both professions; the ability to take complex ideas or facts and simplify them to better communicate them to others.

How my design experience adds leverage to my legal training is best explained with an example:

During my internship one of the projects involved converting a large property conveyancing project into a legal workflow. This was being done to determine whether it could be translated into an automated process, but it would be equally useful to determine whether there was potential for simplifying the process or finding alternative ways of achieving the end result.

The conversion process required a lawyer to sit with a business analyst to explain all the incremental steps involved, with the analyst converting the process into a legal workflow diagram. I sat in on the first session and watched how they were doing it. It took multiple sessions and iterations back and forth between the lawyer and the analyst to understand the steps and get the process converted into a diagram format. Each of them understood their area of expertise, but the lawyer couldn’t convert the process to a workflow or draw the diagram and the analyst didn’t understand the law or the process.

A similar project needed to convert a section of the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013 into a legal workflow. Having watched the process described above I was able to perform all aspects of the project. My law training enabled me to perform the legal analysis and my business experience enabled me to make the conversion into a simplified legal workflow and my ability to express complex ideas visually meant I could produce an elegant workflow (essentially a flowchart with tasks and decision points) that could be used to explain the process to a lawyer or a client.