5 legal leaders share their Designer & Builder Program experience

If you’re a legal professional looking to learn and develop core legaltech and design-thinking skills, you’re in the right place.

By this stage, you’ve probably heard of the Designer & Builder Program – a free, self-paced, six-week online course.

If you’re still on the fence about signing up next week, we spoke to 5 leaders in the legal industry about their experience in the program to learn how it has helped them in their work and their careers.

Click the Sign up button to register for our next intake starting the week of March 15, 2022

We know you’ll get a lot of value from the Designer & Builder Program because legal professionals who’ve completed it will tell you as much.

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Bernadette Stirling, Head of Innovation & Market Development, Clayton Utz

The DBP helps develop the mindset of solving problems differently. The DBP was an easy way  to get exposed to building bots and what types of problems the bots can solve. It allowed us to think about how we can apply the tech to our client needs and internal processes. Josef is very intuitive – you don’t need a high level of tech knowledge to be able to use it. The DBP is about thinking through the process, then Josef easily enables someone to pick it up and run with it.

Whenever we had a question or query, the team was accessible and super helpful. It was easy and we felt very supported.

Rachel Delaney, VP of Legal and Operations, Lexer

I’ve used the thinking I’ve learned from the program numerous times in my role as VP of Legal and Operations at Lexer, including while developing intake forms. The Designer & Builder Program challenges you to automate a legal task in the shortest and simplest way possible.

I had some exposure to some legal automation projects when I was one of the members of the Telstra Legal Innovation Forum. I later moved to another in-house role at Aurecon, and they were seeking to innovate and do things differently, but they were a bit further behind.

I took the lead and spearheaded the innovation program there, at Aurecon, and looked to upskill myself.

We had already created a number of self-service template contracts at Aurecon, but the challenge was that nobody knew how to select the right one. They were confusingly similar to the users, so I built a prototype for our contract selection tool to help guide people towards the right contract for their needs.

 The self-service tool helped users select the right contract, with the additional potential of using inputs to generate a bespoke contract without needing to involve the legal team at all.

If you’re looking to innovate processes that are boring, repetitive or low-value, the Designer & Builder Program helps you work through it. Even if you don’t have budget or political clout to influence purchasing decisions, do it at a personal level to work through task and systems you can control.

Christopher Aaron Yong, Technology and Digital Assets Lawyer, Lander & Rogers
30 under 30 Financial Services Lawyer of The Year

The Designer & Builder Program allowed me to get across the Josef platform over a number of weeks – it was the full experience. 

The program brought into focus the customer’s problem, finding pain points, and learning how to build your solutions based on that, instead of a fragmented idea you might have. You interview people to get a good understanding of what the problem is, so you can build a product they actually want to use. It teaches you to consider how empathy and user experience might fit into the larger piece so lawyers like us can develop client-based solutions. 

I would 100% recommend the Designer & Builder Program. It’s an amazing program. It will allow you to tap into really complex technological solutions with just a few simple clicks.

Kate Offer, Legal Academic and Senior Lecturer, The University of Western Australia

I did the Designer & Builder Program after I got involved with Josef to work on a project with CLWA, leading a team of students to research, design and build a chatbot to streamline intake for community legal centres across the entire state. 

In the program, I built a chatbot to generate wills. I don’t have a background in tech, science, or data – I’m a humanities person, but the program was extremely accessible. 

It’s beautifully and thoughtfully designed with the beginner in mind. I followed the program from start to finish, and I was quite nervous undertaking the course. I don’t do well with instruction and I’m better with people showing me what to do. 

The combination of videos in the course, with people explaining things, was really helpful.

Benjamin Judd, Manager, Innovation and Clients & Markets, Clayton Utz

The Designer & Builder Program is a really accessible way for lawyers to play with legaltech.

The DBP introduces exciting new ways of thinking to help lawyers think differently about how they deliver services.

The program is non-confrontational and self-driven. You can literally dive in without any training and start clicking and pulling things together to see what the outcome would be. This is great from a proof of concept point of view, or in testing a hypothesis – it’s awesome.

The program teaches you how to take an idea and turn it into something that is operational in real-time. Bonus, is that it is in a form that can be presented to stakeholders internally or to a client.