These are slides from my presentation at DATA2J, a roundtable conference hosted by Prof. Elizabeth Chambliss, Director of the Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough Center on Professionalism at the USC School of Law. In my presentation, I addressed ways to increase online engagement between the public and lawyers through the use of gamification. I based the talk on my working paper.
Here is a working paper I wrote that looks at ways to increase online engagement between the public and legal professionals using gamification for the purpose of increasing access to justice. This is the last of the research and writing I have produced this year during my Stanford Law Fellowship. I hope someone out there takes this research and the case studies and puts the information to good use. The working paper will be refined and become part of a white paper series for the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services later in the year. I am open to suggestions and collecting other case studies for this paper.
I posted my other draft paper on Gamification in Law Firms a couple weeks ago. There is more work to be done in this area and it involves multidisciplinary collaboration. Hopefully these two papers will provide a good starting point for those interested in the actual development of gamification strategies within the legal profession – whether for access to justice or for internal improvement of the law firm environment.
Here is my draft working paper on Gamification in Law Firms which looks at the use of gamification in law firms to increase productivity and collaboration, among other benefits. This paper provides a framework for approaching implementation of a gamification strategy within the law firm.
For this paper I had fun researching in the fields of psychology, sociology, education, game design and development, behavioral science, marketing, human-computer interaction (HCI) and a little neuroscience. This paper provides a background on gamification, including the science behind why it works, and then looks at how law firms could apply gamification for different purposes within the firm.
The second half of the paper actually provides a map for a law firm to design a gamification strategy and move forward with experimenting with this in the firm. I have many case studies of different forms of gamification at companies and even a small handful of law firms that have experimented with gamification and had success.
Some of the objectives for the use of gamification in law firms might be:
1. Increased associate retention rates,
2. Efficient and effective training of new technologies and processes, including methods to improve associate recording of billable hours,
3. Human resources productivity, such as onboarding new associates, training new hires, collecting associate reviews, etc.,
4. Increased communication between members of the firm,
5. Encourage inter-generational mentorship,
6. Increased participation in pro bono activities,
7. Desired use of firm resources, such as training and education,
8. Encouragement for individual law firm members to innovate for the benefit of the firm.
Please note that this paper is a work in progress. I am currently working on a paper related to gamification for access to justice and with client-facing applications that focuses more broadly on increasing online engagement between lawyers and the public. I’ve found some great, fairly recent, empirical studies for that paper that I may go back and add to the analysis in this one for law firms. Stay tuned.
Here is the video from my presentation to the ABA Future of Legal Services Commission. I was asked to discuss virtual law practice and online engagement through gamification. This is part of a series of webinars that the Commission is holding. You can check out the other videos on their website, including talks by Will Hornsby, William Henderson, Michael Mills, Susan Hackett, and others to come. The Commission is having an invitation-only National Summit out here at Stanford Law at the beginning of May and based on its roster of speakers, it promises to be a productive event.
The annual Meaningful Play Conference (@meaningfulplay, #mplay) is being held this week at Michigan State University. This game conference takes an academic approach to how games can be used to educate and persuade the players. The conference explores how games can be designed and developed for meaningful purposes acknowledging that
…games have the potential to impact players’ beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, emotions, cognitive abilities, physical and mental health, and behavior.
I am unable to attend the conference, but my two fellow panelists, Lien Tran and Dan Jackson, are there to present information about how games might be used in the legal industry and to raise questions about the development and funding for those games. I wanted to share their important work here and provide an update on my own research progress.
Lien Tran is a game designer and Assistant Professor at the University of Miami. She has started an initiative, Amiguía Americana, to provide interactive, game-based resources for unaccompanied immigrant minors (UIMs), youth who may have been taken into custody by the government because of their undocumented status. Her first immigration project, Toma El Paso (Make a Move in English), is a board game currently being used by ICAN (a team of community volunteers who deliver a tailored curriculum to UIMs) with UIMs in a juvenile shelter in Miami, Florida, to teach them about the shelter release process.
Dan Jackson is the Executive Director of the NuLawLab at Northeastern University School of Law. They have created game that is a simulation for self-represented parties. The game is a nominee with the HiiL Innovating Justice program.
Keep an eye on both of these individuals and their projects as the concept of games for legal services begins to take hold.
As for my research at Stanford Law, I’m reading through examples of how games and gamification have been used in the medical profession and the reported outcomes from use in caregiver/patient or medical organization/public relationships. This is requiring me to read through journals outside of law which makes this work really fun and challenging. I’ve been reading books on persuasive games and radical game design.
I am also writing a couple of introductory white papers that look at 1) gamification within law firms, and 2) the use of games and gamification to increase online engagement between the public and the legal profession. I’ll share. More to come.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
I attended GSummit in San Francisco this week. (The “G” stands for gamification.) This annual conference looks at ways to increase user engagement through gamification and games. With all of the online “noise” surrounding us and the invasiveness of mobile technology pulling people in many different directions, no industry – not even the legal profession – is immune from the problem of getting the public’s attention long enough to convey a message.
As I’ve written before, I am researching ways to increase online engagement between the public and the legal profession. Specifically, I am looking at ways to use online games to educate and empower the public about their legal rights. While I knew this conference was aimed more at how companies could increase brand loyalty and engagement of consumers, I thought the lessons here were definitely something that might translate over to our profession.
I was not the only person thinking this. There were a couple other people from the legal profession, including a member of the Legal Services Society in BC and someone from a big law firm scoping out methods of gamification to motivate associates to collaborate and share work. I gathered a lot of useful information in the sessions that I will be exploring further in my research at Stanford.
Below are only a few of the top take-aways from GSummit 2014. With each of these, I am thinking about multiple applications of the concepts to our profession, such as 1) implementation in a large law firm for associates, training, employee motivation, etc., 2) a technique that a legal tech startup or existing branded network for legal services could adopt, or 3) a way that games could be created that would educate the public about the law and where to go for legal assistance whether that’s to a legal aid organization, a branded network, a law firm or a solo practitioner.
1. Games can be incredibly adept at explaining complex systems. – IBM’s Serious Games Solutions (And what could be more complex than the legal system?)
2. Games can be used to change cultures in a positive fashion. – IBM’s @INNOV8ATE
3. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation may not be specific enough to explain behavior. Behavior is systematic. Designing should be for behavior change and not for persuasion. – BJ Fogg (Stanford) (@BJFogg)
4. How to troubleshoot when a behavior is not happening (such as people not take some preventive legal action): 1. Trigger the behavior (Tell them “You need to have this legal document executed!”), 2. Is it simple enough? Can they do it from an ability perspective? 3. Motivation (do they want to do it? do they understand the legal consequences of doing or not doing an action?) – BJ Fogg (Stanford)
5. Validation, especially social validation, is always better than out-right rewards, but it’s harder to orchestrate. Rewards have a short-term result. – BJ Fogg (Stanford)
6. For intervention and prevention, you only need to create an experience that is short but impacts the player for a longer time. This is contrary to the belief that you have to build a game that people will keep playing repeatedly or come back to. You only have to get them to do it in a short burst and that exposure to the experience in the game mechanics will be long enough to have the impact desired to convey the lesson. – from a recent study on games that Jane McGonigal spoke about during her session
7. Technology didn’t make a difference in the results regarding the success of a game. It could be a pen and paper game and innovative technologies or apps didn’t make a difference. – from McGonigal’s talk [McGonigal also told about the push-back she has gotten with her games and research geared towards improving people’s health and how the “bias” against games by the medical profession is unfortunately preventing potentially useful clinical data from getting into the hands of the people it could help. I expect the same initial resistance with the legal profession. Gathering user data and outcome reporting is going to be important.]
8. Co-op play, social gaming, or adding a social component to the game increases positive feelings about the players and increases interaction. – McGonigal
9. Connecting the subject you want to teach to pop-culture references can have enormous impact at both increasing the engagement but also in spreading the lesson to people who otherwise might not be interested in engaging long enough to learn it. – Neil DeGrasse Tyson spoke about his work as an astrophysicist and how he teaches by finding ways to connect his ideas out into pop-culture references. The same could by connecting legal games with pop culture icons and references – maybe even cat memes. While that may sound “distasteful” to some in the profession, it would actually work really well to get the engagement necessary to teach the legal lesson.
10. There is a psychology of fun (her slide deck on this) and different types of fun that can lead to desired engagement. – Nicole Lazzaro, XEODesign
Top insight gleaned: The legal profession is not engaging with the public we serve in ways that will make a meaningful impact. As society becomes more mobile, it will become increasingly difficult for us to get the public’s attention and therefore more difficult to increase access to justice and help guide them to self-help resources. There are ways we could use gamification and game mechanics to create meaningful connections between the public and legal services providers and/or legal information for self-help purposes.
A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation on a panel entitled Legal Technology in the Public Interest with Ron Staudt and Phil Malone for Stanford’s Future Law Conference. Below is the video from this:
The ABA Journal wrote an article about the RocketHub crowdfund campaign to develop the game for legal services, Estate Quest.
I’m still working with Illinois Legal Aid Online on a game about eviction law, but the estate planning game has been on hold until I can get more funding to complete it. There are five days left in the campaign.
Please consider helping to develop this project with me. If we can learn ways to increase online engagement with the public around the law and their legal rights, then we can increase awareness, access, and education. If you are interested in ways that other industries are using games to create positive change, check out Games for Change.
I wrote an article about the use of games for legal services in the March issue of Legal IT Today, an online legal tech publication. You can read the full article starting on page 31 of the publication.
A couple of quotes from the article:
Most people seek out assistance only after they suspect they have a legal problem, but what if we could provide increased legal awareness to the public at large through educational games for legal services?
Because of the psychology behind gaming that supports positive engagement, games could be used to educate the public
as well as provide a way for the legal profession to jump into the larger online conversation around legal services.
This is a slide deck from a presentation I gave this morning as part of a panel for the South Carolina Law Review Symposium entitled, On Task?: Expanding the Boundaries of Legal Education. In it, I look at why increasing online engagement is critical for lawyers to think about, what methods of engagement might work, assessing engagement, and then the transfer that happens after engagement.
There’s a good balance that must happen here between lawyers pulling in “leads” for new business and at the same time using these engagement methods to educate and empower the public to 1) know when they might have a legal need in the first place and to prevent issues before they happen, and 2) if they do have a legal need, having access to where to go for help (ie, intelligent matching systems). Another piece of the puzzle to explore.