Marco Imperiale, founder of Better Ipsum, an Organization dedicated to legal innovation and wellbeing and President of the Wellbeing Committee of the International Association of Lawyers (UIA), examined how legal-design thinking can redefine value creation in contemporary legal practice. His perspective places design not as aesthetic refinement but as an engine for systemic change, aligning the profession’s intellectual traditions with modern expectations of accessibility, collaboration, and measurable impact.
From Tradition to Transformation
Imperiale highlighted the struggle to adapt legal to twenty-first-century realities. Italy, he noted, remains one of law’s “cradles,” yet its legal profession mirrors a global tension: reverence for precedent colliding with the need for reinvention.
He likened today’s disruption to Napster’s effect on the music industry. When consumers stopped paying for songs and began valuing experiences, the music business was forced to reimagine its purpose. “GPT,” Imperiale argued, “is that moment for law.” The shift from the billable hour to outcome-based value marks not the profession’s decline but its necessary evolution.
Redefining Value in Legal Services
Rather than pursuing automation for efficiency’s sake, Imperiale urged firms to reconceive their work as value partnerships built around client experience. Success, he warned, cannot be sustained through margin protection alone. Law’s Blockbuster moment—continuing profitability masking structural fragility—demands that firms re-centre the client as the organising principle of practice.
True legal design begins with user empathy and works backward to process. It challenges lawyers to see themselves as designers of relationships and systems, not merely providers of advice. This mindset transforms the client from recipient to co-creator.
From Reactive to Proactive Law
Imperiale proposed a progression from reactive to preventive and ultimately proactive law. Traditional practice resolves disputes; preventive law mitigates risk; proactive law anticipates and generates value through foresight and data-informed design.
Such an approach integrates project management, behavioural science, and user-experience methodology into legal reasoning. The lawyer becomes not only an interpreter of rules but a designer of frameworks that sustain trust and resilience.
Inside Practising Legal Design
Imperiale’s recently published book, Practising Legal Design, structures this transformation into four parts:
- Defining Legal Design – establishing user-centric principles for legal work.
- Adjacent Disciplines – connecting legal design to gamification, ESG, and proactive law.
- From Theory to Practice – converting conceptual insight into operational models.
- The Framework – a replicable process for embedding design within firms.
Each part concludes with reflections from leading figures such as Matthew Broderick, Sally Guyer, and digital influencers Ashley and Ellie Rag, illustrating how communication, culture, and design converge to enhance legal performance.
Collaboration Over Hierarchy
At the heart of Imperiale’s philosophy lies a rejection of rigid hierarchy. Legal design, he argued, depends on collaborative ecosystems in which trainees, technologists, and clients contribute on equal footing. “A trainee or an IT professional may hold the best insight,” he observed, “if the structure allows them to speak.”
He called for decision-making models more typical of technology organisations—cross-functional, iterative, and empirically tested—contrasting sharply with law’s traditional command structures. In areas such as cybersecurity and AI ethics, he suggested, expertise already lies outside the partnership model; integrating those voices is now essential.
Lawyers as Learners
Imperiale’s most striking proposition is that law firms must evolve from service providers into learning organisations. Echoing Satya Nadella’s reinvention of Microsoft, he framed learning as strategic capital. AI, he maintained, is not a new legal field but a new cognitive environment requiring experimentation, reflection, and iterative skill-building.
This reorientation turns professional development into a continuous process embedded within everyday work—a form of “productive friction” that strengthens rather than threatens the lawyer’s intellectual identity.
Managing Anxiety and Change
Transformation inevitably generates unease. Imperiale acknowledged the profession’s anxiety over lost certainty and shifting power structures but argued that discomfort is the price of relevance. Industries from music to film endured similar ruptures before renewal. “The current paradigm,” he concluded, “is unsustainable. We have not yet found the new one—but those willing to experiment will define it.”
Conclusion
Imperiale’s vision situates legal design as a method for intellectual renewal. By embedding empathy, co-creation, and iterative learning into legal systems, it offers a route to sustainable innovation that honours rather than erodes professional rigour.
In this framework, design functions as law’s constructive friction—the stimulus that sharpens reasoning, fosters adaptability, and anchors technology in human purpose. As firms navigate the integration of AI and evolving client expectations, Imperiale’s approach provides a model for balance: a profession that learns, designs, and leads rather than merely endures change.
