After starting her career as a user experience researcher in “San Francisco’s vibrant tech start-up community alongside some of the industry’s brightest visionaries”, my friend, Liz Chase moved home to Melbourne to commence legal practice. This, she said, “was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream marred with frustration and dismay at the amount of busy work undertaken by junior lawyers and paralegals which could easily be automated with better outcomes in terms of accuracy, efficiency and resource allocation”.

After holding various roles as a legal professional (lawyer, partner and business owner, having started her own firm, Chase Legal), it dawned on her that the practice of law no longer got her out of bed in the morning. What did, however, was “the business of law and the opportunity to transform it”.

So Liz, being Liz got out of her bed and co-founded a design thinking consultancy Law DesignED and now couples this with being a lawyer and mentor at Leo Cussen Centre for Law – spending her days developing the next generation of legal professionals and imbibing design thinking into their modes of practice.

Design thinking (or human-centred design), she explained, is a “problem-solving methodology originally used by web designers and software developers to make digital environments more intuitive, useful and engaging”.