By Nicolene Schoeman-Louw 

Introduction 

Design thinking is a powerful problem-solving approach commonly associated with large businesses. However, its principles can be equally beneficial for small businesses. This mindset allows small businesses to foster innovation, overcome legal obstacles, and drive success. 

While design thinking is traditionally used in product or service development, its application in the legal context can offer unique advantages to entrepreneurs. By focusing on understanding entrepreneurs' needs and aspirations, design thinking provides a fresh perspective to tackle legal challenges effectively. 

Applying Design Thinking to the Legal Side of Your Small Business 

Entrepreneurs must connect with their business needs and goals to successfully apply design thinking. By deeply understanding their unique challenges, entrepreneurs can identify and effectively communicate them to their legal advisors.  

The legal team can then dig deeper and understand the root causes; entrepreneurs can avoid superficial solutions with often expensive price tags. This process shifts the focus from merely applying legal principles to finding innovative and efficient ways to address the underlying issues specific to the business. 

Design thinking encourages generating a broad range of ideas to tackle the identified problem. By thinking outside the box and exploring unconventional approaches, entrepreneurs can devise innovative strategies that suit their business needs more effectively. 

Prototyping plays a crucial role in the design thinking process. It involves creating tangible representations of potential legal solutions in the legal context. In many instances, this could include the legal documents' format, language use and layout – so that the legal speaks the same language as the brand. It also involves the alignment of the legal business processes. Entrepreneurs and their legal advisors can review, refine, and test these prototypes. This iterative process ensures the proposed solutions are practical and innovative, aligning with the entrepreneur's requirements. By testing and refining the prototypes, entrepreneurs can address any potential issues early on and create a tailored legal strategy unique to the business and more preventative by nature, as opposed to reactive, which is often costly in time, money and strategic relationship capital. 

What are some specific examples of legal challenges that small businesses can overcome using design thinking? 

Design thinking provides small businesses with a valuable framework for creatively tackling legal challenges. This means that the focus shifts from reacting to a legal crisis to navigating it proactively. This, in turn, reduces the business' legal risk. In addition, the contracts, legal processes and other legal documents are aligned uniquely to the brand and the customers it aims to serve. By embracing design thinking, small businesses can navigate the legal landscape successfully, fostering growth and achieving long-term success. 

Nicolene Schoeman-Louw | SchoemanLaw Inc

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