Creative confidence and thinking skills for lawyers: Making sense of design thinking pedagogy in legal education

Law schools globally are increasingly recognising the importance of integrating design thinking into their curricula to equip graduates with essential human-centred skills and mindsets for the future of work. Studies in recent years have investigated design thinking pedagogy in higher education, but there is a need for further empirical research to understand educator and learner perspectives in law schools. We conducted in-depth, semi structured interviews with design thinking educators from an Australian law school to investigate their experience and sensemaking of design thinking pedagogy as a specific application case. While our research findings are not generalisable, this study allowed us to reach tentative conclusions about how design thinking might be used to approach skills teaching in law. Our participants sensed design thinking pedagogy as developing empathic, creative, and innovative thinking skills as an alternative to the traditional institutionalised way of producing lawyers. They also sensed it as enabling human centred problem solving, developing creative confidence, and enabling alternative mindsets. We propose that law students must cultivate a different way of thinking to prepare for the future of the legal profession. Integrating design thinking pedagogy into law curricula has the potential to prepare graduate lawyers to respond to complex legal problems with fewer constraints, to develop emotional intelligence, to build resilience, to tackle a fear of failure, and to better collaborate in multidisciplinary contexts. For these reasons, we propose all law schools consider including design thinking pedagogy, or relevant components, within their legal education curricula.