Whiteboard tools, and why they should be part of the legal toolkit
Meet the whiteboard
The legal toolkit
For many lawyers, word processing, email, document management and document comparison tools are essential parts of the lawyer toolkit. Some lawyers may venture into spreadsheets and slides. Others may even start using project management software or modern communication tools. But not that many have ever used whiteboard tools.
Remote working is here to stay, at least in some form. Lawyers will continue to look for ways of making their teams more cohesive. This is a great opportunity to promote whiteboard tools. I also believe these tools can be more than just a way of bringing teams together. I think they can bring improvements to legal work product and client service. I want to get them used more by lawyers.
What do I mean by a “whiteboard tool”?
You’ll be familiar with a physical whiteboard. There are apps you can use that replicate this experience, on a screen. Your organisation probably has them already. They are designed to be written on by hand — probably on a tablet on a touchscreen device.
These tools might be helpful for some professions, but I don’t think they are very helpful for lawyers. In this article, I’m not talking about these tools. I’m talking about a different kind of whiteboard tool.
Whiteboard with a mouse, not a pen
True whiteboard tools are designed to be used with a mouse, not a pen. the two main examples are Miro and Mural, although there are others entering the fray such as FigJam. They let you sketch ideas and diagrams. They let many people contribute ideas to a page at once. You can allow people to vote on things. You can group, spot connections and separate out different themes.
These tools help you think and help you explain things to others. They are, in my opinion, the quickest way of drawing diagrams. They can bring meetings to life by encouraging true collaboration. They can help build teams. And I think they should be part of a lawyer’s everyday toolkit. Here’s why.
🎨 Reason #1: they improve work product
It’s hard to read long and wordy memos
Lawyers are famous for produce long and complicated memos. Clients are alive to this. Many of them ask for lawyers to deliver concise legal advice that is simple to understand: “it must fit on the screen of my iPhone”.
Many lawyers go a step beyond just simplifying their language. They use pictures and diagrams instead of text. Have you ever read a complex case or legal article, and had to draw pictures to make sense of it as you go? I have. And it’s a sign that the text needed a diagram or two.
Making diagrams is a challenge
The problem is that a lot of lawyers don’t know how to make diagrams. They get stuck with PowerPoint (don’t get me started about Visio). Most rely on drawing things out on paper, and sending to somebody else to create.
This can get the job done. But it can also cause frustrations, particularly if you’re working to tight timescales and if you need to make edits yourself. All of this makes it is too easy to fall back on long and boring memos full of text.
Whiteboard tools help you make diagrams more easily
There are specialist tools that you can use to create legal diagrams (see, e.g. Jigsaw and StructureFlow). Whiteboards provide a stepping stone to these tools. They are easy enough for anyone to pick up and use instantly. Look how quickly and easily you can make a structure chart, for example:
Once you are done, you can easily export the diagram to an image and include it in another document. The barrier to lawyers making their work product clearer and easier to understand is lowered.
Key use cases: visualising legal advice, steps plans, corporate structures
💬 Reason #2: they help explain things
It’s hard to follow calls
I would say that 90% of my interactions with clients happened in email or over a conference call. On a video call, it’s difficult to read body language to see whether people are following the conversation. And it’s not possible to jump to a flipchart or hand diagrams around to explain complicated things.
Whiteboard tools make things easier to follow
Instead of walking people through a memo you sent prior to a call, lawyers could use whiteboard tools to sketch out legal situations as they go. Take the example of a lawyer walking a client through the legal steps they need to follow to implement a transaction. Standard practice might be to send out a set of slides beforehand that documents these steps.
Alternatively, they could use a whiteboard tool to show things happening in real time, making changes to the structure as you go. It’s like hearing somebody speak, and seeing their words being visualised as they go. It makes things so much easier to understand.
Whiteboard tools make it easier to read the room
You can make a drastic improvement to meetings by sharing your screen while you make changes in a whiteboard tool. If you want to go a stage further, you can allow people to access the whiteboard directly (no, they don’t need a separate login). A key advantage of this is that you can see people’s cursors, and track what they are looking at.
Scary, right? Well, you can turn this option off if you want. It’s your choice. I find this doesn’t actually scare people, it just helps you make sure everybody is on the same page. In fact, you can go a stage further if you want, and control what people are looking at to avoid any doubt.
In many ways, I think these capabilities help you go beyond what you could achieve in a physical setting. That is, if you can cross the rubicon of doing things a little differently. More on that later…
Key use cases: steps plans, explaining legal issues on calls
💡 Reason #3: they help you understand
It’s hard to get the full picture in documents and email
Many legal teams complain that outside counsel does not take the time to understand their needs. Some law firms assume they know what clients want, without actually asking them. Some don’t even know who their “clients” actually are (i.e. is it the person you deal with day-to-day, the person they report to, both, or someone else?).
This lack of understanding means that time is spent on work product that doesn’t achieve the outcomes the client wants. This is in part because of mindsets. But it is also because it is difficult to do with the standard toolkit.
Whiteboard tools help you anticipate things
So far, we’ve looked at use cases of one person “showing” things created in a whiteboard tool to others. You can also use whiteboard tools to collaborate with others and anticipate needs and outcomes.
Let’s take a long and expensive example: a due diligence report. Some law firms might be tempted to get cracking on this right away, producing a long Word document flagging the standard change of control risks. Such law firms risk racking up fees for a work product clients didn’t really want.
Using a whiteboard tool, you could spend a few minutes with clients mapping out exactly what they want to achieve, and what they will do with your work product. In the due diligence example, you could spend 20 minutes on a call with your client to map out the scope of your report with them. Doing so encourages people to exchange ideas more easily, changing things as you go. Meetings become less like presentations, more like collaboration sessions.
Whiteboard tools help you collaborate
You could extend this further. Rather than the lawyer proposing something and the client questioning it, you could encourage people to submit their own ideas from the get-go. Using the due diligence example again, you might spend some time working with the client to come up with the pain points they suffered doing this exercise last time. That gives you a solid foundation on how to solve these things going forward.
The key thing about this kind of exercise is that it gets everything out in the open. You don’t have to wait for a drop in conversation to make your point. It captures input from people who might not have the confidence to speak up. You can cluster ideas together and spot common themes. It’s the ultimate form of collaboration, because everybody is involved from the start.
🚨 Danger: culture shift required
Some of the things described in the last few paragraphs will jar with many people. I remember being quite surprised the first time somebody handed me a stack of post-it notes during a meeting. My initial reaction was, “this seems like a bit of a waste of time”.
Having done quite a few of these sessions, I now see the value of them. My point is that if you try some of these use cases, it is important to make sure everybody understands what you are trying to achieve and is bought in. Otherwise, the whole thing might fall flat on its face.
Nonetheless, it is very rare for law firms to use whiteboard tools in this way with clients. Those that are brave enough to do so will be able to distinguish themselves easily from other law firms. Clients remember this stuff.
Key use cases: planning processes, anticipating concerns, close collaboration between lawyers and clients, e.g. on litigation strategy
🏟 Reason #4 — they help you work as a team
It’s hard to manage teams in a remote setting
I used to be able to tell whether others were busy or not when we were in the office. I could tell exactly who was closing a transaction and who was not by the pace of their footsteps down the corridor. I knew when our team training was and who was on leave that week because it was written on a board when I came in through the door. And I knew when my project milestones were, because they were written on a board in a partner’s office.
Whiteboards can help you manage teams
Rather than run a call every week where everybody talks about how busy they are, you could allow people to drop this information into a whiteboard tool at a time that suits them. The advantage of this is that you can run the process asynchronously — by which I mean, you don’t have to find a slot in people’s diaries where everybody is free. You can simply have the whiteboard up, and people can access it when they want. You don’t have to arrange a meeting.
You can extend this use case beyond mood. You could use it to capture ideas for team training events. You could use it a way to run a retrospective assessment on what went well and want went badly on a project that just finished. Both Miro and Mural have a bunch of pre-made templates that help.
Whiteboards can help you manage projects
Many legal projects will require detailed matter/project management tools. However, whiteboards can help you track things at a higher level. People might already have been doing this in the office — either through post-it notes on a wall, or things written on a whiteboard in the office. You can do exactly the same with a whiteboard tool.
The advantage of the whiteboard tool is that you can share it with people who don’t work in the same physical space. These high level milestones are often the things clients care about the most. Lawyers could use a whiteboard tool to map out key dates on a legal matter and share the link to the board with clients (or export to PDF etc.).
Key use cases: managing teams, work allocation, managing milestones
To conclude…
Whiteboards are for everyone
You don’t have to turn into a full-on, card-carrying, blue-sky-thinking innovation guru to enjoy whiteboard tools. For lawyers wanting to dip into these tools, using them to improve their existing work product is a great idea.
Don’t scare people off too early
My advice is to start with use cases you and your team are comfortable with, and scale up from there. Don’t scare people off too early. That being said, in due course I hope we see more lawyers using these tools to work with each other and with their clients.
A roadmap to new skillsets
The thing that excites me most about whiteboard tools is perhaps not the tools themselves. It is the prospect of allowing lawyers to develop skills that do not come naturally to them, such as designing processes, rigorously understanding their clients and thinking in terms of outcomes. At the same time, these tools and skills help flatten hierarchies and bring about a much more collaborative working environment.
All of this will help lawyers focus on the key outcomes that matter to their clients, and direct efforts at the problems that really matter. And their clients will love them for it.
