Season 2, Episode 20: Legal Design with Marty Finestone

Notes To My (Legal) Self

Marty Finestone is an artist, DJ, lawyer, and legal designer.

Marty has over 15 years of experience in private practice, in-house, and government. Today, he helps in-house legal and business teams simplify their legal docs and legal ops at Legal Adjacency, a boutique legal consultancy founded by Marty in 2020. Legal Adjacency challenges legal and business teams to thrive through better outcomes. Marty uses a blend of legal expertise and law adjacent methods and tools to simplify and solve the challenges that matter most to his clients.

Your value as in-house counsel is not in being a good lawyer, but in being a great advisor. The organization doesn’t have legal problems, it has business problems. Typically, the business problems of an organization have legal aspects, but they are not discreetly legal. Business problems often require creativity. Working in a role like legal, where there are many constraints and an established “way it’s done,” can feel like there’s limited opportunity to infuse more creativity or innovation, into your work.

If we zoom out and change our perspective, we can see that the law may tell you to do one thing, but it doesn’t dictate how you do it. This mindset opens the door to finding creative ways to advise and provide legal solutions to the organization’s problems. This is where legal design comes into play. Legal design is a mindset, an approach, that starts with the user - the internal client - their needs, interests, communication style, constraints, and more.