An Unlikely Friendship In Legal And Design

Izac Ross at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/VqOiHJI_ihA

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Collective Health, and why legal and design

[00:00:06] Izac: Collective Health, we are a healthcare technology company. We're giving companies a smarter way to provide healthcare benefits to their employees and their families. You may be aware healthcare benefits, healthcare in general, and paying for that in the United States is really complex and the opposite of user friendly. So we're actually making the process pleasurable, easier for employees and their families to navigate. We do this by creating this comprehensive member experience through technology, and also a team that is able to explain to people how do your benefits work, really get them to understand it and be able to use them wisely. And it's showing that it's working, because we have this Net Promoter Score, NPS, of 72 out of 100. That's right up there with the best consumer facing brands, and unfortunately a lot of the companies that are in our space tend to have a really low NPS score, in the teens.

[00:01:09] But we're not here to talk today about all the awesomeness that is Collective Health. We are here to talk about the unlikely friendship that we have formed between legal and design, that's really led to innovation in our space, which is incredibly complex. So today we're going to cover a few things. We're going to talk about our path to friendship at Collective Health. We're going to talk about how we understand each other, how you can understand your legal counterparts better. We're going to also talk about partnering on intent, what does intent mean. And we're going to also stress the importance of working together early and often, legal, product and design. And then some tactical tools you can take back with you when you go to your home offices.

[00:01:54] So let's dive into that path to friendship, and I think we want to give you a bit of our personal stories in getting to Collective Health. When I started at Collective Health I thought I was really ready for any regulated situation. In consulting my two areas of specialty were finance and medical. I've worked on credit cards, trading, personal banking, financial advising, medical device, cancer treatment and even pharmacy quality control, which was a little bit too nerdy even for me. And I knew, based on that past experience, that my legal colleagues would make a huge impact in the work that I was able to do to impact our members. I interviewed with and talked to them in my process of starting there.

[00:02:40] And three weeks into my experience at Collective Health I was like, hey, I think we need to add this new touchpoint to our service for our members, and gathered my legal colleagues at the time, the head of design, product. And very soon after a 30 minute discussion on the finer points of health privacy law in the United States, I was crawling under my desk, literally shedding a couple of tears. And I had to pick myself back up and really build my relationship with our legal team and build that collaborative culture.

[00:03:18] Brianna: I was really excited to come to Collective Health and work with the creative brains directly. I previously had come from the US government. One of the major projects I worked on was a platform for enrolling people in insurance with subsidies from the federal government. This website, healthcare.gov, you may have heard of it, was in the news a lot, it had some issues when it launched. It was associated with the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. When the glitches happened and we were trying to fix it, they put us all together in a room, and that was a really smart decision of the agency, because legal, design, all the different teams could collaborate. And they weren't just working as we normally did, which was over the phone, just sort of signing off as stakeholders, trying to understand each other as best we can, but it was really just over the phone and wasn't really deep collaboration.

[00:04:17] So coming to Collective Health was really exciting, because I could work directly with designers and product to bring our mission to life. I was really nervous though, because I knew there was that idea of government attorney: really risk-averse, stodgy, not exciting, basically a dream killer. And what I knew that I had to do was build trust and confidence. Trust that I wasn't just going to say no all the time, I wasn't going to be that stodgy awful stereotype of an attorney, and also confidence that I knew what I was talking about, so when I said to the team, hey, this isn't going to work, let's try to find something else, they would believe me and move forward.

[00:05:04] Izac: From there, the work that we have done together between design and legal has literally impacted every touchpoint that we talked about earlier in our member experience, and I feel incredibly proud of the work that we have done together to make real change.

[00:05:19] Brianna: We've definitely made mistakes. I have been that no lawyer.

[00:05:26] Izac: And I've definitely been that designer screaming that this is not going to work for the users. But today we're here to share with you our lessons learned, how we've moved forward. And these are not just internal lessons. We actually went out and talked to colleagues in similar roles to gain further insight into what are the best practices for working together.

Why the relationship matters

[00:05:51] Izac: So why is the relationship between design and legal so important? Quick show of hands, how many of you guys have worked in a regulated space: finance, healthcare, education, government? Okay, a lot of hands. Keep those hands up for a second. How many of you guys have had a product or service that didn't quite make it to users because of a compliance or regulatory review? Okay. And how many of you guys had a product end up looking like this, after a compliance and regulatory review? Okay, cool. So this is why it's important.

[00:06:24] Brianna: Yeah, this is awful. I mean, I have to say, as a lawyer, even in my personal life I don't read this. I may be signing my right arm away and I know really important rights and obligations, but I'm not going to read it. And also this is a really bad member experience. You want your members, your end users, to understand this, but they're not going to.

[00:06:45] Izac: And this stuff doesn't just apply to text on screens. My background's in service design, and it really does affect the processes that you put in place, and those digital and physical barriers. It is really important to listen to legal and compliance, because they're going to bring up really important risks that you need to take into consideration. So many regulated companies have found themselves in hot water when they don't listen to legal and compliance, especially startups.

Understanding each other

[00:07:17] Izac: So let's dive into understanding each other a little bit more. When we went out and did this research, I heard this theme coming up that legal often sees design as irreverent to the law. Really, I don't think we are, but we send signals to our legal counterparts that indicate this. I think it's really well illustrated by this quote. "I become the stereotypical naysayer when design comes to me at the end of a project with questions. I'm supposed to have a quick and easy answer. This shows a complete lack of understanding of what goes into my job."

[00:07:48] And I knew it was crazy for me to ask Brianna to come up with a new legal determination in 24 to 48 hours, but I think what got me was how similar it was to a product manager walking up to me and being like, hey, can you launch this new app in a week? It's just not going to happen.

[00:08:04] Brianna: It's my job to worry about the worst case scenarios. I don't think about that happy path. So when I'm asked to come up with a solution, I'm going to lean back on past precedent to make sure we don't get into hot water. That means that I don't have time to ideate or come up with a solution that you're going to like, and it's not happy for any of us.

[00:08:28] Izac: Designers, because of this, can sometimes see legal as an obstacle. One quote we heard from a designer at a medical device company is, "we try to stay clear of legal as much as possible. They too often interfere, they prevent us from doing the research we need or making real change."

[00:08:47] Brianna: And that part about real change really hurts, because I joined Collective Health to make real change. My legal counterparts at other companies, they join tech companies to make real change, to do exciting work. They're not there to be no people.

[00:09:01] Izac: So let's examine our commonalities and our differences for a second. As designers we are the risk takers, we look for the novel solution, and I don't know about you, I'm really sad when I don't get to do that. It hurts my heart.

[00:09:17] Brianna: And for attorneys, we're supposed to be risk-averse. We have to lean on past precedent for what worked, because that's how the law works. Past precedent determines the future way to move forward.

[00:09:28] Izac: But we are both really good creative problem-solvers when we're doing our jobs correctly, and we're both advocates for both our users and the company's mission.

Partnering on intent

[00:09:39] Izac: One of the tools that we use to be able to focus on our commonalities rather than our differences is partnering on intent. What do I mean by intent? From the design side this means what it is you're trying to achieve for users, and why, and the relationship to the business objectives. These are the things we talk to all our other stakeholders about, but sometimes we forget to do it with our legal counterparts.

[00:10:01] Brianna: And that's really good to know, because with legal intent we're thinking about what protections are the laws and regulations putting in place for the end users and also for the company.

[00:10:13] Izac: Now, we don't have time to get into the laws that we have to deal with, which are HIPAA, ERISA, super boring, all your eyes just glazed over. But I wanted to dive a little bit more into this legal and tech piece, so Brianna's going to go over something that translates a little bit better across the pond, so to speak, which is contract law.

[00:10:32] Brianna: So what is a contract? You have entered into contracts so many times and sometimes we don't even realize it. Every time you sign a lease for a car or an apartment, that's one, but also anytime you buy an airline ticket for example, that's also a contract. So contracts have several elements to them. There's offer and acceptance. Your company offers, for example, online widgets, and as the end user I'm going to accept those online widgets. And to be able to accept them I have to give you something back, I have to give you some consideration, so say ten dollars a month for your online widgets. We also have to both have an understanding of what the widgets mean, so that I understand what widgets I'm getting and you understand what widgets you're giving to me, and that that's basically the same.

[00:11:28] And then finally there is an action. Back in the day it could have been a handshake, or something kind of brutal like blood on a stump[?] or an etching in a rock, and then we finally came up with pen and ink, excuse me, pen and paper. And then from pen and paper we've gotten to electronic signatures. So how did the inventors of DocuSign and CoSign come up with electronic signatures? We thought about the intent of the action. What is the intent? It's to identify who the parties are to the contract and their capacity to enter into an agreement. So by memorializing through an algorithm who the parties are and that they are capable of clicking to enter into an agreement, you've got a contract, you've got the action preserved. And using this really helps you to ideate and think through and escape that gravity of precedent.

[00:12:23] Izac: It's really important for legal and design to collaborate on projects to really understand what the intent is. Legal will sometimes create what's called legal requirements documents. At Collective Health, design or product will actually collaborate on these, and they really focus on what are the laws that apply and what is the intent, so that whatever project is happening, it's documented there and you can really work that into your creative process. And we use these to really build trust with our legal stakeholders when they can't be in the room, and use those guidances as we move forward in building new products and services.

Working together early and often

[00:13:02] Izac: It is really, really important to work together early and often. This was the biggest differentiator between companies that succeeded at this collaboration and failed at cooperation, along with legal putting frameworks in place for design to do the user research they need to do inside of that regulated environment. And you really need to rethink how you're thinking about legal, from being a stakeholder or an approver to being a collaborator who's resourced to the project that you're working on.

[00:13:35] So one example where working together early and often really paid off was the out of network claims form. In the US, if you go to a doctor that doesn't have a contract in place with your health benefits or your health insurance, you go to that doctor, you have to pay the doctor upfront and then you get reimbursed by your benefits or your insurance. And to do that you generally, the classic case, have to fill out this really complex form. That was really something our members were struggling with, very frustrated and angered about, because not only is it this awful looking form, but then you have to mail it or fax it, and who knows even where to find a fax machine, and there's extra time involved with that. To solve this problem we really had to understand the needs and desires of the user, dive into those legal requirements, and build that out into an operations team to be able to really take over from where a partner was handling things previously.

[00:14:43] Brianna: So legally we still need all of this information, but it doesn't have to look like this fine print. Just some questions we have to answer here. We have to identify the member, we have to identify who is the patient and who is filling out this claim, and then also do they have any other insurance involved. And not only that, we also have to make sure that the doctor is legit and not a quack. So we were able to just say, okay, well, we really just need this information, we need to make sure our members understand their rights and obligations about it, so we could just turn this into simple yes/no questions, not that ugly form.

[00:15:29] Izac: With those few questions, a snap of a photo and a quick confirmation, we've increased our transactional NPS to the standard of Collective Health, and also seen a 95 percent adoption rate within, I guess, eight months of launching. And this was only possible with deep legal and design collaboration from the beginning and then frequently throughout.

Tactical tools

[00:15:50] Izac: Last, we want to leave you with a few quick tactical tools to help you succeed. The combination is key for us. When we don't do them all, we end up in no-land. The first is that product, legal and design need to be working together. All too often this relationship looks like an arrow, not a triangle. This is something that really needs to get solved. It's also really important to present in flows, that way your legal counterparts can see the whole process.

[00:16:21] Brianna: And just so you know, that if you present in flows, attorneys may want to comment right away, and it's okay to say to them, hold on a second, let me get through the entire flow and then you can ask your comments. And that's good, because if you've been working together early and often like we've discussed, your regulatory intent is already preserved, and they will be very happy when you get to the end of your flow presentation. And again, you can use that regulatory intent to limit that disclosure bloat[?].

[00:16:53] It also really helps to let legal work in your design tools. One thing that Izac has taught me is to use InVision, and that allows me to comment directly on the mocks of the design. What's really important here is to separate legal comments from design comments, because I fancy myself an artist sometimes and I want to be able to say, oh, move this here, move that there, but that's not really a legal comment. So I preface my legal comments "legal comment" and the non-legal comment as "non-legal comment", and then Izac can just ignore the non-legal comments and I won't get offended.

[00:17:29] Izac: Don't be afraid to jump into that legal copy and help clarify and simplify. And don't collaborate over email, too many things get lost in translation. Always introduce what you need approval on in person or over a meeting. And then it's very important to gain an understanding of the inner workings of your legal team. Sometimes it takes more time for a complex decision to get approved across multiple legal stakeholders.

[00:17:58] Brianna: So sometimes if it's a complex decision, I'm just going to need to discuss that point with my other legal colleagues, and it will take a little extra time. So if Izac can consider in his timeline the time that it needs to take for things to get approved in a group, that really helps.

[00:18:17] Izac: And just a really quick recap, and we're short on time. Our path to friendship: we really had to understand each other and focus on our commonalities rather than our differences, and we used intent as that common tool to focus on our commonalities, and work early and often together as collaborators, not stakeholders, and use those tactical tools to avoid that no-land. And I want to thank all of you guys so much for your time, and if you have any questions feel free to grab us. We are also hiring across all roles, product, design, engineering and even legal. Thank you.