Day 222: Empathy and the Customer Journey Map

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

ABA Standard 303(c) for law schools provides:

(c) A law school shall provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism:

(1) at the start of the program of legal education, and

(2) at least once again before graduation.

This isn’t a post about whether diversity training is good or bad. Regardless of what you or I think about that, the ABA Standards require law schools to train students to provide culturally competent, unbiased, non-discriminatory legal services. Effective lawyers also need to recognize where and how these factors may affect their clients’ cases. This training can be provided through orientation, lectures, courses, or other opportunities, but it must be part of the law school curriculum.

Empathy: It’s an Lawyer’s Job

Essentially, this ABA Standard requires a law school curriculum to incorporate the practice of empathy. We need to put ourselves in our clients’ shoes to see how cultures operate in ways that affect their cases.

Cultural competency can operate on different levels, though. It may mean that the client comes from a different country than we or the opposing party do. We face that kind of cultural competency challenge every day in the Immigration Law Clinic.

But “culture” isn’t just what country you’re from. The legal profession has a culture. Morgantown has a culture. Millennials have a culture. College football has a culture.

A lawyer is, above all, a communication expert. A good lawyer needs to understand how different cultures operate, how they shape communication, and how communication can be shaped to bridge cultural gaps, especially where they affect the relief the client seeks.

This means practicing empathy.

Empathy: It’s an Entrpreneur’s Job

Turns out, the practice of empathy is a key principle of the entrepreneurship method and mindset, too.

An effective entrepreneur has to understand and bridge cultural gaps. Fail to understand your customer; fail to make a product your customer will buy.

The entrepreneur and the customer likely share in some cultures, but are separated by others. And the more market segments a venture wants to capture, the more cultures they’ll have to cross. Cultural competency is a matter of survival for entrepreneurs.

Customer Journey Mapping

Today in Entrepreneurship for Lawyers, we worked through a tool called the Customer Journey Map. In the customer journey map, we imagine our ideal customer, and then we try to put ourselves in their shoes at various points in the customer-enterprise relationship, such as:

Discovery (when they realize they have a need);

Research (when they search the market for solutions to their problem);

Purchase (when they select a product or service solution); and

After the Sale (when they use the product and choose whether to continue a relationship with the enterprise).

In our class hypothetical, we considered building an app for prospective law students that would provide qualitative data from current law students about their experience at their school (sort of a touchy-feely version of U.S. News).

The students decided our ideal customer, “Yan,” would be a recent college grad, possibly a first generation professional, a little anxious, and ambitious but thoughtful and cautious by nature.

By thinking through the Customer Journey Map, they realized that Yan would be feeling broke. With all the application fees involved in applying for law school, and given his careful nature, he might not want to pay for one more service.

But someone else might: The firms who heavily market to law students. Students in the class could quickly name those: legal research database providers, bar review companies, law firms. Perhaps Yan is our ideal user, but these companies (and their advertising dollars) may be our true customers. Once we put ourselves in Yan’s shoes, we realized we’d better look for other revenue streams, and we modified our business model.

Applying the Customer Journey Map to the Law

Students in the course have come up with some hypothetical ideas they want to develop and pitch (for the course or for real). Some of those ideas directly relate to the law or the legal profession; others don’t.

But using the Customer Journey Map applies to lawyering, whether students consciously intend it to or not. By deliberately engaging in the practice of empathy in the venture-creation process, students learn how to walk in the shoes of their clients as well as their customers.