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Legal Innovation Simplified
What If Lawyers Weren’t the Heroes? Hallie Jay Pope on Solidarity by Legal Design for Housing Justice [Ep. 8]
Are lawyers the
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- [00:01]
Hanne Le Korhonen
What if lawyers weren't the heroes? Hallie J. Pope on Solidarity by Legal Design for Housing justice welcome to Legal Innovation Simplified, the podcast where legal design thinking meets business strategy and a growth mindset. Hello friend. I'm Hanne Le Korhonen, an ex corporate lawyer, legal tech co founder, law Firm founder, designer, PhD researcher and your legal innovation coach. I'm also a proud Finn who believes in wool socks, astrology and doing law with heart. Every week I'll share practical design led strategies, bold ideas and mindset shifts to help you innovate, scale and find joy in your work. Are you ready to trade perfectionism for a soulful aligned journey to success? Welcome to my world. Let's dream big, think differently and scale low with heart. Ready? Let's do this. Well, hi there and welcome to today's episode of Legal Innovation Simplified. I'm happy to bring you a conversation that might challenge how you think about advocacy, which has traditionally been the MO for change for us lawyers. My guest today is Hallie J. Pope, the director of the New Jersey Legal Design Lab at the Setonhall Law School. Halle's journey is really fascinating because after graduating from Harvard Law, her career took an unexpected creative turn because while she initially was planning to pursue civil rights litigation, she discovered the power of using cartoons and visual design to make the law accessible. This spark led her to found the Graphic Advocacy Project and she also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Utah Law School where she ran the Creative Advocacy Lab. Today, Halle brings her unique perspective on how lawyers can work in solidarity with communities rather than simply advocating for them. Our conversation explores a little bit provocative question, what if lawyers weren't meant to be the heroes of social change? And what happens when we share the power instead? Here's Hallie and the New Jersey Legal Design Lab.
- [02:19]
Hallie J. Pope
So the Legal Design Lab was founded by my amazing colleague, Abdourah Man Khan. He has been doing eviction representation in New Jersey for many years. So when, when people get sued by their landlords, he shows up, he defends them in court. A lot of the time he can keep them in their homes. A lot of the time he can't. And so he was part of the Housing justice project at Seton hall, which the lab is, is a part of trying to support tenants in New Jersey during this housing crisis in our state and across the United States. But he realized, you know, the limits of that sort of crisis response. Right. We're always responding to the harm, trying to avoid the harm over and over and over again. And as a result, it's really hard for us to actually go look at the root of the problem. And so he turned to design thinking like so many of us have. And he actually founded the New Jersey Legal Design Lab. So it is a social transformation laboratory. And our goal is to combine law education and design to transfer power from our institution, from Seton hall, from other institutions into local movements for housing justice. So I came on as the director a year ago and basically my, my goal was I actually have no background in housing, so I'm coming in. You know, my learner's mindset is very accessible because I really have no idea. I have very few assumptions to leave behind. But I also really didn't know the landsc landscape of housing justice in New Jersey. I am from New Jersey originally, so it's been amazing to return home. But the first thing that we really wanted to do was design the lab with the movements and people were going to be working alongside. So that has been sort of what we've been focusing on for the past year. We started with design jams which were these little brainstorming sessions where we invited tenants and organizers and policymakers and students and faculty, whoever people walking by. We grabbed a few people who were just kind of walking by like what's going on here? And we just brainstormed about housing justice, what, what it meant to people, what kinds of challenges people were facing. And that sort of helped to start to get a sense of where the lab might fit in to this existing ecosystem. Right. Because I have no idea what the ecosystem even looks like. Starting to get a better idea now a year in. So that's been really, that's been our first goal is to answer your question, right. What is the lab? And I think the answer that I have that I feel most solid about is that it is an endeavor that is co created with people who are impacted by the housing crisis, with organizers who are fighting for housing justice and beyond that I am finding out alongside everybody else, which is very exciting.
- [05:16]
Abdourah Man Khan
That's so wonderful. And the approach that you have taken, the co creation with the people that you are actually and I love the notion about you are transferring the power from institutions to the people who are actually affected by all of this. So, so important. And I think that's a perfect segue to talk about solidarity. Can you explain us what does solidarity mean in design and legal design?
- [05:47]
Hallie J. Pope
Absolutely. So you had very eloquently summed up my talk better than I could from the Legal Design Summit this past September in Finland, kind of pointing out this contrast between using legal Design to reform our existing systems, make them more efficient, more accessible, but ultimately retaining their general structures and goals versus designing to dismantle, dismantle those systems. Recognize that those systems have actually themselves been designed to achieve the unequal, unjust outcomes that they're achieving and to try and move beyond that and to create something new. So I've been sort of circling all kinds of terms for the kind of work that I and many other folks are doing, designing to dismantle liberatory legal design. Design is another one. But this concept of solidarity by design is a little bit more specific. It's sort of within that, that framework of trying to design to dismantle unjust systems. What I like about the term solidarity is that, for example, if you contrast it with the word advocacy, right, an advocate is championing on someone's behalf, right? They are the change maker. So this is what I had in my mind when I was a teenager. And I was like, I'm going to work for the aclu. I'm going to do, do impact litigation. I'm going to be an advocate. And it's a wonderful role, right? It's so fulfilling. It's a needed role. But what I've sort of been learning in my work, and I've actually gotten a chance to do a little dive into history here in the United States of social movements. And I've become quite convinced that the key agents of change are not lawyers. And you heard me talk about this in Finland. They're the people who are impacted by these systems of oppress. And so I like the word solidarity because it, it shifts that relationship, right? What is the lawyer's role in supporting movements that are led by folks who are impacted? It's not that we can just step back and say, okay, you go ahead, right? Because we might be preventing people from going ahead, or at least we can use our power and transfer it and share it. So it's not that we get to say, you go do your thing and we won't get in the way. We need to be involved. And so that's why I like the word solidarity. It is this concept, this relationship that we are supporting, we are facilitating. And I also love it because it's mutual, right? Like we're in solidarity with each other. All of our struggles are intertwined. And so I believe that design frameworks and design tools can be really effective at exercising and implementing these relationships of solidarity and of telling the stories of those relationships in the first place. Because I think that even that concept, that idea that lawyers should Be working in solidarity. It's still, it's still, it's certainly not the dominant concept in the legal field. We have lots of robust scholarship around movement lawyering, a lot of folks putting that into practice. So in the US here we do have a lot of folks who've been doing this work for a long time. But I think legal design is one more tool in our toolbox of how, how do we lawyer in solidarity with movements and with communities.
- [09:15]
Abdourah Man Khan
Oh, that's a great, great way to explain it. And what has been the response from lawyers about this lawyering in solidarity so far?
- [09:24]
Hallie J. Pope
You know, it's really interesting. I've gotten a lot of very positive responses. Sometimes I feel, I feel a little nervous when lawyers respond positively to this concept because at its core it really does involve members of our profession relinquishing power. It's sort of an idea that is contrary to our own interests, which makes it really hard to do in a meaningful way because there's a part of me or any other lawyer doing this work, I think, who's always trying to guard our power, no matter how good our instincts are, no matter how good our intentions are. And so I think sometimes when people respond positively, I'm like, oh, did I explain it right? Are they getting it? But no, I think that so many folks, especially in the legal design space, they recognize that these systems are broken. They really do want to change things and they're just looking for their place in that change. Now, plenty of lawyers who I think hear me talk about this and they're like, well, this is not related to me. This is this crazy lefty over here. Let her do her thing, she's harmless. She's drawing cartoons in the corner. Great, that's fine. But I, but I do think it has resonated with a lot of folks who want to find their place in that change making and who maybe recognize that maybe they shouldn't be the key change makers, but they still have a really crucial role to play in these movements as we are facing crises all over the globe, right? Global warming, we have genocide in Palestine, we have housing crises. There are so many big, scary, naughty topics in law. They're all intertwined. And so it really heartens me to see so many people in our profession genuinely, I think, wanting to share their power with people who are most impacted and act in solidarity with them instead of advocating on their behalf.
- [11:25]
Abdourah Man Khan
Yes, definitely. And I think there's also this human level, that craving for connection with other people. So it's not just lawyers working on our own and trying to solve all the big problems of the world, but we can actually work together and not separately.
- [11:43]
Hallie J. Pope
Exactly. It's actually really freeing. I talk about this with my law students because there's this idea, I think, in law school still, that, you know, fake it till you make it right. You're supposed to have all the answers. I know I was rewarded in law school for talking like I knew what I was talking about even when I really didn't. And there are settings where that is effective. Right. If you're advocating in court and you want the judge to take you seriously, it might make sense to act like you know everything, even when, of course, you don't. But when that sort of intolerance of uncertainty extends beyond the performance of the courtroom, you really run into some issues in the profession. There's this great article that I love. It's by Tang and Foley. I'm going to forget the name. It's like the intolerance of certainty or uncertainty. It's a lawyer and a psychologist writing together, and they basically say that the legal profession's intolerance of, you know, this ambiguity and uncertainty, it's not only unrealistic because, of course, nothing is certain. And to get really philosophical, right. We're all just sort of making it up as we go, but it's actually taking a toll on the mental health of legal professionals and students. We know that our profession has a lot of mental health challenges, and the authors of this paper suggest this is one reason is we are trained to expect ourselves to have all the answers, and that is, in fact, impossible. And when we embrace a model like design that actually encourages us to sit in that ambiguity and embrace it and recognize what we don't know and reach out to other folks who do know something. Yeah. It's not just more effective, it's joyful for us to make those connections. There's this great community agreement from some of the organizing spaces I've been in. No one knows everything. Everything, but together we know a lot. And that's. I always think of that. Right. That's. That's kind of the core tenet of legal design to me, is nobody on their own should be expected to know everything. Nobody does know everything. It's a good thing. Together we have collective knowledge, and we know so much more than the sum of our parts.
- [14:05]
Hanne Le Korhonen
Yes.
- [14:05]
Abdourah Man Khan
I feel like this is some. Some like, intergenerational trauma that we are now healing for the students that you don't have to know everything. It's such a. Such. Such a healing to Take off the burden of you have to know everything.
- [14:21]
Hallie J. Pope
Yes, absolutely.
- [14:24]
Abdourah Man Khan
You already talked about this. But, but why would you. Why do you think that it's important to have. Have the power that people have the power to change the system themselves alongside others as well, but that people have the power to.
- [14:41]
Hallie J. Pope
Yeah, so. So this is sort of like an instinct that I've had for a while. And, and I. My parents are. My dad is a labor law organizer. My mom did environmental law and sort of came over the course of her career to see the limitations of the advocate model when it came to facilitating justice for communities. So I'm not going to, you know, I was raised in that environment and I think there's sort of been that seed for a while. But I was working on a paper for the Legal Design Roundtable last year in 2023 in Belgium, and I was writing about creating counter narratives using. Using speculative design or design fiction to change our narratives about power. And in doing that, I read two amazing books and I really hope that I can get the titles right. One was no shortcuts by Jane McAlevy, who is a longtime union labor organizer here in the United States. And the other one was I've Got the Light of Freedom. The last name of the author is Payne. I believe I'm blanking on the first name. No Shortcuts is about lessons learned from the height of the labor movement in the United States, which was in the 1930s, according to this author and I think a lot of other historians. And I've Got the Light of Freedom was about a particular organizing tradition within the Deep south during the civil rights movement here in the United states in the 1960s. And the common theme of both of these historical accounts, or at least the one that I latched onto, and definitely Jane McAlevy's point is that the workers in the union context and the. The people in the south, residents as opposed to professional organizers, were the key agents for change. And the job of the organizer, the professional organizer, is to facilitate and nurture leadership within those ranks rather than coming in and being a leader. And basically, both authors argued that the lasting changes that we've seen in this country, the progressive winds of the earlier 1900s, the ones that have not successfully been rolled back by the backlash that we see now in the United States, were created through these worker, ordinary people led movements. And I read that and I was like, okay, wow, yeah, this is kind of what I maybe thought, but these folks have really done the research to see this. And a key part of, I think, starting to implement methodologies that. That build on the idea of the ordinary person as the key agent of change is first accepting the idea that they are the key agents of change, Right? There's this first step. We have to buy into the idea. And I think, again, for. For lawyers, it's really hard. We've been told that we are special, right? Our legal knowledge affords us something that other folks don't have. And we have all the answers. I mean, look no further than the US Supreme Court, where nine people with no science background or other backgrounds are ruling on all of these things that they really know nothing about. It's wild. And so we need to sort of, even those of us who have really good intentions, I think we need to be convinced of this idea that we shouldn't be the ones leading. And then there's something beyond that. Even folks who say, okay, you're right, lawyers, elites, we should not be the ones leading. But that's just how it is, right? That's just how it has to be. And so even when you find those folks who are amenable to this idea, there's still the challenge of the inevitability of elite rule. And Macalevy talks about this a lot, right? So she says, if you think elite rule is inevitable, the best you can do is getting nicer elites into power. Right? And this is the legal design for reform idea, right? It's like, well, yeah, these structures aren't great, but it's the best we've got. We're not going to do better. So we just need to make them friendlier. We need to make the bad things friendlier. We need to make the people who have all that consolidated power friendlier. And we'll just sort of. We'll change things that way. And Macalibi says, no. Guess what? History shows us. And Francis Fox Piven has also written about this. There are so many instances in history where ordinary people. Power has effectively challenged elite rule. And in fact, that is when we see the most transformative change. So reading that, sort of putting that together with my experiences in my work as I'm slowly figuring out my place in all this, really hammered home this idea of solidarity by design for me. And re envisioning who the key agent is in change and recognizing that we all have a role to play in that change.
- [19:46]
Abdourah Man Khan
Yes. Yes.
- [19:47]
Hallie J. Pope
Amen.
- [19:48]
Abdourah Man Khan
Amen. And it's not taking anything away. It's not taking anything away from lawyers. It's just building up the momentum and really the impact.
- [20:00]
Hallie J. Pope
Yes. It's just re. Envisioning our relationship to our clients and communities. There's always going to be a need for people who sort of specialize in law. Right. I think doing information design, I think some people are like, well, you know, if. If people can just learn the law without lawyers, what's the point of lawyers? And, you know, in an ideal world, we probably wouldn't. Maybe we wouldn't have lawyers, but we're a long way away from that. And I do think there's always a benefit to having people who specialize in a craft. Right. Imagine being able to approach law just from the love of learning and creating a strategy to help and knowing that you're not just doing it on your own, you're doing it with other people who have different lived experiences, different expertise. I do find it freeing. And I agree with you. Right. This idea that we still very much have a place in this, it's just a matter of reimagining what it is.
- [20:54]
Abdourah Man Khan
Yes, definitely. I think you have an example to share of Real Life Project.
- [21:03]
Hallie J. Pope
Yes. The presentation on let's get it up there. Yeah. So I'm excited to share the work that my colleague Abdurahman Khan and I did last semester with our students and tenants and organizers in our clinic. So the Legal Design Lab has a clinic, the Housing justice and Legal Design Clinic. And this past semester, we were working with some tenant leaders in a building in Montclair. Before I get into the project, I have this slide up about the design process, which is going to be very familiar for folks in the legal design world. Right. The double diamond visualization. Just to provide a little roadmap for how we went about this project. And I just want to highlight. I shared this graphic recently with the lab's Community Co Design Committee, which is a group of tenants and organizers and service providers who are helping us design the lab. And they had so many interesting reactions to it, including the. The very strong instinct that this should not be linear or rigid, which I think it's so interesting. Right. Because we say that in design all the time and the double diamond is meant to capture that flexibility. But. But folks in this committee pointed out, you know, can we stray from this diamond? And I said, absolutely. And then I look at the visualization and I'm like, the visualization doesn't really do a good job of saying that. So thank you to the Community Co Design Committee for. For that and so, so many other insights. That's been an extremely exciting project, but that's not what I'm going to talk about right now. I'm Going to talk about our clinic because we're a little bit farther along with this project. So can you still hear me? I just touched my headphones in a weird way. Okay. They're like my ears are very small and they're squeezing my headphones out of the ear. So that's why I keep touching them. Just let me know if I, if I cut out at any moment. So this is an opportunity to work with some tenant leaders who are trying to organize a tenant association in their building. They have a building, it's, it's a mixture of market rate units and Section 8. So that's, that's voucher units from the government for folks who meet certain income requirements. And they have had a ton of issues in this building, habitability issues. So, you know, dirty conditions in the building, locks not functioning, elevators not functioning, roaches, pests, all sorts of awful things. And they've also had recertification issues. So that's calculating the correct amount of rent that they owe. And all of these issues have kind of been rooted in challenges with communicating with management and with the property owners. They've been put off and ignored and disrespected by the property owners. And my colleagues in the Housing justice project represented several of these tenants in habitability claims in rent recertification matters. But ultimately the tenants really wanted to again get to the bottom of it, right to get to the root. And so they said, hey, we're going to have power if we organize to together we want to form a tenants union. And so our clinic came in to see if we could design tools with them to help them support that process. So I'm just going to really quickly go through how that went this past semester. And I'm excited about this project because it's the first time that I as a clinician have gotten to involve folks who are impacted and other stakeholders in almost every stage of the design process. Usually because of logistics or just lack of buy in, I've been able to facilitate participation in the discovery phase and the feedback phase and not so much in anything in between. And feels sort of disingenuous to call that co design to some extent. And this time we really started to get closer to a true co design moment. So we had our tenants in from the moment of defining the project. Our wonderful tenant leaders. Their names are Rosie and Rhea, they're sisters. They've been in this building for many years. And they came into class on the second day of class and they spoke with the students and they said, look, we appreciate that people Help us. We really have needed help, but ultimately we have to be able to help ourselves. We have to have the power, the key agents of change. I'm sitting there like, yes, this is amazing. They're so cool. So we started out sort of mapping our assumptions about the space. This is a map of people who might be. Who might have some stake in the project and whether they're mission aligned and how much power they have. And that sort of helped us hone in on what it is that we were trying to learn, which was basically, what are the challenges tenants are facing, specifically, what are the challenges around organizing and what are our opportunity moments to create something, some tools or processes that can help facilitate that process. So this is the students and me outside of the building after we went there to speak with tenants the first time. So we got donuts and coffee and we. And we talked to folks and we learned a ton about the issues in the building, about people's fears around organizing or their sort of, you know, were they interested? And it turned out a lot of people were interested, but they were frightened of retaliation. We also spoke with a number of other stakeholders, tenant organizers, who had experience with this sort of situation, housing lawyers, some politicians and policy makers. And so with that, we really gathered a lot of different insights about the problem. And then we were able to synthesize those insights with tenants and organizers in the classroom. So we tried to open our classroom up. So we didn't just go out to the building. We also made our classroom a community space, which was really exciting. So here's some tenant, students, organizers and faculty all doing a very familiar design activity of clustering sticky notes to figure out what are the main takeaways from all of these different places where we gathered knowledge. And it wasn't just conversations. We also have a really robust tenant organizing organization in New Jersey, the New Jersey tenant organization that created this massive handbook about how to organize. So we read through that and got all that institutional knowledge. We read through the memos from the court cases that the Housing Justice Project and students and colleagues had gone through. And we brought all of that together to figure out where are our opportunity points. And then we got to idea together. Everyone came back again for the next class. This is one of our tenant leaders, Ria, with a student, Samir, and we brainstormed ideas together. So this is, I think, maybe the most exciting part for me is that the ideas were actually co generated by tenants and students and organizers in our classroom. And we sort of came up with as many ideas as we could and then we prioritized them based on impact and feasibility. And we landed on a few different clusters of themes. Kind of information sharing was one community and connection was another kind of processes to relieve the burden on tenant leaders was another. And so then the students kind of chose what they were going to focus on for the prototyping. So this is the one phase where, unfortunately, we did not have outside stakeholders involved. And so I think this is room for opportunity for the next time that we do a project. But we had three student teams that each came up with a different prototype. So one team made a flyer that was sort of, what's a tenant organization? Why should you join one? Why should you not fear retaliation? And they also made a slide deck template for a first meeting. Another team created a tenant newsletter template to help the tenants build community and share news about organizing and other events in the building and the community, and also legal rights and information. And the third design, this issue tracker, we heard that, you know, tenants had many complaints, but there was no one way to kind of collect all of them. And the point of the issue tracker is not to then send them to management, but to actually just enable tenants to have that information so that they can know, okay, what are the most common issues? What are the most pressing issues? How do we package this to then go to the management or to go to the town council, where Rosie and Rhea go every meeting and they stand up and they advocate. And so this is meant to sort of serve as a tool for them to use data when they're doing all of that. And then, of course, we got feedback, right? So we did go back to the building and. And the students showed their prototypes and got feedback. And then they presented on the final day of class. And we had some folks join us, some organizers and advocates join us. And I, unfortunately, the tenants were not able to come that day, but they presented basically what they had designed and why, the feedback they'd gotten and their ideas for moving forward. So now we're at a point where we're going to figure out which of these designs are going to be iterated on. So we're working with our tenant leaders. They're excited about all of them, and so are we, all of the designs. So this project is not over. And, you know, in terms of impact, I don't yet know, but. But I think one thing that I'm really interested in, and maybe some folks who are joining us will have thoughts about this, is kind of reconceiving how we think of impact. Because in this. In this Framework of design, solidarity by design. One of the most important things I think we can do is facilitate opportunities for people to experience their own agency as change makers. And so the hope is that by going through this participatory process where tenants are really leading the students, that they see themselves as the key agents. I mean, Rosie and Ria are leaders. They already do. They're awesome. But hopefully other tenants can. Can experience and see that hopefully leaders can sort of be reinvigorated. And we did see a lot of energy come into this effort that had been somewhat dormant for a little while. We got an organizer to come in and do a training with the tenants, and there's now a group that has formed a steering committee and they're going out and they're doing the first stages of starting the tenant association. So was that us? No, that's them. But I do think that having this extra energy, these extra resources, is at least some small catalyst in this process and moving forward. We're just saying, hey, we're here. We can do this, we can do that. We're going to do whatever, whatever you need us to do to support these efforts. So we'll see how it goes. And hopefully Hanel will get to talk again to update on this project. But I just quickly want to sort of highlight some of the questions that I have for moving forward about whether we. Whether we sort of like, met our goals of designing in solidarity. These are. These are four kind of goals or values in liberatory legal design that my colleague Abdurahman Khan and I are sort of writing about now, trying to figure out what practically can we actually do in this framework to have people, to really shift power to people. Right. How do we actually do that? And so these are four ideas we have. One is treating classroom as community and community as classroom. So sort of resisting that dichotomy between learning and praxis, theory and praxis, opening up our spaces of learning while also moving them out to other places. I think we did a great job of that this time by, you know, going to the building and having folks from the building come to us. I think we can do a lot more there. The second one is facilitating experiences of agency and also telling stories about it. One of the best things about this project was having the students, you know, really learn to view the tenants as their collaborators and as experts in their own experiences. It sounds kind of basic, but I think it's a lot harder to teach that in a traditional representation context where there is sort of this professionally prescribed hierarchy and so we're very lucky and designed to get to kind of take. Take that relationship and move it all around and reimagine it as something much more mutual. The third one is, this is a really interesting one, and if we have time, one that I'd love to talk about. Embedding political values. Right. The theory of change. My colleague and I took this project because we believe that organizing is the way, right. To. To get lasting, systemic change. We weren't neutral in choosing this project, and we weren't neutral as instructors. It would be disingenuous to say that we were. And so a lot of that went into how we chose the project. Right. We were very lucky to have Rosie and Rhea who shared our political vision. It would have been a lot trickier if we didn't come in with that sort of political framework in place. I think there's a lot of momentum towards designing to reform. Right. And the students initially were like, you know, how do we package up all these habitability claims to send to management? And we're like, no, no, no. We don't want to just send them to management. We need to build power with the tenants so they can choose what to do with it. But we don't. You know, as instructors, we also don't want to be saying, here's what we want you to do, because it's what we think is right. So that's a delicate balance that I think we're definitely still trying to explore. But choosing partners who share your vision is, I think, one way that we were able to do that here. And finally, my favorite, experiencing joy. Radical imagination. It's so important, right? This is the human connection that you mentioned, Hannel. This. This beauty of working with people and fighting for something that's. That's really important. Housing can be a really depressing line of work. Eviction representation is really depressing. And for the folks living it, I mean, having your. Your home be threatened or. Or be a place where you don't want to be, it's serious stuff. And I think we sometimes have an instinct to be very serious about it all the time. And I just. I think we need to push back against that. One of the organizers who was designing with us brought up this idea of celebrating small wins, the importance of celebrating each victory. That's what sustains us through this work. So even when we're working on something really serious, and we obviously want to be respectful and cognizant of that, it is so important to bring joy in. And so seeing the tenants and students having A very sort of party atmosphere year as they did the sticky note clustering or the brainstorming, sharing stories, sharing their prototypes was certainly my favorite part of this project and something I hope we can replicate moving forward.
- [36:25]
Abdourah Man Khan
And I can see how that builds up that once, once you do it and then you start doing it consistently and then actually see that our voice matters here, that it's not just, not just some, okay, let's just ask, let's just send out the survey and then forget about it. But really they are in the work themselves.
- [36:48]
Hallie J. Pope
Exactly. That takes time. Right. Because rightfully there's a lot of distrust of an institution like a law school. And we had folks say to us when we came in, you know, this is like these are people's lives and you're just coming in for a semester. And so one thing that is exciting about the lab structure is it allows for us to continue these projects even after the clinic has ended. So even though the students from last semester have now are actually graduating next week. Congratulations to our wonderful students. We, the lab are going to be able to continue working with these tenants, continue iterating on these prototypes and supporting them moving forward. And so I think that is something that really excites me about this new structure because in the past I've just been in the clinic and now we have this broader organization that is, you know, being co designed with, you know, some of our committee members are actually from this building. Rosie and Ria are on our co design committee because they're just awesome and they do everything. And so they're there with us deciding what the lab is going to do and setting our priorities. And so we know that we're going to be able to continue to support the project beyond the end of the semester.
- [38:02]
Abdourah Man Khan
So important, so important. And also secure the resources and, and the kind of the future, future of the work as well. And not just these one time projects. It's been so wonderful to speak with you, but I'd like to go back to you before we go because I always love to hear people's own experiences. So as someone who has transition transitioned from lawyering to this design world, what has your own experience been like?
- [38:34]
Hallie J. Pope
Yeah, it's so funny because when I tell people what I do, I think the first assumption is, oh, I escaped law, right? I must have really not liked law. And now I get to do this creative stuff and actually I loved doing litigation in another universe. I am very happily doing legal research and writing briefs for issues that I care about, which when I think about it I'm like, wow. I'm actually really. Even though I think I would be happy there, I do think I'd be missing out on this whole understanding of my role in change. Right. I think hopefully I would have gotten to that point doing the work like my mom did. Right. Doing impact litigation in the environmental world and seeing how that model does not necessarily facilitate leadership by communities. But. But it has been really an interesting thing for me to put a lot of those skills on the back burner. I'm doing something that I never thought I would do. Even though I loved to draw when I was a kid, I never thought I would do it for my job. I never thought anyone would pay me to do it. And. And so that's. That's been wild. And when I meet students who are interested in law, students especially, who are sort of interested in more creative careers, and they're wondering what they can do, Obviously our community is really growing, and there's lots of awesome opportunities. But another thing that I say is, even if you can't find a job that is specifically about your creative skills, you have. You have a superpower. Your. Your creativity is a superpower. And in my experience, at least, especially in the public interest world, lawyers are so excited to find out you can do things that aren't just law. Like, when people found out I knew how to cartoon, they were like, oh, my gosh, can you do that for us? Right? So can you code? Are you great at facilitating focus groups or user research? Do you just have a facility for design thinking? Let the folks you're working with know. That's how I started. I. I had a fellowship at the ACLU of Massachusetts, and when I pitched the idea to them, I said, hey, what if I'm, like, 70% a litigator and 30% a cartoonist, and I like, draw cartoons about our work, but I also do the law stuff, and I fully expected them to be like, you're wacky. Absolutely not. And instead, they immediately understood the. The value of that approach. And I had the coolest title to this day that I've ever had, which was Legal Fellow slash cartoonist. And it was an amazing year, and it's how I got started in my career. So I think if you love doing some. If you love doing law, but you also love doing other things, see if you can weave those other things into your work, because especially if you're working towards social justice, we need every single tool in that toolbox. And hopefully your colleagues will understand that too, and will really value what you're bringing it.