Legal product design studio FoundationLab has launched a new prototyping subscription service geared towards bridging the chasm between the idea stage and an actual end result.

Say a firm wants to develop a product or solution that could help smooth out the process of collaborating on a matter involving multinational parties. Prototyping could provide a better sense of how a product might look or function once fully executed, and before the firm has gone to the trouble and expense of actually bringing that vision to life.

“I would say legal prototyping in general is a very light-weight way to test ideas and get real feedback,” said Mike Cappucci, a partner at FoundationLab.

For law firms and legal departments, the drive to innovate is a very real thing. The first-ever conference thrown by the Association of Legal Technologists (ALT), held earlier this year in Scottsdale, Arizona, even constructed an entire theme around “legal design thinking.”

The term was coined by Margaret Hagan, director of Stanford University's Legal Design Lab, which creates concept designs for legal products and refers to the process of addressing legal problems with creative solutions.

But sometimes those ideas never make it beyond the idea phase and into reality, either because nobody was sure what the next step on the ladder was or didn't want to spend the money to find out.

“I think for us legal prototyping as a concept is really geared towards reducing risk which is an important metric for lawyers,” Cappucci said “They're quite risk averse so being able to get something out there that gets you legitimate feedback on whether the innovation opportunity that you're considering pursuing is worthwhile as opposed to running the idea through your own head over and over again.

Subscribers are entitled to one prototype design a month and how the process unfolds will vary slightly depending on the firm or legal department involved. Some firms or legal departments may already have a curated list of ideas they want to explore. If not, FoundationLab will start there.

“The subscription enables them to have a tool that every month they utilize to work through that list of ideas,” Cappucci said.

Discussions start off loosely and gradually zero-in on the “why” of an idea. If the underlying goal of a project is found to actually mesh with the solution that's being proposed, FoundationLab can go off and prototype a design for feedback.

Still, they aren't the first company out there to offer legal departments an outlet for ideas. In 2015, Riverview Law, now a part of EY, also launched a prototype consultancy to clients develop their own automated processes for legal work.