The Geek in Review Ep. 98 – The Boston Legal Design Challenge Update

A couple months ago, we brought in Bob Taylor and Jeff Marple from Liberty Mutual, and Gabe Teninbaum from Suffolk Law School to discuss the Boston Legal Design Challenge being held online in November. Taylor and Marple are back to discuss how things went, and they brought with them one of the members of the championship team, Aubrie Souza. Souza is a 2L from Suffolk and her team triumphed over the other nine law school competitors from across the United States and Canada. While the event was held online, the technology, the structure, and the facilitators and judges made all of the competitors feel as though they were still working side by side.

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Information Inspirations

Lillian Michelson created a magnificent library for movie design. Over a fifty-year span, Michelson helped movie producers and directors make scenes realistic through her research and cataloging of information and details. Unfortunately, she no longer had the space to store all of her research and materials. For the past few years, the library sat in boxes looking for a home, or to be digitized. Finally, the Internet Archive and its founder, Brewster Kahle heeded the call and are placing the material on the Internet Archives database for all. A ribbon-cutting event is taking place on January 27, 2021 launching the first phase of this project.

The Baltimore Library is raising $25,000.00 for a van to provide legal resources to the surrounding community. This project is exactly how Access to Justice issues need to be addressed. The project is headed up by Baltimore County Librarian Julie Brophy, and Maryland Legal Aid Pro-Bono Director Amy Petkovsek. Hat’s off to both for taking this on.

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Transcript

Greg Lambert:  Welcome to the Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene Gebauer is off this week, but she did join us as we invited a couple of our former guests to come back and discuss how the Boston Legal Design Challenge went. So Jeff Marple and Bob Taylor of Liberty Mutual join us. And they brought along one of the members of the winning team Aubrie Souza, who is a 2L at Suffolk law school. So stick around for that discussion. And now let’s jump into this week’s information inspirations. For more than 50 years, Lillian Michelson created and maintained one of the most famous libraries for film research and Hollywood. Lillian and her husband Harold were royalty and Hollywood, so much so that the king and queen in the movie Shrek are actually named after them. Lillian’s library contains detailed descriptions of what a movie set should look like. Whether we’re talking about a drug kingpin’s, living and working environment in movies such as Scarface, or US Army details in movies like Full Metal Jacket, Lillian Michelson helped make it real. She began volunteering at the movie library for Samuel Goldwyn studios in 1961. And by 1969, she made it our own by purchasing of the library away from them. Unfortunately, over the years, the library had to be moved from place to place. And over the past few years, the library was moved into some 45 pallets full of filmmaking information. She’s tried for years to get the collection digitized, but no one seemed to want to take on the project. That is until now, the Internet Archive and its founder Brewster Kahle are going to scan and catalog all of the materials and put it online to the internet archives for everyone to access. On January 27, they are going to have a virtual ribbon-cutting event and the 92-year-old Lillian Michelson will be there to unveil the first phase of her new online Collection. This is exactly what the internet and the internet archives were created for.

Greg Lambert:  The second inspiration I have it comes from the Baltimore County Library. And they are doing something completely amazing by raising money to buy a van to help bring legal services to the communities in their city. The project which is to raise $25,000 is being headed up by librarian Julie Brophy and the director of the pro bono section of the Maryland Legal Aid, Amy Petkovsek. And I hope I said that right, Amy, and I’m sure I didn’t. So one of the things that we say a lot is that access to justice is not a technology issue. It’s a process issue. This is exactly the sort of improvement in the process that helps get the legal resources out to the community, rather than insisting that the community come to the resources. So I hope at some point, we can get both of these leaders of this project to come on the show and tell us more about it. And that wraps up this week’s information inspirations.

Interview

Greg Lambert:  Back in October, we talked about the Boston Legal Design Challenge, which was held in November. With all of the challenges of holding a competition during a pandemic. We wanted to follow up with the organizers of the challenge, and bring one of the winners and to see how things went.

Greg Lambert:   Okay, this is where the magic happens. Well, let me get to my script because…

Marlene Gebauer:  That’s where the magic magic happens. Really

Greg Lambert:  All right.

Greg Lambert:  Listeners may remember back in October that we talked to Bob Taylor and Jeff Marple of Liberty Mutual, along with Gabe Teninbaum of Suffolk law school about the Boston Legal Design Challenge. Well, from what we heard the event was a huge success. So we asked them to come back and talk with us about it. Bob Taylor and Jeff Marple were able to join us again, and they brought along Aubrie Souza of a 2L from Suffolk, who was on the winning design team for the challenge. So everybody, welcome to the Geek in Review.

Bob Taylor:  Hey, great to be here.

Jeff Marple:  Thanks, Greg.

Greg Lambert:  So Bob, before we jump in, would you mind just reminding us who you are and who you’re with?

Bob Taylor:  Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Bob Taylor. I am Vice President and Senior corporate counsel at Liberty Mutual. And I lead a team called legal ideation and transformation, where we’re thinking about the way that laws is being delivered today or legal services are being delivered today. The way we think it’s going to be delivered tomorrow and how we might be able to influence that.

Greg Lambert:  All right. And Jeff, would you mind doing the same?

Jeff Marple:  Sure, Jeff Marple I work at the mutual I work on Bob’s team. I’m the director of innovation with corporate legal.

Greg Lambert:  Alright, and Aubrie, you’re, you’re the new one here. So you mind the

Marlene Gebauer:  We saved the best for last?

Greg Lambert:  Exactly. Do you mind? Just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Aubrie Souza:  Sure. Thank you. My name is Aubrie Souza. I’m a two out Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Greg Lambert:  Well, it’s good to have all three of you back.

Marlene Gebauer:  Yeah. Welcome, everybody. Bob, let’s start with you. How did it go?

Bob Taylor:  Well, from my perspective, it was a wild success. No, I, I was so unbelievably proud of both the Liberty Mutual and the Suffolk team for adapting and moving this event, from being an in person event, traditionally to being a virtual event this year, for obvious reasons. And, you know, there were a lot of good parts that came out of that. But before I get to any of that, and I know Jeff has a lot to elaborate on this part as well. I just want to thank Suffolk University. I want to thank Dean Andy Perlman, who’s been a really good collaborator with Liberty Mutual over the course of time. I also want to thank professors GabeTeninbaum and Professor Dyane O’Leary, who were instrumental over the years and helping us get this going, and Dyane, in particular this year and working with her on the project. But, you know, the the event went really well, Marlene, I mean, I was so happy with the enthusiasm of the students. We had great facilitators. We had facilitators that had been involved in the event prior, we even had facilitators that and I think we mentioned this last time that we were on that had been either externship students or law clerks for us that have participated in the event previously, that came back to help be facilitators, some even took a day off their actual jobs to come back and do this. They were so enthusiastic about the event itself. So we had high energy and great participation. And we had 10 teams from around the country. So what’s not to love, it really was a good engagement for the students. And I think a nice welcome distraction from their regular schoolwork, I think.

Marlene Gebauer:  What did you have in terms of the feedback from the facilitators and from the students?

Bob Taylor:  Yeah, I mean, I think the facilitators get a lot out of this themselves. You know, it’s a long day, it’s a hard day, you know, you really got to dig in and, and go at these problems. And I think people get, you know, elated at the beginning. And then you have this terrible trough of despair. During the middle of the event where this is never going to work. I don’t think we can, my team is doing terrible come help us, you know, we would, we had all these great breakout rooms, you know, with Zoom. And I should also call out another really big portion of success for this event was we had amazing technical support from our production group at Liberty Mutual. Without them, we couldn’t have pulled this off. I’ll let Jeff talk more about the technology because he certainly knows way, way more about that than I did. But without them, we couldn’t have pulled it off. And but you know, we went through these amazing highs and lows throughout the day. I think the facilitators themselves get a lot of really good psychic return from empowering these folks and helping them learn a little bit more about design thinking and how to apply that in a legal setting. And then the participants themselves, I think that, you know, some of them, you know, responded that they got to work with people in their class that they didn’t typically get to work with, which was kind of cool. They got to, you know, really learn and apply some new ways of thinking about the law and challenged themselves and their construct of what they might want to do post graduation. A lot of people I think, hopefully look at Liberty Mutual and corporate law a little bit differently as an option for them. I think, you know, a lot of students come in and they think and, you know, maybe Aubrie can talk about this a little bit later that they come in thinking, look, there’s one path for students that they’re going to go and get into a law firm post law school and you know, part of the I have this event, if you will, is to get people thinking about alternative careers and ways to apply your legal knowledge in different ways. And I think we’ve accomplished that. I think we did. I’m really proud of that.

Greg Lambert:  That’s great. It sounds like a lot of fun. So Jeff, do you mind just kind of walking us through? You said you had 10 teams. And of course, this was a virtual environment. So just kind of walk us through what, how it started and how it went through through the day and what what challenges you kind of ran into?

Jeff Marple:  Sure. Yeah, so we had great we had 10 teams, we had, we had teams from Suffolk University, we had teams from Texas and SMU Southern University Law Center, we had it was an international event, we had a team from Canada from Thompson Rivers University, a couple of teams from UNLV, a couple of teams from Michigan State. So just getting that geographic spread was was a big win for us as well. Normally, we had schools from Boston and being able to reach out even internationally was, was a big deal for us

Greg Lambert:  Did the Stanford team show up?

Jeff Marple:  No Stanford team did not show up. They were quite intimidated by the talent that we had. And that’s what happened there.

Bob Taylor:  There’s always next year, always next year Stanford.

Jeff Marple:  That’s right. So the day started, so how do my day start my day started when I woke up at like 4:30 in the morning, terrified about what lay in front of me as I never run one of these events before online. Really, we did a tremendous amount of prep, and planning and trying to think through every eventuality. But as I’m sure you’re all aware, no plan survives the battlefield, and neither did this one. But planning is essential. And all that planning paid off. So the first part of the day was a quick introduction, and then a quick icebreaker for the teams to sort of get to if they didn’t know each other already, to start to understand how to use the technology and to work together to collaborate to come up with a quick battle cry, which they then had to share back out to everyone. The rest of the morning was a series of exercises that help them start to understand what problem they were trying to solve for, given their secret ingredients, and then how to narrow that into different stakeholders that that may be affected by that solution. By the problem, excuse me, and then trying to come up with a solution and visualize that solution in a drawing that will eventually lead into a pitch deck. So these were just a series of sort of quick hit, note and vote type of exercises. we leveraged as Bob said, we had sort of with a great technology stack and a ton of help on that we had. We had plenary sessions in zoom that we would then push folks into breakout rooms, each team had their own breakout room. We learned early on that we needed to have one facilitator per team that that it was a quite a change from previous years, we could usually do this with three or four facilitators. Now we had 10 plus plus an event staff on top of that, so a lot more lifting from that perspective. So we had some great facilitators, all of which were alumni of previous events, they would sit in the rooms with them, they would be their first point of contact and any technical issues or any any content issues. Meanwhile, we had a chat going on in the background on Discord, which would allow us to understand if anybody was running into problems here or running into problems there, and also served as an amazing way for the facilitators to blow off steam with the mightiest of GIF wars that you may have ever seen in your life. Like

Bob Taylor:  the Meme and GIF war was strong. Yeah.

Jeff Marple:  The highlight of the day. No, I’m kidding. So that was the first the first part of the day, Greg was a tremendous amount of hands on teamwork, trying to source a bunch of ideas, and then quickly narrow them into one that the team could focus on for the second half of the day, which was pitch preparation.

Bob Taylor:  Jeff, if I want to mention one thing, too, that I think, you know, you’re you’re kind of doing yada, yada, yada over right, because you can’t yada yada over some of the best tech, which was our use of mural in the back. Yeah. So the team’s built on a custom mural board. And I want to give a quick shout out to a friend of ours. You know, so Douglas Ferguson at Voltage Control who is one of our sponsors, contributed some good amount time.

Jeff Marple:  And previous guest on this particular podcast.

Marlene Gebauer:  Previous guest, yeah that’s right.

Bob Taylor:  So, as you know, right now, Greg, yeah. He is an amazing guy. He’s a really interesting dude. And we really like collaborating with him. But he and Jeff created customized Mural boards for each one of these teams, so that they could walk their way through the process that Jeff talked about. And so I think combining all these various technologies in unique ways, made for a really, I think, smooth event that the students could navigate relatively easily. I mean, I’d be interesting to hear Audrie’s take on that. Because she thought that the same.

Marlene Gebauer:  We will

Greg Lambert:   I was gonna say there was like, there was one there was a lot of moving parts. You I mean, you had a lot of technology going on. So let’s just jump right to it, Aubrie, how did it go? Are you able to handle all that technology being tossed at you?

Aubrie Souza:  It was a really seamless day, I felt like I was sitting in the room with all these people with sticky notes talking with, with my facilitator, who would that bring us back to the group. And we’d have that conversation. And then we’d go back and have a conversation amongst my team. I mean, you didn’t feel like you were being bounced around and interrupting the conversation. It felt you are just like turning your back. And going back to your group, I have to commend the Liberty team, we didn’t realize that we were just sitting on our computer for eight hours that day. And it might have just been a lot of adrenaline and excitement, because it was a really great event. We were a team who was really excited to be there, but a little pat on our backs, too. But no, it was a perfect platform, every step was perfectly planned to build to the final event too. We didn’t realize at the time, but everything was planned to build the next thing. So you know, the problem. And then the stakeholder. We didn’t realize at the time what it was building to. But eventually, it all helped us shape an idea that really brought us to that final pitch.

Marlene Gebauer:  So, you know, tell me a little bit about the composition of the team itself. And what the idea was that that you guys were pitching and then I’ll probably throw it back over to Bob and Jeff to sort of get a sense of the composition of some of the other teams and maybe some of the other ideas that were shared.

Aubrie Souza:  Sure. So my team is made up of myself, Mia Bernardi, Christina Greg, Michael Cronin and Elena Constantino. And we…

Marlene Gebauer:  Are you all from the same school?

Aubrie Souza:  We’re all from Suffolk. Okay. We’re 2Ls and 3Ls. None of us have really met in person, though we know each other from working together through the Suffolk Lit Lab, which is a clinical program. So we’ve worked online together, which I think was a benefit in the setting. But we’ve never met in person. And our idea was called VOLTS. And it was a virtual online legal training simulation. One of the early prompts was a problem statement that related to our secret ingredient. And I don’t know, Jeff and Bob, and you want to go more in depth about what the secret ingredients were.

Marlene Gebauer:  Can we hear secret ingredients? I personally want to I want to have a audio of one of the battle cries that we can actually use on the website.

Jeff Marple:  Let’s see if we can get to the audio on that.

Marlene Gebauer:  Please see if that can happen.

Aubrie Souza:  All I have all the secret ingredients, but ours was virtual legal training and education. I don’t know, I can’t explain how they were all supposed to play in.

Jeff Marple:  Well, the secret ingredients are secret. So I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. No. We focused on we we try to lean into the virtual aspect of 2020. And so there was three secret ingredients you were they were assigned at random virtual legal training and education was one. One was the virtual legal profession. And the last was the virtual administration of the law. So those were the three secret ingredients. And they had to they had to leverage or use one, you know, the ingredient they were assigned in whatever their solution was.

Greg Lambert:  So this was the Iron Chef portion of the

Jeff Marple:  That’s right. Yeah.

Greg Lambert:  I remember you talking about that. So

Jeff Marple:  Yes, this is the Morimoto part.

Greg Lambert:  Yeah. And Aubrie? Was there a way to kind of prepare yourself for this? Or was it something that you just showed up? And they hit you with the, with the training and the problem and bam, you were on your own?

Aubrie Souza:  No, we were being geeks. And we were trying so hard. We like researched past challenges, and we couldn’t find no information about past winners except for their names. We could find no information so and it couldn’t, we didn’t know what we’re gonna be doing. We didn’t know if it was gonna be like in an area, we have substantive knowledge about areas of the law. So we were really in the dark.

Bob Taylor:  And I was just gonna say, Aubrie, I think that’s the way we like it with the students because we don’t want them trying to kind of pre solution everything or try to do all this crazy research. I think the idea for the students is to come with an open mind and you know, just have that growth mindset. So when they get there, they can be fully engaged and really get a little uncomfortable, because that’s part of the exercise too. And I don’t know if you felt that uncomfortableness or not Aubreie but that was certainly intentional on our part to try to spur a little bit more creativity.

Aubrie Souza:  I would, I would definitely agree that we were very uncomfortable. But once we gave in to that our facilitator did a great job. Anthony Metzler to give them a shout out was really great. Every step of the way, he was just like, this is the stage you are in do this. And so we weren’t thinking about our final product and our pitch until about 45 minutes until pitch time, we did not have like we weren’t doing our deck until like the last 45 minutes, which was a little late. But it worked for us, when we were thinking about the problem of the virtual legal education and training. The problem for us is that there’s no checkpoints, and you’re unable to harness the power of virtual training for students. It doesn’t just talk about students, it’s, you know, lawyers who are in the practice or new lawyers, because there’s just, learn it, and you get to test at the end of the year. And go to your CLE. And maybe just sit through the whole thing. And then you get a code that you register at the end. There’s no checkpoints for people in this practice. And it’s kind of just you’re in the world. But then we were talking about stakeholders, we all talked about who’s the stakeholder and it’s not the people who are in the practice, it’s communities that lawyers serve. At the end of the day, they’re the user, we’re creating lawyers who serve a community. And so as we’re building, we were really thinking about how do we build better lawyers, but also give make better lawyers who have something. And so we wanted to make was something that helps lawyers feel better about themselves. And we built like a pilot simulator. For lawyers, it was like a video game that teaches lawyers how to learn new fields with a client and get built those soft skills while you’re building the practice area. So if you want to learn how to do property law, you learn how to deal with a client who’s having an issue, so you can learn how to go to the registry of deeds, but also to deal with that emotional issue and interact with somebody, but also really low stakes. Because when you’re dealing with somebody who’s having an issue, it shouldn’t be like a real person. So that was our idea.

Marlene Gebauer:  I really, I really liked that idea that sort of blending the the human element into it. So it’s it’s about client service, in addition to understanding the law and in that area. And, you know, I think that’s an area where we’ve talked about there can there can definitely be some some growth and improvement in terms of education. So that’s great. So I’m wondering that based on the skills that you apply during this exercise, you know, how do you see yourself using those, you know, moving forward in the future?

Aubrie Souza:  So I think that one of the really nice parts about this is that, like I said, we didn’t try to solve the problem right away. We talked about what was involved.

Greg Lambert:  That’s very non-lawyer of you.

Marlene Gebauer:  You listen, and you thought about it.

Aubrie Souza:  I’m also in exam mode right now. So you know, I’m going through and I’m looking at what’s important, and all the pieces, like we’re breaking it down to all of the parts of the community. So I just think that like all of the ways that we were interacting with, like a group going back and forth with it was really nice. And we were able to just like really collaborate as a team. We really built on it at the end, because it fit the group’s values and how we’re working on it.

Marlene Gebauer:  So I want Jeff, I wanted to get back to the other teams that participated in some of the ideas that they put together as well as their composition. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jeff Marple:  Yeah, happy to but I did want to comment on one thing that Aubrie mentioned. So she mentioned that her facilitator was Anthony Metzler. Mets, as we know him was an expert, an extern. And then a law clerk for us. And then a last he departed to go and work for Baker McKenzie. He currently works for frequent contributor to Three Geeks and a Law Blog. His boss is Casey Flaherty. So just sort of bring it around again.

Greg Lambert:  Well, you say frequent contributor Casey hasn’t contributed in a while so let’s uh, let’s encourage him to start jumping in.

Jeff Marple:  By frequently, I mean every couple of years It feels like something along those lines, but when he does, it’s, it’s is there’s a lot of it. It’s long form.

Marlene Gebauer:  Yes.

Jeff Marple:  So anyways, the the The second and third place teams well as the second place team was also from Suffolk, they were called MBA 2K20. And they, they also were looking at Virtual Education. They were trying to build a virtual campus, an educational facility, I guess, for law students, but also for CLE. And then the third place team was our Canadian team, who by the way, that far away had the most amazing Tim Hortons Zoom backdrops that you ever saw in your life.

Bob Taylor:  And Jeff, by far, the most polite.

Jeff Marple:  We say that story a lot. And they were trying to figure out a way to automate legal consulting, legal technology consulting. So not only were they trying to consult on legal technology, but they were trying to do it in an automated way, which I thought was a an interesting, interesting approach. They were automating the consulting around technology with technology. So that was that was that was compelling. But those are our three winners.

Greg Lambert:  So So what I want to do is encourage any future Texas teams to have a good Whataburger background. Let’s say, you got to get a counter that Tim Hortons

Jeff Marple:  You got to counter the Tim Hortons. That’s correct. Yes. There was a lot of Maple Leafs and Canadian flags. They were very patriotic.

Greg Lambert:  That’s funny.That’s funny. So now one of the things I wanted to ask you about was you had a blue ribbon panel of judges. Now he did you talked about, you know, he had cat moon, you had Bob ambrogi Jason Barnwell. How was their experience? How were they able to jump in with this virtual environment and do their job? And and was it as smooth as it sounds like everything else went?

Marlene Gebauer:  Yeah, how did they do?

Bob Taylor:  Yeah. So first of all, they’re all pros. And, you know, they’re fantastic. And we’re very thankful for their participation. They jumped right in with these, they came in towards the end of the day, they watched a little bit during the day, but then they came in towards the end of the day, and they listened to all the pitches. We actually had an online form that they could fill out as they were going along, that automatically tabulated the scores so that when we broke out into the virtual judge’s chambers, we were able to review those scores and kind of have the team’s force ranked a little bit. They weren’t held to that. But it gave them a framework to work off of. And they all asked the team’s excellent questions. And they really were, you know, not only probing but also very generous questions, in terms of allowing the teams to maybe get out that last little bit that they needed to get out or be, you know, get some more clarity around something. And I want to go back to something that Aubrie said about how she and her team drew analogies for their idea from other places. Like, you know, the flight simulator and the way that they display things was so very simple. And I think you know, somebody like Bob Ambrogi, who really appreciates both simplicity and writing, but also the simplicity. And the idea of really called that out. I think, you know, Jason Barnwell was very complimentary about the virtual nature of the training. Cat Moon, who, as you know, from Vanderbilt, as a professor, you know, really thought that this would be a great training tool, and it really resonated with them. So as far as the judges were concerned, they had no problem adapting to the environment. I think they’ve all been working in this environment on their own anyway. And they were super generous with the students in their questioning and their comments back to them on the winners. And we were pleased to have them. So very fortunate.

Greg Lambert:  Good.

Marlene Gebauer:  It’s nice to hear.

Greg Lambert:  Did Jason Barnwell tell you that you should have done this on Microsoft Teams instead of Zoom?

Bob Taylor:  He had a lot of suggestions about the tech stack. Yeah.

Jeff Marple:  We made a lot of a lot of Office jokes. Which were fun.

Greg Lambert:  Well, good. It sounds like everyone had a good time with this. Aubrie, let me let me just ask you real quick. I know you’re you’re 2L, you may not want to do this in your in your 3L year but it would would it be something that you would do again, or at least encourage other people to participate in?

Aubrie Souza:  Tell them to sign me up as a facilitator.

Marlene Gebauer:  I was gonna ask,

Aubrie Souza:  I don’t know if they’ll let me go for a two time champ, but I would encourage everyone to do it. It would be absolutely incredible.

Marlene Gebauer:  I like that. She just threw that down man.

Greg Lambert:  I’m just envisioning a WWE style entrance with a boa and walking through with music. So let’s have you come back as the reigning champ.

Bob Taylor:  Yeah, I want to know what the team’s going to do with the money because I mean, if you guys will remember we had really generous sponsors. I just want to mention them real quickly. Legalmation, Integron, Thomson Reuters, Neota Logic, LawGeex, PactSafe, NovusLaw, and Voltage Control,  and, you know, I want the sponsors to know not only did it go to prize money, But also to support the Lit Lab at Suffolk University and the great work that they’re doing there. So I’m just curious Aubrey, you know, we gave out $5,000 to the winning team $3,000 to the second place team, and $2,000 to the third place team. So I’m just curious, Aubrie, what are you gonna do with the money?

Aubrie Souza:  You know, I think we all joked, but I was very serious. I’m going to pay my rent.

Greg Lambert:  Very practical

Marlene Gebauer:  a good, a good thing to do,

Greg Lambert:  Pay rent and pay your student loans.

Bob Taylor:  Some form of COVID relief it’s really what it was.

Aubrie Souza:  Yeah, I’m sorry. It’s not more exciting.

Jeff Marple:  So we got an email from one of the people on the winning team. Her name’s Christina Gregg . And if it’s okay, I’d like to just read a little bit of it.

Greg Lambert:  Yeah, go ahead.

Marlene Gebauer:  Yeah, please.

Jeff Marple:  So the, you know, we do this for a lot of reasons. We, we do it because it’s fun. We do because we like it. We do it because it gets Liberty Mutual and Suffolk, like some exposure by doing things like this podcast and talking about it in different places. We do it because we want to educate the law students on design thinking and help them think about something different. But Christina really sort of summed it up. So this is her email. “I wanted to thank each of you sincerely for the incredible experience here LM team worked so diligently to create for us on Friday. The opportunity to participate was a pivotal moment in my law school career, and has recommitted me to the pursuit of a forward thinking mechanics oriented career in law. Specifically motivated by the event I enrolled just this morning and design thinking and legal process and project management, as two of my final law school courses next semester. The day was full of lightbulb moments, laughs, and lessons learned, I really cannot say enough good things about it and confirm the meaningful impact that it has on students like myself, who will take those lessons and apply them in our own careers. I hope to stay in touch with this team in the months and years to come.” So that right there means we had a good event, if everyone else hated it, but Christina had that experience, then I feel like we had a great event. So you know, thank you, Christina for the lovely email. Thanks to all the students that participated. A huge thank you to our facilitators and project team and our sponsors for helping us out because we had a we had a really great time, and I can’t wait to do it again.

Greg Lambert:  Good. Well, I don’t think we can top that. So Bob Taylor, Jeff Marple, and Aubrie Souza, thank you very much for coming back on here and in tell us how it went. Sounds like a really good time was had by all and and good luck in the future on this.

Marlene Gebauer:  Yeah. Thank you all so much.

Jeff Marple:  Great. Thanks, guys.

Post Interview

Greg Lambert:  Well, it’s always a pleasure talking with Jeff and Bob. This is where I wish Marlene was here because she would agree with me that envisioning Aubrie and reentering the competition next year and walking in with a championship belt around her waist and fireworks going off in the building. They I think that’s that’s how I imagined the next challenge going. So all kidding aside, it sounds like the Boston Legal design challenge was a great experience for everyone involved. Kind of wish I could have streamed it and watch the events that day. So thanks again to Jeff Marple and Bob Taylor from Liberty Mutual for joining us. And a big thanks to Aubrie Souza, from the reigning championship team of the Boston Legal design challenge and Suffolk law school for sharing her experiences as well.

Greg Lambert:  And before we go, we wanted to remind listeners to take the time to subscribe to us on Apple podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcast. You can rate and review us as well. If you have questions about today’s show or comments on a future show, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter at @gebauerm or at @glambert and you can call the geek and review hotline at 713-487-7270 or email us at geek and review. podcast@gmail.com And as always, the great music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thanks, Jerry. All right. We’ll be back next week. We’ll see you then.