Adopt Rick Rubin's Creative Process in Your Legal Team
Legendary music producer Rick Rubin was once asked what he had learned working with all those great artists.
His response was profound yet simple: “Never try to judge an idea based on the description of the idea. Always musically try the idea.”
In short, the artist's description of a musical concept might sound terrible, but when they then played it, it could turn out to be incredible.
So there’s a gap between the theoretical description and the practical implementation of ideas.
Can go both ways too, sometimes an idea sounds like it should really work and it doesn’t.
I for example spent 6 years working on something that everyone agreed should work but didn’t! (read that story here).
What does this mean?
It means we should quiet the voice in our head that wants to make decisions based on discussions of an idea. We should instead try to say: how can we quickly try this idea?
My ideal process:
let’s test drive it in a lean way for 2 weeks
then we do a 20 min retro figuring out what went well and what didn’t go well
then run for another 2 weeks
By the end of the month you have a much better sense whether the idea solves the problem. You can then either stop it, or invest properly.
(Note: this all assumes the idea tries to solve something we care about - if not, we shouldn’t even test it. Not because it will/won’t work, but because it doesn’t solve a bottleneck)
In-house legal team example:
Imagine your team spends a lot of time on back-and-forth with the sales team to get context on the contracts before they can start work. A team member suggests investing in a sizeable contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution, predominantly for the ‘legal front door’. The idea was to hard code 10 questions that must be answered by sales.
A binary response might be one of the following:
Nah, that won’t work. I don’t think sales teams will fill in those questions in practice. They’ll circumvent and just emails us as usual.
Ok, let’s do it. [signs multiyear contract on a big tool]
So let’s try the Rick Rubin way: how can we try this for 2 weeks? Maybe set up a Google Form, and get two sales team members to use that for the next few deals?
You’ll learn whether 10 questions is too many (it likely is!), and you can then iterate. What if we just ask 3 most imnportant questions, is that enough to stop the majority of back-and-forth?
After another few weeks you may feel comfortable either dismissing the idea, or buying a tool.
Note: this is why with our contract playbook tool (LexPlay) we offer a full month free trial (no need for a sales call / credit card etc). I feel strongly you should be able to testdrive it in your work for a number of weeks before making a decision.
Typical objections:
There might be pushback like, "But we need a full-blown system to properly test this." That's a trap. Even in its simplest form, a good idea should show some promise.
We're really after the 'Minimum Viable Product' (MVP) – the bare bones version that lets us experiment and learn. I think it was Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder) who once said:
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”
So, let's not just talk about innovative ideas. Let's give them a stage to perform, just like Rubin would. Who knows? We might find our next incredible hit!
Thanks for being here,
Daniel