Caitlin "Cat" Moon

Cat’s expertise with executive education for legal professionals and human-centered design was a great match for our needs. She brought an in-depth knowledge about the legal industry and innovation leadership that were key ingredients in delivering a high-impact executive leadership institute for legal information professionals.

Cat worked with us to develop a customized human-centered design approach that would resonate with our leaders working across various settings. Cat was intentional, highly responsive, and flexible throughout the entire process. This was incredibly refreshing given the nuances and high expectations of our leaders.

She delivered a fantastic session using design sprints in an engaging and digestible format that set the stage for powerhouse strategic discussions that followed. Our leaders left equipped with knowledge, actionable steps, and approaches that could be applied back in their setting.

At the Multilaw Americas Regional Meeting 2019 in Nashville, members were treated to a fascinating and inspiring keynote speech by Professor Caitlin “Cat” Moon, Director of Innovation Design for the Program in Law & Innovation at Vanderbilt Law School.

Cat really opened our delegates’ eyes up to the possibilities of being more innovative in their approach to delivering legal services to their clients. She explained, using tailor-made examples from their real-world clients, the benefits of making human-centred design-thinking central to their client strategy — and inspired the audience with her ideas on how to go about doing this.

As organiser of the event, I was delighted by Cat’s professionalism and approachability throughout the planning process. She engaged with our committee and thoroughly researched our audience’s needs to tailor-make her keynote for them. Her impact on the audience was engaging and it was great to see how many were excited by her findings. One of the partners let us know afterward how he had been messaging his Managing Partner throughout to tell him “you have to listen to this!”. I know many of them reached out to Cat afterward for further support, and the feedback was entirely positive throughout.

I would not hesitate to recommend Cat for events in the future. Awe-inspiring!

Cat has been instrumental in shaping and influencing so many of the positive, progressive initiatives emerging from my team.

Having attended a workshop on human-centred design which Cat led at the ICW/CCCA Annual Summit in Toronto in 2018, we adopted wholesale the learnings from the event. Cat delivered the session in such an accessible and inclusive way that the principles have been applied to develop and enhance a range of team-wide initiatives, from the 2019 legal training programme to our approach to document assembly technology.

In doing so, we have been able to turn the dial up on a number of core skills which are essential for us to develop as lawyers, such as client-centricity, empathy, curiosity, creativity and a willingness to prototype the imperfect.

Our engagement with Cat has further resulted in the team running our own “failurecamp”. The concept was entirely borrowed from Cat’s own initiative at Vanderbilt. As a consequence of adopting Cat’s initiative, the team has a stronger, more inclusive culture where vulnerabilities are more readily shared, and ‘intelligent failure’ and psychological safety much better understood.

Cat was incredibly generous with her time to help us shape the content and approach of the session. Cat has consistently been great to work with and her passion and commitment to developing legal thinking and the profession itself have been a huge source of encouragement and inspiration – I am incredibly grateful to her.