Innovation Certificate Program.
An immersive innovation training program for a cohort of 40 leaders inside the firm, combining practical design thinking, organizational design, and behavioral science. The program ran successfully for five years (200 alumni total) before being adapted into an AI-focused version in Year 6.
Dechert, in partnership with the firm's Director of Innovation. Each ICP cohort contained a strategic combination of lawyers and business services professionals from practice groups and business units around the firm. This meant that in addition to rigorous training, participants in each annual class joined an expansive, multidisciplinary innovation network that Dechert could tap for a broad range of strategic and innovation initiatives.
I designed the curriculum in close collaboration with the Director of Innovation and served as lead instructor for five years. I assembled a teaching team of legal and design experts who joined as guest lecturers, plus ICP alumni from past cohorts who came back to teach. The program contained 20+ hours of live virtual instruction across three modules plus a two-day in-person design sprint. Every ICP class focused on a different high-level design challenge, with examples including "The Future of the Client Service Experience" and "Increasing the Usage of AI Tools at the Firm".
Five consecutive years of the program, 200 alumni across the firm, and a self-sustaining alumni network that became a real organizational asset. ICP graduates went back to their day jobs and applied the methods on their own initiative, redesigning practice group meetings, taking new approaches to business development, and building cross-functional working groups. The methodology proved durable enough that when AI emerged as the firm's central strategic concern, the same model adapted directly into an AI Innovation Certificate Program in Year 6.
