The COVID-19 pandemic requires lawyers to address a myriad of unique problems—and highlights the need for lawyers to engage as creative problem solvers. Lawyers must determine how best to deliver legal services while contending with travel restrictions, social distancing, stay-in-place measures, and business and court closures. Furthermore, questions arise as to how to tackle the access to justice gap in the midst of the largest global recession since the Great Depression.
Although lawyers need to work collaboratively to come up with creative solutions to these unprecedented problems, a challenge administered to groups of business students, lawyers, CEOs, engineers, and kindergartners revealed that lawyers do not work efficiently and effectively to creatively solve problems. In dozens of challenges, kindergartners outperformed all of the other groups. Instead of collaborating and focusing on completing the task, the lawyers engaged in status management—trying to determine how they fit into the group and who was in charge. While not smarter than the lawyers, the kindergarteners solved the problems best because they were smarter in the way that they worked with each other.
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