Getting corporate employees to actively engage—and learn from—compliance training is a challenge in any corporation. Ropes & Gray put its summer associates on the knotty problem, organizing a competition, or “hackathon,” to brainstorm the future of corporate compliance.

The learning wasn’t just one-way. Concepts unearthed by the summer associates in the hackathon, where participants try to reinvent new ways of doing old tasks, may filter into a new product that the firm is launching later this year for Ropes’ corporate clients, the firm said.