Legal Design Podcast

Many contracts can be really complicated, especially the ones used in industries like construction. They are known to be long and complex, making them difficult to understand and comply with. These contracts are often designed by a lawyer for another lawyer, with potential disputes in mind.

This kind of contracting doesn't really support the end user in their daily activities so it's time to make changes! The field of contract design is dedicated to transforming these kinds of risk-averse and lawyer-centric contracting practices. It promotes a more proactive and user-centric approach to contracting where contracts are perceived not just as something to be shoved in the drawer, but rather as tools that can guide, support and empower the businesses.

In this episode we meet with Sarah Fox, a contract simplification specialist and the creator of the 500 word contract. Having decades of experience as a construction lawyer, Sarah knows how bad contracts can cost time, money, deals and relationships. With her simplified contract design model she advocates for more meaningful and user-friendly contracts that help streamline deals, enhance customer relations, and still keep everyone protected.

Sarah shares with us how she came up with the idea of the 500 word contract and what kind of feedback she has since received from users and other lawyers. We also hear her tips for contract simplification and how to use them in redesigning other types of legal information as well. And of course, we also discuss the future of contract design with AI. Tune in to hear more!

In this episode we meet with Sarah Fox, a contract simplification specialist and the creator of the 500 word contract. Sarah shares with us how she came up with the idea of the 500 word contract and what kind of feedback she has since received from users and other lawyers. We also hear her tips for contract simplification and how to use them in redesigning other types of legal information as well. And of course, we also discuss the future of contract design with AI. Tune in to hear more!

Sarah Fox is a recovering lawyer transforming the way people do business. After decades dealing with huge deals in the construction sector, she realised that long, complex and bad contracts were costing time, money, deals and relationships. And after all that, they were usually just shoved in a drawer! There was a better way. Now Sarah advocates for short, simple contracts of less than 500 words. And delivers keynotes that inspire people across industry how to streamline deals and enhance customer relations with contracts that represent their values, embed trust, and keep everyone protected.

The ability to tell stories is what distinguishes us humans from other living creatures. We think, remember and pass on information in the form of storytelling. It’s no wonder, then, that storytelling is also a powerful method in design. It helps make sense of the world, empathize with different perspectives and simplify complexity. Law and legal work are no exceptions, as legal professionals benefit from good storytelling skills too. In the context of law and legal design, storytelling can help make people’s experiences of the law and justice visible and relatable, and help understand what measures are needed to fill gaps in the legal system.  

In this episode we deep dive into the world of storytelling with Senior Design Strategist Emily MacLoud and Principal Design Strategist Luke Thomas, both at Portable. Portable is an Australian-based design agency specialized in using design and technology to create positive impact in areas like justice, public sector, mental health and more. With Emily and Luke, we discuss the elements of a good story and how to craft one for the purposes of legal storytelling. Emily and Luke also share their insights on using design tools like user journey maps in story building, and how to address sensitive topics in law with storytelling.  

But does a story need to have a happy ending? And who is Becky, and what does she use storytelling for? Tune in to find out.

The majority of people in need of legal help do not turn to formal legal services, such as going to court. Research indicates that this is a global phenomenon: those who seek to solve their legal problems often turn to their social circles and other informal sources of information instead. By doing so, people look for advice that is precise, tested, and socially approved, making it relevant and practical for their own personal situation. However, many legal innovation efforts seem to be focused on fine-tuning and polishing formal legal services, with fewer solutions aligning with how people really want and need their justice problems solved. 

But how can we fill the 'engagement gap' between people and the legal system? What exactly does being people-centered entail? What should we pay attention to when seeking more systemic changes in law and access to justice? In this episode, we discuss these questions with the inspiring Zainab Malik, Senior Justice Sector Advisor at The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) and the leader of the Justice Innovation Labs. Zainab introduces us with case examples of HiiL's projects in Tunisia, Uganda, and Nigeria, alongside her insights into creating an enabling environment for legal innovation. We also discuss the role of technology in improving access to justice. Is it sensible to digitalize court services or make legal help apps when people lack access to basic commodities, such as mobile phones or electricity?

In this episode we venture one of the most classical examples of automating legal processes and talk about document automation. We are joined by the notorious guru of this field, Catherine Bamford of Bamlegal. Catherine shares with us her career story and what insights she has gained on her transformation journey from a lawyer to a legal engineer. We also hear why she is so passionate about document automation and what are the benefits for it. With over a decade of experience in digitalizing legal work, she tells her secrets on what to do and what to avoid in automation projects. We also learn why organizations should create and maintain contract playbooks.

We won't miss the discussion on the role of AI and GPT tools in document automation either. Catherine explains whether human-made templates are still needed in the era of AI, or should we concentrate on prompting and training AI tools to raise ourselves to the next level in document drafting. We also hear how Catherine views the general impact of technology on legal work over the past decades. Has there been any significant milestones yet? Or are we lawyers still working like it was the 1970's?

We kick off the new season with Dan Riley and J.P. Rossi from Resol-VR. Resol-VR is an innovative tech company specialized in creating immersive and interactive solutions for the legal, insurance and law enforcement sector. We discuss how virtual reality can be used in various legal contexts, such as for presenting evidence at court or examining different scenarios for crime investigation. As we learn from Dan and J.P., virtual reality can be a particularly powerful tool when it comes to improving access to justice. Virtual courts or data visualizations not only make law and justice more accessible, but also enable new forms of collaboration and transparency, and help reduce the costs of dispute resolution. Importantly, virtual reality can also make us more empathetic. With immersive visualizations we can step into the shoes of “the other”, and experience events for example from the perspective of a physically impaired person.

While the benefits of using virtual reality in the legal context become evident, there are also some concerns related to its reliability. Just like any data, also the data used for virtual reality simulations can be biased or flawed. How do we ensure that the visualizations convey the information as truthfully as possible? Are there some quality metrics for the safe use of virtual reality? We also discuss the threats and possibilities of AI in creating virtual reality content. But if courts become more virtual, do we lose an element of human connection in turn? And further, is there a risk virtual reality makes court proceedings too theatrical?  Listen to the episode to hear how Dan and J.P. respond to our queries.  

This is a Legal Design Podcast special episode in Finnish - dedicated to Finnish folks interested in legal design. But no worries our English speaking friends! We will be back with a new season starting in January 2024.

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Tässä podcast-sarjamme erikoisjaksossa keskustelemme legal designista, eli suomeksi oikeusmuotoilusta, kolmen suomalaisen legal design -pioneerin kanssa. Vierainamme ovat ennakoivan sopimisen ja sopimusmuotoilun uranuurtaja, Lapin yliopiston työelämäprofessori sekä Vaasan yliopiston yliopistotutkija Helena Haapio, Laurea Ammattikorkeakoulun oikeusmuotoilu-koulutusohjelman isä Jukka Linna sekä Juristin muotoilukoulun perustaja Hannele Korhonen.   

Keskustelemme vieraidemme kanssa erityisesti oikeusmuotoilun taustasta ja tulevaisuudesta Suomessa. Helena kertoo miten kotimaisen ennakoivan oikeuden ja ennakoivan sopimisen 25-vuotinen tutkimus on osaltaan vaikuttanut oikeusmuotoiluilmiön syntyyn, ja Jukka avaa maailman ensimmäisen oikeusmuotoilun maisteritason koulutusohjelman, eli Laurea ammattikorkeakoulun oikeusmuotoilun ja oikeudellisen erityisosaamisen YAMK-koulutuksen alkutaivalta. Hannele kertoo puolestaan miten Juristin muotoilukoulu sai alkunsa ja millaisten muotoiluprojektien parissa hän on saanut työskennellä.

Kuulemme myös miten vieraamme selittäisivät oikeusmuotoilun merkityksen kuuluisalle Pihtiputaan mummolle, sekä pohdimme kuka voi kutsua itseään oikeusmuotoilijaksi. Visioimme lopuksi oikeusmuotoilun tulevaisuutta suomalaisena vientituotteena. Miten oikeusmuotoilu onnistuu tekoälyn kanssa? Entä onko oikeusmuotoilusta apua ihmiskuntaa koettelevien isojen kysymysten, kuten ilmastonmuutoksen, ratkaisemisessa?

This week we team up with the energetic legal tech guru Maya Markovich who is now focusing on Justice Tech. Justice Tech is innovative technology designed to improve access to one’s legal rights, improve outcomes for justice-involved individuals, or more equitably administer a legal system. Maya has extensive experience in legal tech and now she's working as an excutive director for Justice Tech Association supporting companies and programs that create technology solutions helping people navigate legal matters to foster hope, independence, and self-empowerment to contribute to a fairer legal system. We talk about justice tech having an impact on access to justice but since access to justice is not a technology, but a systemic problem, we also concentrate on what else could we do as a society.

We also discuss AI and legal tech in general. Just recently Henna met with some law students and learned that the generation we believed was born to use technology is really questioning whether or not there will be entry level legal jobs in the future (Yes, there will!). We asked Maya's opinion about this and discussed the future of legal.

Maya also shares her experience in participating the "90 day Finn Program" and how to survive the Helsinki November with all the seasons in just one month.

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With her unique background spanning VC, law, behavioral science, and change design, Maya Markovich delivers technology, process, and business growth services worldwide. For nearly 6 years she launched and scaled industry-first Nextlaw Labs/Nextlaw Ventures at Dentons, the world's largest firm, delivering next-generation technology, process client and business growth services across the globe. Maya is currently justice tech executive in residence at Village Capital and executive director at the nonprofit Justice Technology Association. She also advises multiple high-growth startups, investor and venture funds, and consults on legal department and law firm innovation and transformation initiatives, building future-proof methodologies and tech to advance the legal industry, its clients and consumers via achievable, sustainable and scalable

design and implementation. 

In 2020 Maya was named one of five “Influential Women of Legal Tech” by ILTA, a “Woman Leading Legal Tech” by The Technolawgist in 2019, and an ABA Legal Technology Resource Center “Woman of Legal Tech 2018” for her work in designing, promoting, and driving the future of the legal industry around the globe.

This week we are Leaning Law with Isabell Storsjö and Ana Lucia Martins, two researchers engaged in Lean supply chain management and Lean philosophy in justice systems. With Isabell and Ana Lucia we will be discussing the concept of lean thinking in the context of law. Lean thinking, also known as Lean methodology, is a management philosophy that originated in the manufacturing industry and has since been applied to various fields, including healthcare, software development, and now law.

The core idea of lean thinking is to eliminate waste, increase efficiency, and continuously improve processes. In the legal industry, this approach has gained momentum in recent years as law firms and legal departments seek to increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve client satisfaction. Isabell and Ana have been researching how the Lean philosophy would also help on the public sector, especially in court proceedings.

In this episode, we will explore the principles of lean thinking and how they can be applied to the practice of law. We will also discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that come with implementing lean thinking in the legal industry.

Join us as we delve into the world of lean thinking in law and discover how this approach can help legal professionals achieve better results for their clients and themselves in the courtrooms.

Ana Lúcia Martins is an Assistant Professor at ISCTE-IUL and an integrated researcher at BRU-Iscte (Business Research Unt). She holds a PhD in Management, with a specialization in Operations Management and Technology. She currently serves as Iscte Business School Vice-dean for Teaching and Innovation, and as Vice-President of Iscte’s Pedagogical Council. Ana teaches Operations Management, Logistics Management, Service Operations Management, and Supply Chain Management. Ana has authored close to 100 scientific articles. She has authored book chapters in logistics management and lean management in the justice systems. Her current main research topics are operations management in humanitarian settings, logistics management, supply chain management, and lean management in the services area, mainly in judicial and healthcare systems.

Isabell Storsjö is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Law at the University of Turku. She holds a doctoral degree in Supply Chain Management and Social Responsibility as well as a law degree, and has always been interested in topics that combine the two fields of knowledge. One of the areas where they intersect is justice system reform and legal process improvement, and Isabell started investigating the problems with prolonged legal proceedings, especially in Finland, in 2011. She has published on lean thinking in the justice system in academic journals and books, and has also done research on cooperation between actors in the criminal procedure in Finland. Isabell has followed legal design since attending the first Legal Design Summit as a law student, and is especially interested in the process (or service) design, organization design and system design levels of the concept.

Today, we have planned something extraordinary for you. We finished the last season with a little riddle and asked our audience to guess who was the Special Legal Design Santa in our season finale. We received some answers, thank you for those, and the promised prize was drawn. Our lucky winner is Elif Yildirim, a lawyer and legal design student from Turkey and we invited Elif to plan and co-host an episode with us and what an episode it turned out to be! 

Alice Rawsthorn, a British Design Critic and author joined us to discuss about design as an attitude and how it can be incorporated into law. Alice talks about why great design is a human right and explains how we understand design and its potential in different fields of life and what is the level of importance to incorporate design into our responses in times of crisis, such as in the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria.

We also talk about how design, or design thinking, has increasingly gained popularity in different fields of professions, and law is just one of the examples. Alice explains if there are some “red flags” in this development.

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Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and author, whose books include Design as an Attitude, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design at MoMA, New York. Alice’s weekly design column for The New York Times was syndicated worldwide for over a decade. In all her work, Alice champions design’s potential as a social, political and ecological tool that can help to foster positive change. Born in Manchester and based in London, she is a founding member of the Writers for Liberty campaign for human rights and of the advisory board of the Democracy Next research and action institute as well as a member of the UK government’s Honors Committee for arts and Media. Alice and Paola are co-founders of Design Emergency, a podcast andmin research platform that investigates design’s role in forging a fairer future.

Ayşe Elif Yıldırım is a lawyer and academic and most recently a Visual Communication Design student. After traveling and living in many countries of Europe, she is now based in Ankara, Turkey. She has several academic degrees in different fields of law, most recently she was granted her Ph.D. degree with distinction for her doctoral research conducted under the scholarship of Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology in the field of Business and Human Rights. Always being interested in interdisciplinary fields of work that combine two distinct ways of thinking, Elif is now focusing on Legal Design and how we can use it to solve complex challenges we are facing in our contemporary world.

Today, we meet with Anna Posthumus Meyes. She’s a Dutch legal designer running her own agency Aclara Legal Design. With Anna, we concentrate on the legal design market and how to create buy-in for legal design.

Without buy-in, legal design will remain a rather small concept and it's potential to improve legal industry will go unrealized. We all know that getting buy-in can be a challenge for legal designers. Lawyers are trained to be risk-averse and skeptical of new ideas and we still face the challenge that organizations are not that familiar with the concepts of legal design. And even if they have heard of legal design, it might be difficult for clients to see the value in investing in design solutions. So how do we overcome these barriers?

Anna has great news! During her years offering legal design services, she has seen the swift in the market and there definitely is a need for legal design. One strategy is to start small. Rather than trying to convince the entire legal industry, start with a pilot project to create interest and showcase the impact of design. And help the client to see the impact by creating KPI's that are easy to measure. 

As our listeners know, in this podcast we are inspired by the becoming-of-stories people have about discovering design and its potential for law, so we also hear Anna's story and she tells us how she experienced the career change when becoming a legal designer and an entrepreneur at the same time. We also discuss whether legal designers experience similar competition and pressure as lawyers do in the legal industry. 

Anna Posthumus Meyjes is a Legal Designer and founder of Aclara Legal Design consultancy. Anna brings creativity, design and a user-centered approach to law. Her focus is on information design and user-centricity in legal services.  Aclara Legal Design redesigns traditional, text-heavy legal communication and documentation to make them engaging, readable and memorable. Anna practiced law in private practice for 10 years before founding Aclara Legal Design.

This episode starts our season 5! What a ride it has been so far and the good times will continue as we have planned a tremendous fifth season for you, dear listeners.

In this episode, we meet with a serial entrepreneur and a lawyer Nils-Erik Jansson to talk about start-up culture in the legal industry. Nils-Erik has a vast experience of entrepreneurship in the legal industry.  Currently, he's changing legal industryt at Precisely, the user-friendly platform for enterprise contract management. He founded the company in 2014 and with his team, is on a mission to set a new standard for digital contracting.

Quite often lawyers are risk aversive and not that many wants a career outside of the traditional way of lawyering. Nils-Erik, however, has made career choices and has been changing the legal industry since 2009. There's a lot of peer support for those of us, who (against their parents' wishes) decided to become legal tech managers instead of respectable judges. So if you are struggling with your career choices, this one is definitely for you! 

Nils-Erik  tells the story behind Precisely, and his experiences from start-up life in the legal sector. We all know that living a start-up life isn't  about fancy beanbag chairs, pingpong games and microbrewery ales but it's very hard work and tolerating the unknown. And as Nils-Erik has lived the legal start-up life for quite a few times, who would be better than him to share some thoughts on building a company and leading a legal career outside the traditional law. We also talk about what does it take to grow a legal business from start-up phase into the growth phase and beyond and why there should be more lawyers as entrepreneurs.

Such an inspiring episode to start the new season with, we do hope that you enjoy this as much as us!

Nils-Erik Jansson is a lawyer and serial entrepreneur from Gothenburg, Sweden, who founded Jansson & Norin, Sweden’s first NewLaw firm, which was exited to Fondia Oy in 2017. With 15 years of experience practicing business and contract law, he saw his industry peers struggling with the repetitive admin work associated with contracts thus founded Precisely in 2014. For the last six years, with the Precisely team, he has been on a mission to set a new standard for digital contracting.

Happy Holidays everyone!

We wanted to celebrate the end of this milestone filled season with a Holiday Special Q&A episode. We received some brilliant (and hard!) questions from you dear listeners, thank you so much for them! So in this episode our hosts Henna & Nina are on the hot spot answering them. But to make this even more special, we have a Special Santa joining us! This Santa knows his legal design and has visited the podcast before. To make this even little more special (and magical with some Christmas spirit) we will reveal Santa's real identity later this year. How ever, you can guess who he is and submit your guesses through social media. We will draw a prize amongst all the answers.

But, this episode is not just about Holiday spirit. We cover hard topics like what are the threats posed by legal design and what are the most challenging topics in this field. Henna & Nina share their most remembered five episodes (and believe us, it was HARD to name only five because we love all the episodes!). We discuss what we have learnt from the podcast and how our understanding or perspective to legal design has developed or changed throughout the podcasting. We also reveal our dream projects when it comes to Legal Design and Santa makes a wish for all the lawyers out there.

So Deck the Halls and join us for this Season Finale!

Often, when societies want to reduce crime, the idea of more severe punishments comes up. But as lawyers have learnt in criminology classes, that is certainly not the way to go. There are more and more studies showing that more severe punishments not only do not prevent crime but may actually have the opposite effect. In this episode we talk about how to fight crime by design and hear from experts Lorraine Gamman, Adam Thorpe and Marcus Willcocks who work at the Design Against Crime Research Center in the UK.

The mission of Design Against Crime Research Center is to disrupt crime by bringing together government, businesses, local communities, prisoners and returning citizens to generate strong socially responsive, co-created crime prevention strategies and crime diversion projects. Lorraine, Adam and Marcus tell about their projects and we hear what ethical aspects using design against crime have.

We discuss about how crime-doers and prisoners differ as targeted end-users or participants in a design process and how design can empower prisoners to change the path of their lives. In addition, our host Henna, inspired by her own neighborhood in Helsinki,  asks questions how to approach solving local crime issues using design.

This, dear listeners, is also a huge milestone for Legal Design Podcast as this marks our 50th episode! Thank you for your kind words and support and thank you for listening. Many more to come!

Dr. Lorraine Gamman is Professor of Design at Central Saint Martins and Director of UAL’s award-winning Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC), which she founded in 1999.

Adam Thorpe is Professor of Socially Responsive Design at Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London (UAL). He is Co Director of the Design Against Crime Research Centre and Coordinator of the UAL DESIS Lab (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability).

Marcus Willcocks leads the Public Space strand of the award-winning Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC), at the University of the Arts London.

In this episode we focus on creating tech friendly ecosystems for law. We meet with Teemu Oksanen, a general counsel at Futurice. Teemu is a forerunner when it comes to implementing technology into legal work. As we know, the legal industry has been quite slow with technology, but the pandemic really shifted the focus on how to deliver legal services in more modern way. The right technology can improve the client experience also in legal industry as it might speed up the delivery and make law more understandable to end users.

Often, when we talk about legal tech, we focus on how it might help lawyers. Teemu and his team at Futurice has focused on the end users of law and started implementing technology that could make law easier to understand and use  for their clients. With his team he has automated legal work to help non-lawyers understand what law is about and how to use it in every day business life. And this has been really successful for both the end users but also for the lawyers. Automating tasks and processes has freed up the time for lawyers to concentrate on more meaning work.

As we learn in this episode, what happens before implementing technology is really important. Teemu shares his experience on how to drive the change in legal departments and orgniszations and what importance design thinking has in these projects.

Teemu Oksanen is a tech-savvy in-house lawyer with a law firm background currently working as General Counsel at a full-service digital innovation company Futurice. He is a huge fan of legal tech. He thinks the practice of law is undergoing a major change, and that the change is for the good for both the lawyers and the society as a whole. In his free time, he loves to play with his two dogs, Lex and Dana.

Harmony can be considered as a universal goal in life. We want to find our yin and yang whether it was about our health, wealth or work, and live in connection with other people and nature. Harmony plays an important role also in design. We want our everyday things to be fit for purpose, user-friendly and aesthetically appealing. The same goes also when designing legal services, products and information. However, although the desire for harmony is something that we all humans seem to naturally share, there are some misunderstandings related to the concept that may distract the use of harmony as a guiding principle in design. Contrary to the common belief, harmony is not about sameness or lack of controversy. As we learn in this episode, it is quite the opposite. True harmony can only be found by accepting chaos, conflicts and diversity as part of the design process.

In this episode we meet Derek Lomas, assistant professor of “Positive AI” at the department of Industrial Design at the Delft University of Technology. Together with Haian Xue Derek has researched how the universal philosophy of harmony has manifested through time in music, physics and cultural traditions, and how to use that knowledge in design. We discuss how harmony can also translate into the fulfillment of justice, and how to strategically design such harmonious legal solutions. We also hear what the new King of United Kingdom, Charles III, has said about the natural relationship of harmony and the law.

 Derek's article here 

In this episode we concentrate on contracts and how to make them more functional. We are joined by Milva Finnegan and Anna Hurmerinta-Haanpää who both have completed their doctoral dissertations on contract design. Milva and Anna talk about the transition from understanding contracts as mere legal risk management tools to instruments of communication, and how to design user-friendly contracts that are fit for purpose.

Milva and Anna help us understand better the status quo in contracting. We talk about why so many contracts (still today) are mostly about managing legal risks, and therefore full of legal jargon. Contracts are typically understood as some sort of “weapons” or “risk management tools” that should try to safeguard the interests of contracting parties. However, in this episode we learn what other purposes there are for contracts.

We dive deep and talk about whether lawyers really understand the full potential of contracting, or did we just stop caring at some point. And what if lawyers weren’t the ones to design contracts and what special skills different professionals can bring to the contract design process?

Milva Finnegan, PhD, recently completed her doctorate degree in Economics in business law at the University of Vaasa in Finland. She recently joined KPMG US as the director of the Client Contract Value Center

Anna Hurmerinta-Haanpää is a University Lecturer at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Law. She defended her doctoral dissertation on the functions of contracts in interorganizational relationships in spring 2021.

Welcome back to Legal Design Podcast! This marks the start of season 4. For this season premiere we are joined by the legendary legal information designer Hallie Jay Pope. Hallie has done amazing work making law better by designing legal information and one of her goals is to democratize legal information. As we know, legal information is often hard to obtain and even harder to understand because it’s full of legal jargon and sentences so long that publishers have to minimize the print in law books.

But Hallie is here to change this. She’s known for her amazing work as a cartoonist and visualizing legal information in general. She explains the “threats and opportunities” of using comics, or images and visualization in legal communication. Hallie gives examples on projects she has been working on at the Graphic Advocacy Project and tells us about finding the Creative Advocacy Lab at the University of The University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law.

We talk about the bigger picture and how access (or lack of it) to legal information has an impact on big things like democracy and how we make decision makers understand how vital access to legal information is to justice systems.

We also have some exciting news for you guys. We are proud to announce that for this season, we are sponsored by Precisely, the CLM platform setting a new standard for digital contracting. For more info, go to preciselycontracts.com/ldp.

Hallie Jay Pope is a legal information designer, cartoonist, and educator. She is the founder and president of the Graphic Advocacy Project, a nonprofit that works with advocates and communities to share legal knowledge. Hallie is currently a visiting professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law where she runs the Creative Advocacy Lab, a legal information design clinic that re-envisions lawyers as community educators, problem-solvers, and storytellers.

Lawyering culture is often perceived as conservative, and somewhat difficult to change - the social structures that shape legal work today have not changed much from the 18th century.  The image of law - quite often - is white, middle-aged men working long hours drafting documents no-one else understands. It is no wonder if the lawyers of the 21st century find it unmotivating to pursue legal traditions that don’t support their values, viewpoints and wellbeing.

In this episode we meet with Laura Hartnett, a legal consultant whose mission is to make lawyer work better,  especially for female and minority lawyers. Laura wants to chuck the insane hours, endless drafts and revisions, and help lawyers redesign their work and business environment in a way that there is room for different personalities with different backgrounds. With Laura, we discuss how to identify the needs of different lawyers and what can be done to meet those needs and make lawyering better, for everybody.

We also discuss how legal design can increase the client commitment, and why it is important to create space for legal design having the future generation in mind.

Laura Hartnett is the founder and legal consultant at Law By Design. She has over 15 years of experience as a management consultant, litigator for national and international law firms, and in-house counsel for a Fortune 100 company. Today, she teaches lawyers how to redesign their practice of law from a human-centered approach, one that works better for both lawyers and clients, with a special aim to keep women and minorities staying and thriving in the practice of law. She is also a yoga addict, karaoke enthusiast, and proud mom of two creative girls.

In this episode we meet with Amanda Perry-Kessaris, professor of Law at Kent Law School, to discuss what design can do for legal research. As we know, the possibilities of design in the realm of law are almost endless, but can design also change the way we research law and practice academic legal analysis? And if it does, should we be worried that design takes over traditional law?

Amanda is known to discuss about doing law by design mode and in her research Amanda highlights three lawyerly concerns: the need to communicate; the need to balance structure and freedom; and the need to be at once practical, critical and imaginative. If we address these concerns with the traditional way of doing law, lawyering seems almost impossible. But could design mode ease these concerns?

We also focus on the legal research. Traditional legal research and legal thinking struggle with the idea of having multiple perspectives to legal issues, not to mention using other information sources than legally binding sources to solve legal problems. But could design ease law and legal research with these struggles and could law become more like “a real science” that operates with empirical data and experiments, perhaps also more interdisciplinarily?

In addition, we also talk about the need for legal design critique. According to Amanda, we have to know what value we add when we “design law” - we can’t just give old things a new form.

Amanda Perry-Kessaris is Professor of Law at Kent Law School.

She specialises in empirically grounded, theoretically informed, cross-disciplinary approaches to law; and to the economic lives of law in particular.

Doing meaningful work will promote happiness and increase your life satisfaction and doing work you hate will make you miserable. This is obvious, of course, but yet there are many lawyers who stay in jobs that aren't right for them. It is hard to make a change because we have the image of perfectly successful lawyer in our head and that image might not be what we want from our working life. During the podcast series, we have talked to some "recovering lawyers" who have found themselves miserable and made bold career changes. In this episode we concentrate on meaningfulness in work life and how important it is for all of us. 

In this episode we get to meet philosopher and researcher Frank Martela. Experiencing purpose and meaning is a fundamental part of having a good life - also according to science - and many people make career changes, such as becoming a legal designer, in search of it. But how do you make your work feel more purposeful if it already doesn’t? Frank will share some useful and practical insights for both indiciduals and organizations on meaningful work backed up by scientific research.  

We also talk about problem solving and learn that philosophy actually might have an interesting connection to design thinking. If you thought that philosophy is far from the practical every day life, this episode is really for you because after listening to Frank, you will want to start to apply philosophy into your daily (working) life. 

And of course, we had to take the opportunity to pop up the big question: What’s the meaning of life?

Frank Martela, PhD, is a philosopher and researcher of psychology specialized in meaningfulness, human motivation and how organizations and institutions can unleash human potential. He is a University Lecturer at Aalto University, Finland, and has two Ph.D. 's from organizational research (2012 Aalto University) and practical philosophy (2019 University of Helsinki). His scientific publications have appeared in journals ranging from Journal of Personality, Nature Human Behaviour, and European Review of Social Psychology to Southern Journal of Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Academy of Management Review, and Organization Studies. He has spoken at universities on four continents including Harvard and Stanford, written for Scientific American Mind, and Harvard Business Review, and been interviewed by New York Times, Le Monde, New Scientist, and Discover Magazine, among others. His book A Wonderful Life – Insights on Finding a Meaningful Experience (HarperCollins 2020) has been translated to 27 languages including French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian.

In this episode we meet with legal designers Aku Nikkola and Christine Inkinen from Dot. Legal, a legal design consultancy from Helsinki. Aku and Christine tell  us their stories how they decided to pursuit a career a little different from the traditional legal work and how they became legal designers. We talk about their latest venture, the first ever legal design course organized for law degree students at the University of Helsinki and what design can offer for legal studies. Aku and Christine are both recent graduates of law school and it is interesting to hear from them what seems to be missing from the traditional legal education. If we want to change the law better for real humans, we should focus on the education and make sure that future lawyers learn the needed skills already at law school. 

Besides discussing what design can offer for legal studies, we talk about the legal design market. Aku and Christine share their views and experience in selling legal design projects and we discuss if supply meets the demand in the market at the moment. 

Dot. Legal is an award-winning legal design consultancy from Helsinki. Dot. is known as a forerunner in all things legal and design.

Aku Nikkola is a legal designer and a partner at Dot. Aku is a lawyer second and a front-end wizard first, a true visual perfectionist who understands and wields the power of fonts, colors, icons, and animations; always to the benefit of the end-user.

Christine Inkinen (or Kiki, as we call her) is a legal designer and a partner at Dot. Kiki is a creative problem solver, who focuses on translating technical legalese into accessible and beneficial information for end-users – proving that the pen is still sharper than the sword.

Business opportunities can emerge anywhere in the world and many corporations operate globally. This creates a huge demand for relocation and there are companies who send employees almost daily to different countries. Keeping up with immigration rules and regulations can be a huge task for any HR department and immigration professional, let alone for those who send employees to various different countries. In this episode, we talk to Octavian Tantu and Karita Niemelä from KPMG Finland about their work developing technology to streamline the immigrations processes at firms. 

Octavian and Karita share their insights and experience on working with legal tech projects in multidisciplinary teams. We concentrate on one of their joint projects, Immigration Expert. The Immigration Expert tool helps people moving from one country to another to assess imigration requirements. Octavian and Karita tell us about the developing process and what were the initial problems (or the most common problems) in the immigration process the tool now solves.

We also discuss how technology plays an inevitable role in creating better working practices and how Octavian and Karita see the role of tech in improving the performance of legal professionals. And because we love future predictions in this podcast, we also ask Octavian and Karita how do they see their work changing in the future and will technology play a more major role.

Octavian (Tavi) Tantu is currently the Head of Tax & Legal Technology for KPMG Finland. His background is in Tax and Legal Technology and he has also worked as a tax and global mobility consultant. Throughout his career he has worked in various technology projects ranging from global mobility, immigration to tax preparation and global compliance applications in several different countries. As part of these projects he has fulfilled the roles of business analyst, product owner and service manager and has also helped implement and optimize the software development processes and technology teams. As a technology enthusiast, Tavi is always looking for new opportunities to help teams and businesses find the right balance of technology and process optimizations whilst constantly exploring new ways of collaborating and developing technology.

Karita Niemelä works as a senior consultant within KPMG Finland’s People & Change department with strategic, change and project management consulting. Previously, Karita has worked within the Tax and Legal department with global mobility advisory. She has worked with various different client engagements and projects including organizational development and project management for clients from different sectors. Karita has also been part of the global technology project KPMG Global Immigration Expert and worked in daily collaboration with different stakeholders of the project and been part of the development and execution of the tool. As a consultant, her way of working is founded on organizational and process development with technology and people oriented mindset. Karita has studied business administration with strategic business development as her major and her thesis was about change management of digital servitization.

Just like the legal industry, the real estate management has had a reputation of being far from the real life of actual people. In this episode, we meet with the brilliant Mia Koro-Kanerva, who is the CEO of the Finnish Real Estate Management Federation. Mia is a lawyer by training but for the last twelve years she has been leading people in the real estate management industry with her human-centric methods. And she is on mission to change the real estate manangement for real estate managers and their customers. Transforming the whole industry in to providing more human-centric and sustainable services is not an easy job. Tough times and tough jobs need tough measures, such as love.

Mia is well known in Finland for her "Leading by love" management style. Leading by love is not only about human-friendly soft skills, but also about the ability to make tough decisions and have difficult conversations for the overall wellbeing of the personnel. This requires that the leader is authentic and open, also for criticism, which makes this leading style more challenging yet rewarding, compared to more traditional leading methods. 

There are many lawyers who at some point in their career end up in manager roles. It is something quite different than working as a lawyer or as a legal specialist. What makes the difference is not only the perspective to things, but also the required skill set that makes it possible to lead successfully - and having legal expertise is not enough, though it might be an advantage. Mia explains what are the management cornerstones from her perspective and what is being a leader all about.

Mia Koro-Kanerva is the CEO of the Finnish Real Estate Management Federation with a big heart and a mission to make real estate management becoming the best possible thing that can happen to a housing company and it’s owners. She's a lawyer by training but have been leading people for the last 12 years with great love and passion. That probably has also granted her the moniker “Love Leader”.

What makes people rethink their career choices and search for something different? The rapid technological development that makes old ways of working inefficient and pushes people to learn new skills? Maybe. But when talking about lawyers turning legal designers, it can also be about “the inner need for fulfillment of justice”. The use of human-centric, co-creative and interdisciplinary design methods can bring a new, more meaningful perspective also to everyday legal work.

In this episode we meet Karol Valencia, Peru born legal designer and legal tech specialist currently living in Amsterdam, Holland. Karol is the founder and CEO of her legal design agency WOW Legal Experience. She also teaches and facilitates law students and legal teams about using design and technology in improving legal tools and services. As Karol opens up her career story, we hear what inspired her to swift from traditional lawyering to legal design, and how her journey has developed since that. Karol also tells about the ups and downs of being a legal design startup entrepreneur and how she sees the future of the legal design movement.

In this episode we discuss creating social value by legal design with Ebru Metin. Ebru tells us how she drives social impact as CEO of her social enterprise Legal Design Turkey and as director of Istanbul Bilgi University Legal Design Lab. We hear how to become a “social value agent” and how legal design can contribute to creating a legal system that gives more than it takes.

Ebru has advocated for making positive systemic change through Legal Design and in this episode we discuss how Legal Design can be part of the social innovation projects and what kind of projects could be matched with legal design? 

We also talk about the Legal Design landscape in Turkey and discuss how legal design and need for change in legal services are welcomed in Turkey. As we know, Turkey lies partly in Asia and partly in Europe and geographically it is basically bridging these two continents. Tune into hear can this uniqueness also be seen in the legal culture and in legal design projects!

Ebru Metin is the founder and CEO of Legal Design Turkey, the first co-learning community and social enterprise for legal design in Turkey. Ebru also acts as the director of Istanbul Bilgi University Legal Design Lab. Prior to this, she held several in-house positions located in Turkey, United Kingdom and Spain. Besides legal design, she also focuses on legal technology and contract management. She is acting as European Legal Technology Association’s Ambassador and a member of Global Legal Tech Consortium. She has been given the “Advanced Practitioner” title at World Commerce and Contracting in 2020. She has pursued her Masters in International Financial Law at King’s College London as a Jean Monnet Scholar in 2014.

We start the season off with the wonderful Sarah Ouis who’s the founder of Law But How? and Legal Design Manager at ContractpodAI. You surely have seen the intriguing and value adding content she creates and shares on social media.

With Sarah, we talk about the inspiring career change she made when converting from successful in-house counsel into a thriving legal designer. She tells us what have been the biggest changes for her in working life after the switch. 

We also concentrate the importance of legal design for in-house legal teams as Sarah shares her insights how legal design could be incorporated into the work of legal teams. Sarah also gives us concrete examples for KPI’s with which in-house legal teams could measure the success of their legal design projects.

In the end, we ask Sarah for tips on how to create meaningful and engaging content for both clients and pees.

Tune into this great season premiere!

During this podcast series, we have discussed a lot about how to make Legal Design mainstream. Our this week's guest, Hannele Korhonen, believes that it can be done with educating people. However, Legal Design is not taught in many law schools yet, but learning happen mostly elsewhere.  In this episode, Hannele, the founder and legal designer shares the story and pedagogical philosophy behind Lawyers Design School. At Lawyers Design School, Hannele teaches the new ways of doing law to serve legal customers better and this way find more meaning and purpose to lawyers' work. Hannele believes in social learning that encourages interaction with others. This way, students will be preparing the skills they need to be successful at work, where most learning is done through on-the-job experiences and interaction with others.

We also talk about curiosity and its meaning in design thinking processes. It takes a curios mind to be able to discover new possibilities. Lawyer's may be used to do things the same way and they already know how it will come out. But in being curios, lawyers and other legal professionals are able to discover how to do things in a new way with better, more human-centric and client-centric results. 

In addition, together with Hannele, our hosts Henna and Nina share their experience and thoughts on their joint collaboration, Sustainable Futures by Legal Design, a virtual event that was held online in November 2021.

Tune into hear how you can learn Legal Design!

Many people feel that terms and conditions of insurance contracts aren’t meant to be understood. It’s small print and full of industry specialized jargon, aiming at preventing legal risks, but, on the contrary, actually provoking them. People purchasing insurances that they don’t understand, causes problems on the next phases of the supply chain. All this makes the insurance industry the perfect candidate for legal design. This week we meet with Anthony Novaes, a Brazilian insurance lawyer and a legal designer who has conducted ground-breaking research on how legal design can improve insurance practices.

Insurance law is a one of the heavily regulated areas of law, which implies that there are many interests involved which need balancing, and particular groups that need governmental protection (or governmental control). The problem of heavy regulation is that it makes the market complex and unpredictable to navigate, especially for anyone who doesn’t have the training for that. Legal design can be of great help to make insurances more functional, and also prevent disputes related to them. Legal design can also offer alternatives to traditional legal regulation, as it can help create policy measures that satisfy the needs of the stakeholders better.

Anthony tells us what are the typical pain points in insurances and how to address them with the help of legal design.

Anthony Novaes is a Brazilian Insurance, Reinsurance and Private Pensions Attorney. He is author of the first academic investigation on legal design applied to insurance and of articles focused on legal innovation, civil law, civil procedural law, legal design, and insurance. He was certified as a Legal Design Expert Practitioner by Legal Creatives. He is a teacher and coordinator of the course “Seguros 4.0” at Future Law, which offers the first discipline on legal design and insurance in the world.

Legal Tech is one of the popular buzzwords you can’t help hearing when talking about the future of law these days. But what exactly is legal tech? That is what we’re going to cover in this episode.

We talk to one of the Legal Tech legends, Colin S. Levy who is Director of Legal and Evangelist for Malbek, a leading CLM company as well as a seasoned lawyer and legal tech speaker. Colin explains how legal tech is different from legal design and what kind of common misunderstanding people may have about legal technology. Colin also tells us what to consider when buying legal tech solutions or when designing technology for lawyers and their clients.

In addition, Colin also talks about how he sees legal tech as a cultural movement to embrace technology, and some of the concepts that underly technologies in the practice of law and delivery of legal services. 

The Brazilian legal system is facing many challenges and undergoing major changes due to application of new technologies. As we know, law itself changes slowly but legal design can assist in this change and bring out the positive. This week we talk to José Faleiros Jr., a Brazilian lawyer and the co-editor and co-author of the book "Legal Design: Teoria e Prática".

José tells about the Brazilian legal system and its challenges. For example, in 2020 the Brazilian judicial system had 75 million legal processes lacking a solution. A solid judicial system is also crucial for democracy. And to be solid, the system needs to be efficient and trustworthy and this is where legal design can help.

Tune in to hear how Legal Design is developing in Brazil!

José Faleiros Jr. is a Brazilian lawyer and a Ph.D Candidate in Civil Law at the University of São Paulo and also a Ph.D Candidate in Law, Technology and Innovation at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Legal services are not famous for their human centricity. Quite contrary, legal services have a reputation for being expensive, unpredictable and lacking transparency. Design as a human centric method to enhance user experience would therefore have a lot to offer for legal services. Often lawyers might think that they are client-centric because it says so on their webpage, but how to make sure that they really are and how to start the journey towards client-centrism? And how can lawyers tell about their expertise in social media?  In this episode we have a pleasure talking to Dinko Kortzanov who work as a Managing Director in the oldest marketing communications agency in Finland - McCann - where he leads a data driven creative agency, specializing in using research, data and customer insights to help brands earn a meaningful role in peoples lives.

In addition to guiding us being more client-centric, Dinko share his tips on how to do marketing and selling in legal industry. These topics aren't thought at law school so selling and marketing might feel a little awkward for legal service providers. But Dinko's brilliant advice will make selling process more client-centric and can actually help lawyers deliver more meaningful and value adding services to their clients.

But why should we stop using the word “sell” ? Tune in to hear the answer.

There are many ways design can be practiced, also in the legal context. Many are familiar with the methods and tools highlighted in various service design books, such as making up different user personas and prototyping with legos and cardboard boxes. But what kind of methods and techniques legal designers like to use in their real life design projects? Are there some tools that work particularly well in the legal context?

In this episode we meet Angélica Flechas, who is a legal designer both with a law and design degree from Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia. Angélica runs her own service design consultancy agency HÁPTICA and has a wide experience from various service design cases both in legal and other industries. Angélica shares with us her favorite design methods and tools and tells how they work when designing legal products and services. One of them is called “Frankenstein”. We also discuss why prototyping is so important and how lawyers can easily start using it to improve their performance. Hint: your daily assignments are a potential test environment. Angélica also encourages designers to engage with legal design projects. Helping lawyers to bridge the gap between their services and the clients can have a significant social impact.

We are living very exceptional times to work as a lawyer. The innovation game is on in the legal industry, and law firms are not excluded from it. New legal roles are created and the dominant players are yet to emerge. Working as today’s lawyer differs greatly from the era of our grandparents, although it might be overwhelming to figure out what still has to change and what can remain. Should law firms of the day be like software houses and start selling legal design services?

In this episode we are joined by Marco Imperiale to discuss legal innovation, and its do’s and don'ts. Marco is an innovation and design thinking veteran in the legal industry and has years of experience in hands-on innovation work. Marco shares his thoughts and ideas about how to start the innovation work in law firms and what to focus on. For lawyers who are not that keen on the change, the good news is that there will always be a need for traditional legal expertise too. But to make the most of it for the clients, it’s good to start working in multidisciplinary teams and try to be at least a bit more innovative than the competitors. We also discuss why selling legal design services is so difficult, but why buying them is a good idea for any company that seeks for positive transformation. At the end of the episode Marco, who is also a trained mindfulness trainer, shares his tips for calming the mind in the midst of the busiest season.

This week we discuss the role of interdisciplinarity, human emotions and engineering skills in legal design. We hear what lawyers, engineers and designers could learn from each other, and how to combine these three fields of expertise into one when designing better access to justice solutions. We also hear what positive design is and why lawyers should care more about emotions. But why would engineers already make great legal innovators? And what explains the popularity of legal design in Colombia?

Our guests in this episode lead The Design for Justice Lab, Lab de Diseño Para la Justicia, a joint venture founded in 2019 between the law, design and engineering schools in Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. The Lab integrates design thinking and systems thinking into law school curriculums with the purpose to improve the judicial system. Santiago Pardo Rodríguez is a lawyer and the founding member of the Lab, Laura Guzman-Abello is an industrial engineer engaged in policy design, and Santiago De Francisco Vela is a designer specialised in emotions and positive design. Together with their students this brilliant trio is on a mission to improve the future of law in Colombia. Tune in to hear how it is about to happen.

Making legal information more comprehensible and easier to use is a central theme in legal design. It is also a topic that has recently gained increasing research interest, sparking new ideas on how to enhance the usability of contracts and other legal documents in practice. After all, as research has shown, understanding what a document says is all about human metacognition. If users are enabled to connect the content of a legal document with ideas that are meaningful to them, it can help avoid “cognitive accidents” and work as a proactive method to promote legal wellbeing of the users and other parties. When users can understand what is expected of them, legal conflicts and misbehavior due to misunderstandings are less likely to occur.

In this episode we have the honor to interview two pioneering experts in the field of legal information design, Helena Haapio and Rob Waller. Helena Haapio is a lawyer and a contract strategist at Lexpert Ltd, and an associate professor of business law in the University of Vaasa, Finland. Rob Waller is an experienced information designer, researcher, consultant and a teacher, and the current President of the International Institute for Information Design. Rob and Helena share insights from their various projects and collaborations, like the contract simplification project with an energy industry facility and Canadian aboriginals. We also hear what proactive law is, and practical tips about how to improve the usability of legal documents. If you want to know what makes a good (legal) document, tune in!

Profound understanding of human behavior is a key to success in legal design. Yet legal design doesn’t necessarily aim to nudge people to certain choices, it still seeks to influence people’s behavior in a positive way. When people’s cognitive and emotional needs are being met and they can truly understand what is expected of them, they are more likely to make choices that support the legal wellbeing of themselves and others. Should every legal design team have their own neuroscientist then? Perhaps. At least they should hear what our guest in this episode has to say.

In this episode we discuss the possibilities of neuroscience in legal design with neuroscientist Dominique Ashby. Dominique is a former lawyer, who decided to bring her first passion, neuroscience, into the business world. In her own consultancy company, Neuro@Work, Dominique advises organizations in change management using the power of neuroscience. She has also experience from working with legal design teams and explaining lawyers how brains work. Dominique tells us how neuroscience can help law to achieve it’s missions, and on the other hand, what are the perils of behavioral influencing. We also discuss the importance of brain health in work life. If you still brag with your working hours instead of your sleeping hours - this episode is for you!

Museums and exhibitions are special venues for learning. Museums can use techniques and tools that create immersive, sensory experiences, evoking human emotions and thoughts unlike any other forms of communication. This way museums can effectively promote positive change through learning. Maybe there is something legal designers could learn from museums and their curators?

Our guest in this episode is Dina Bailey, the CEO of her own consulting company Mountain Top Vision. Dina has a long working history from creating museum experiences especially related to civil and human rights. She has worked as the inaugural Director of Museum Experiences at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, and as the Director of Museum Experiences at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. Dina tells us how human rights exhibitions differ from other kinds of museum experiences, and we discuss what role museums play in making society a better place. Nina also shares her own experiences from a visit to the Civil and Human Rights Center in Atlanta.

It's no news that the world is changing rapidly. Lawyers are facing new challenges because of the increasing regulation, digitalization and the fact that consumers as end-users are demanding for more understandable and accessible legal services (and rightly so!). Doing law in the 21st Century with the 18th Century mindsets, traditions and tools isn't working any more. But how to change things?

In this episode we are joined by Legal Design icons Astrid Kohlmeier and Meera Klemola. Astrid and Meera share their insights about the core elements of doing law in our time and the reasons why this era is all about transformation. As recently published authors, they also share the story of their book " The Legal Design Book - Doing Law in the 21st Century". In addition to discussing about making law better, we also talk about making legal publishing better. 

Tune in to hear what would Astrid and Meera do! 

Astrid Kohlmeier is a lawyer and internationally renowned legal design pioneer. She has been combining law and design for more than 15 years. She develops user-centric legal solutions with a focus on innovation and digital transformation. Astrid is a member and lecturer of the Executive Faculty at the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession, co-founder of the non-profit organization “Liquid Legal Institute e.V.”, speaker at relevant conferences worldwide and works with a global network of legal designers.

Meera Klemola is globally recognised as one of the pioneering voices in Human Centred Design for legal professionals and legal business. Dubbed by The Legal Forecast as one of the first ‘Legal Designers’ and the host of the world’s first Legal Design Summit, Meera continues to lead and actively contribute to the discourse on the evolving role of design in law as well as corporate learning and development.

There is increasing interest and demand towards contract design. While contract design might be a daily activity in some of the organizations, others might need more prove of why it is important and what's the impact of contract design. When the impact of design can be scientifically measured, it will make the use of design methods in legal context more appealing as the positive effects for the business can be seen clearly.

But how to measure the impact? This week we are joined by Katri Nousiainen who is conducting her PhD study that focuses on the total impact of design in the framework of commercial contracts. Katri tells us about her reasearch work and explains why research is essential to understand the big picture of contracting. 

Tune in to hear more about Katri's research. 

Katri Nousiainen is a lawyer and professional in legal education. She is conducting  pioneering empirical research on impact in Legal Design and Ethics in Commercial Contracts  with a twist of Law and Economics. She gives expert legal lectures on various practice areas  of Commercial Law, Legal Design and Law & Technology. She is an invited keynote speaker  at conferences and seminars across Europe. Currently she is conducting her research at the Harvard Law School, in the Center for Legal Profession (US) and at the University of  Cambridge (UK).

Mediation is often seen as an alternative dispute resolution method to more traditional court proceedings, as the disputing parties are expected to participate more actively in the process. What is common to both, however, is that both proceedings are often led by trained legal professionals, who tend to put their legal knowledge and legal practices at the center. In such circumstances the genuine interests of the parties - such as sustaining good business relations and processing hurt feelings - may remain secondary. Design thinking and methods, however, can help lawyers bring clarity, transparency and empathy to the complex and often negatively perceived dispute resolution processes.

Our special guest in this episode is Pierangelo Bonanno, who is an experienced and acknowledged international mediator and a member of the Charter Institute of Arbitration (CIArb). His proposal “Mediation by Design”, also published as an article in the Resolver magazine, has received international interest and praise. We discuss why alternative dispute resolution methods have suddenly become so trendy, but yet not so much used in reality, and why dispute resolution has such a negative image in general. Isn't the idea to resolve the problems, not to create new ones? 

All of the companies write policies and tick the boxes to demonstrate their compliance and business ethics. But it's really the corporate culture that defines how compliant and ethical the organization actually is. Cultural beliefs and manners determine what is right and acceptable in organizations and whether or not we speak up if there is something unlawful or unethical going on. 

For us humans it is quite challenging to become aware of our own behavioral patterns, yet realize we’re being part of and contributing to a “culture”, especially in the working life. Understanding the corporate culture and how it reflects the organizational values is vital but we also need to understand whether or not the employee experience matches with our desired culture. 

Culture eats strategy for breakfast and culture either makes or breaks your organization but it's good to understand that it can be designed and re-designed. Tune in to our episode with Niina Ratsula.

Niina Ratsula is an ethics, compliance and governance professional, with a strong focus on corporate cultures and internal control. Niina is known for “translating codes of conduct from paper into daily actions and decision making”.

We kick off the new season with Jim Chiang, the CEO and Founder of My Legal Einstein.

Jim is an AI pioneer with over 20 years of experience in big data analytics and AI algorithm development. He walks us through how the Legal Industry could benefit from AI and how it will make law better for lawyers and the end-users of law. His examples are so practical that AI finally makes sense!

But do us lawyers have to set our alarm clocks on for tomorrow or are the robots going to take over our jobs overnight? And what about legal designers, will AI and new technologies steal jobs from legal designers too?

Many people associate legal design with designing of contracts, but actually contract design is its own unique form of design that can have many other purposes than just making the legal aspects more understandable. Contracts can work as effective tools for preventing legal conflicts by supporting business, brand or social relations between contracting parties. However, these different purposes can be reached only when contracts are designed to fit them.

In this last episode of the spring season we bust myths about contract and legal design with Stefania Passera. Stefania is an information designer and a legal design pioneer, who has designed contracts, policies and other legal documents more user-friendly for over 10 years.

Creativity is one of the most important skills for a modern lawyer. We all were born creative but somehow along the way many adults seem to have lost their creativity. But the good news is that creativity can be practised, just like lawyers practice law to become better at their field of law. Creativity and innovation are hard work and new ideas to make law better aren't born magically overnight. We might often think that changing law and the legal industry require BIG innovation, but what if thinking smaller and putting the oxygen mask on yourself first are the things to start with?

In this episode Michele DeStefano shares her career story and encourages us all to embrace our people skills and creativity.  Michele is Professor of Law at the University of Miami and Faculty Chair in Harvard Law School’s Executive Education. She’s the founder of LawWithoutWalls and MoveLaw.