Legal Design Podcast

In this season finale, we unleash our inner child and explore the role of creativity in law with Tessa Manuello, a pioneer in legal design and innovation. As the founder of Legal Creatives, a legal design training agency, Tessa has empowered legal professionals worldwide to integrate design methods and tools into their work, especially for communicating law visually. Recently, Tessa launched The L...

As law schools are places for the development and betterment of society, shouldn’t they also foster creativity and innovation? Is law actually a design science? Should learning empathy be part of the law school curriculum? Is being student-friendly still a revolutionary act for law school teachers? And lastly, why should all lectures begin with a brief mindfulness session? We explore these questio...

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...

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 bene...

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 pr...

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 docume...

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 l...

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. *** Tässä podcast-sarjamme erikoisjaksossa keskustelemme legal designista, eli suomeksi oikeusmuotoilusta, kolmen suomalaisen legal design -pioneerin kanssa. Vierainamme ovat ennak...

Time for our season finale dear listeners! We are joined by Isabelle Engelhard and Elisa Ensmenger to talk about how to design technology-led future proof legal department. Isabelle and and Elisa both work at We Are Era, a media company and they have recently started their legal transformation journey with implementing a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) System. Are you tired of drowning in a se...

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 Te...

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 si...

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...

In this episode, we meet with Inna Ptitsyna from Kyiv, Ukraine. Inna Ptitsyna is Product Communications Manager at Lawrina . With Inna, we explore the importance of access to legal information. Legal information is essential for individuals to understand their rights and obligations under the law, but not everyone has equal access to this information. We begin by discussing the challenges that peo...

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...

Today, we have a very special guest joining us. We talk to the legendary Don Norman, also known as the godfather of design, who started his interesting career life as electrical engineer, ended up to be a psychologist, cognitive scientist and computer scientist, and eventually a designer. Don has authored many design classics, such as The Psychology of Everyday Things, and his latest book, 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'...

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...

This week we meet with Indy Johar from Dark Matter Labs to discuss why and how our systems of governance should be reformed and why we need all professionals, including lawyers, joining this “Boring revolution”.  We, of course, look things from the legal (design) perspective so we concentrate on what role (legal) design has in making our societies fit for the needs of the 21st Century. Global...

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...

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 im...

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 infor...

Witnesses play a very important role as they help to clarify what has happened by telling the judge or jury everything they know about an event. Although their role is necessary in providing real-life elements and facts to the case to be judged, they possibly are the most neglected group of stakeholders when it comes to the court proceedings. The process is often designed in a way that assumes wit...

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...

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...

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...