Legal Design Podcast

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...

In this episode we talk about virtual reality in courts and how it can promote access to justice. Having to go to court can be once in a lifetime experience for quite many people. It might be nerve-racking and even scary not knowing what is going to happen at court, especially for self represented litigants. A lot of courts might not even see this problem because for courts and people who work the...

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. Durin...

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 de...

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 c...

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-centr...

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 met...

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 fo...

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 b...

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 behin...

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 c...

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...

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 l...

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 tha...

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...

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...

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 engin...

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...

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 wellbe...

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 episod...

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...

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 bu...

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...

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 hu...

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 lawy...