Legal Design Podcast

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 ca...

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....

Law is a system interlinked to other systems in society. So when we try to make law better it only makes sense if we include other systems and disciplines in our change journey. No lawyer alone can change the legal system but every lawyer can participate by having an open mind and welcoming other disciplines into the space of law. Sometimes legal design is seen as the cure to all the problems with...

Design thinking already shapes the way many legal businesses operate today but there is still a lot to do. Collecting and analyzing data will play a key role in future ready service firms but there is also a big demand for multidisciplinary teamwork and collaboration between firms that once were just rivals . Offering just legal services is outdated and law firms and other professional service fir...

Fulfilling the needs of end-users and involving them in the design process are fundamental principles of design. How well are these ideals applied when designing for children? By law children have a right to participate and a right to be heard in matters that concern them. However, it seems that there is a systemic bias excluding kiddos from our society to restricted areas, “kids’ corners”, that a...

Banking is an essential service of a society pursuing trust. Societies where basic financial services are not easily accessible, also struggle sustaining other elements of modern human life, not just the flow of money. Since cash money is becoming less and less relevant in digitized societies, however, the functions of financial services are transforming heavily, bringing out not only new challeng...

There is no legal design without the “legal”. Making law better by design, therefore, always requires proper legal research and legal analysis. The traditional ways of finding and creating legal information, however, do not seem to go well along with the iterative and future oriented design approach. Where legal analysis traditionally looks back to tell “what was wrong”, design seeks to find solut...

In this episode we expand our minds with the help of M. Zane Johnson, Attorney at Law from Philadelphia, who believes that positive social change is possible through human centric private legal practice. Zane sees himself as a problem solver and  thinks that human centric approach and legal design can especially give a purpose for young lawyers like himself and can help them structure their c...

Future law will be done by the law students of today. To make the legal systems and legal practices fit for purpose in the digitalized era, it is necessary that lawyers know more than just the law. But what are the skills needed for the lawyers of the fourth industrial revolution? And more importantly, are contemporary law schools committed to building those skills? Back in the day when Henna and...

A good legal picture tells more than a 1000 words. That’s why visuality is a central feature of legal design. Where legal pictures can communicate legal information so efficiently that collective understanding of the key issues is created within seconds, unclear text-only legal documents can leave parties disputing over different interpretations of them for years. Visuality, however, is still rare...

When we think of public space we tend to think of the urban environment around us: the buildings, bus stops, parks and walkways. But how often do we look at these mundane objects as forms of design and social interaction? Can the urban environment influence the way we behave? Is urban design actually a form of policy making? “We have to begin to understand that we are the environment”, says Shin K...

Corporate compliance seeks to ensure that organizations are abiding by both industry regulations and government legislation as well as their own internal corporate policies and procedures. The common approach to compliance is to “tick the box” when certain formalities in the compliance protocol have been accomplished, without making sure whether people really know and understand what is expected o...

Many law firms market themselves as client-centric. But is client-centrism just a buzzword on the brochure, not a value realized in practice? What "putting the client first" would really mean from the client perspective? Law firms can only exist as long as there is a demand for legal help services, but is it also clients’ job to demand for better value and client-centric solutions? In th...

Design thinking mindsets such as "fail fast" and "be curious" aren't commonly combined to the work done in courts. Courts are known to be the blind services of the justice, pursuing objectivity, formality and the rule of law. But would the end-users benefit if the courts were also open to explore new ways of doing things? In this fifth episode of the podcast series we talk about the possibilities...

Where law seeks to influence human behavior by setting obligations, legal design aims to make those obligations easier to understand and follow by using human centric design methods. Sometimes these methods can encompass behaviorally informed "nudges". In behavioral economics nudges are defined as any kind of interventions in the physical or social environment that alters people's behavior in a pr...

In this episode Henna and Nina talk with Erin Levine, legal innovator and entrepreneur from California. Erin shares the story behind her revolutionary online divorce platform Hello Divorce . The DIY platform helps people applying for divorce to navigate through the divorce process independently. Erin tells us who are the potential users for DIY legal help services and how technology has changed th...

Should legal texts be written in the form of poems? Is legal design legal science ? What happens when legal and design cultures collide? In this second episode of the podcast series Henna and Nina discuss with Michael Doherty, Professor of Law and Associate Head of the Law School at Lancaster University in UK, about the relationship between law and design disciplines both from philosophical, educa...

In this first episode of the podcast series Henna and Nina talk to Lina Krawietz, the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of This is Legal Design, a Berlin based innovation consultancy specialized in legal innovation. In this episode we cover the basics of Legal Design. What is Legal Design and why do we need it? Does design thinking change how lawyers work? We also talk about how to implement design...