Legal Design Podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.