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 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.

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 within law, but it is not enough alone. We have to go beyond design.

Legal design is gaining more and more attention and we have already seen some great projects in the past 10 years. But how to make sure that these aren’t just single projects happening here and there and standing on their own? What will it take to change the whole industry on a more systematic level towards human-centric law and legal services? Listen to Nóra Al Haider sharing her interesting career path and her insights about how to make the change happen and how to make sure that the decisions we make today will lead towards greater access to justice also in the future.

Nóra Al Haider is the Policy and Design Lead at the Stanford Legal Design Lab.

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 firms are changing their mindset into offering solutions. But how to drive this change and make sure we are doing the right things right? How to start the innovation work?

In this episode we talk about business models and how professional service firms can make sure that they are future ready. We also talk about being data driven and whether or not law firms should rely on data when planning for the future. Our guest today is Sebastian Hartmann from KPMG. Sebastian leads technology strategy at KPMG International and has wide experience on transformation in professional service firms. With his teams, he actively influences, shapes, leads and manages the strategies and resulting digital transformation journeys of people-centered and knowledge-driven organizations, e.g. at Fortune 500, DAX companies and leading B2B service providers.

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 are not really designed with children in mind. The reality is that children use most of the same tools, services and apps adults use. When children’s perspectives are not taken into account as part of the design of our everyday things, we can’t know what kind of experiences children are exposed to, nor protect them from harmful exposures.

In this episode we talk about the role of legal design in designing for children with Jonna Tötterman, a Design Lead and Co-Founder of D4CR, Designing for Children’s Rights Association. Jonna tells us why children should be considered as a stakeholder group by default, and how to make a kid participate in a design sprint. We also discuss why children’s ability to navigate in the digital world is often overestimated, and why apps and other digital tools should be designed in a way that kids can use them without adult supervision.

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 challenges but also new interesting opportunities. Designing the legal aspects of financial services to be more human friendly plays an important role in this transformation.

In this episode we talk about the potential of legal design in the financial sector with Fiona Phillips. Fiona is a Global Head of Digital Legal at a large international bank, and a legal design evangelist, who has been collaborating with designers across the Globe in various legal design projects. Fiona tells us how the design of financial services has changed through the ages, and how human centric design can change the way banking is experienced in the future. Is it really possible to make people read their credit card terms and conditions? Tune in to hear out!

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 solutions that are fit for purpose and usable in practice to actually fix the problem. But traditional law and design thinking are not at odds with each other, even if it may seem like it. Like our guest in this episode, Jose Torres, points out, design is an empirical research method that helps lawyers not only to find the right solutions, but also to ask the right questions.

Jose Torres is a legal design veteran, who currently works as a partner at the law firm Lexia Abogados in Bogotá, Colombia, leading the legal design, crypto and fintech practice. Jose tells us how design techniques can be used as legal research methods, and how to build a design minded legal research team. Jose also shares many interesting insights from his previous legal design cases, such as how to use regulatory sandboxes, and what he learned from the design case featuring Colombian cleaning ladies. Tune in to hear more!

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 careers.

Zane manages his own law firm, M. Zane {+} Associates Professional Company, providing simple legal solutions for small businesses, startups and side hustlers. In his previous position at Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity Zane learned how to reach out to people and communities in need of legal help, work together with them to find out what their real problems are, and show them how the legal system can be used in solving those problems.

Legal culture and legal systems around the world have differences, but they also share significant similarities, like the lack of user friendliness. When creating understanding about what needs to change in legal practice, it is, therefore, useful to hear experiences and insights across jurisdictional borders. Zane tells us what it is like to work as a lawyer in the USA in general. Is it like an American legal drama, or more like a human interest reality TV show on Fox Channel?

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 Nina were law students, it was possible to graduate from law school without ever seeing an actual legal document, yet practicing how to make one. It is no wonder if law graduates struggle adapting to real working life, if the real working life never goes to lecture halls.

In this episode we discuss how to make law better through legal education with Caitlin “Cat” Moon. Cat teaches law and legal problem solving in the Program on Law and Innovation at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee. Cat explains why we need human centric design thinking to solve the legal problems of today, and how to build 21st century legal competence by using the Lawyer Skills Delta Model. She also tells about her popular Legal Problem Solving course at Vanderbilt, and we hear what skills podcast making can teach for a future lawyer.

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 in legal communication. The future of law does look brighter though, as there are signals towards a visual and even audiovisual and multisensory design of law.

Our guest in this episode is Dr. Colette R. Brunschwig. She works as a Senior Research Associate at the Legal Visualization Unit, Department of Law, University of Zurich, Switzerland. We consider her as a true pioneer of legal design: she has been exploring the visual, audiovisual and multisensory design of legal or legally relevant content since the 1990’s. She tells us when and why legal design originated in her mind, what her initial understanding of legal design was, and how she currently conceptualizes it. Colette R. Brunschwig also conveys us how she has been contributing to spreading legal design. We also discuss the differences between visual law and legal design, the role of legal visualizations and humanoid robots as potential legal designers.