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 Legal Designers, a collective for experts with verified credentials in legal design, to collaborate on real-life projects and make a significant impact in the legal industry.
Tessa shares her journey in legal innovation, her unique perspective on creativity, and what motivated her to become an entrepreneur in legal design. At Legal Creatives, Tessa has worked with lawyers from diverse cultural backgrounds and jurisdictions. In this episode, we ponder how legal culture influences openness to innovation and the adoption of legal design ideas across different countries. We also discuss the benefits of obtaining credentials in legal design and what it takes to be recognized as a legal designer.
Additionally, Tessa shares her thoughts on the current market for legal design services. Are lawyers more inclined to learn legal design skills themselves, or do they prefer to hire experts in the field?
Lastly, we delve into what fuels Tessa's creativity. Tune in to find out what ordering pizza has to do with it!
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 questions and more in this episode with Sampo Mielityinen, a law teacher and developer of legal learning. Sampo is currently the head of the master’s program in legal design at Laurea University of Applied Sciences. Before this, Sampo worked as a teacher and teacher trainer at several Finnish universities, where he earned a reputation as an exceptionally innovative and student-friendly law school pedagogue. Sampo shares how he manifests his core values of teaching—creativity, playfulness, and presence—in practice, and how he sees the role of design in enhancing learning experiences. We also discuss what design can offer for legal education in general: various new models and tools to create something new, and perspectives on the human experience, to mention a few.
Furthermore, Sampo talks about the legal design master’s program at Laurea and what he has learned about legal design during his first six months as the head of the program. We also hear some initial results from a survey conducted among the program's alumni and learn how students who have graduated from the program view its impact on their careers.
Tune in to hear more!
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 to make changes! The field of contract design is dedicated to transforming these kinds of risk-averse and lawyer-centric contracting practices. It promotes a more proactive and user-centric approach to contracting where contracts are perceived not just as something to be shoved in the drawer, but rather as tools that can guide, support and empower the businesses.
In this episode we meet with Sarah Fox, a contract simplification specialist and the creator of the 500 word contract. Having decades of experience as a construction lawyer, Sarah knows how bad contracts can cost time, money, deals and relationships. With her simplified contract design model she advocates for more meaningful and user-friendly contracts that help streamline deals, enhance customer relations, and still keep everyone protected.
Sarah shares with us how she came up with the idea of the 500 word contract and what kind of feedback she has since received from users and other lawyers. We also hear her tips for contract simplification and how to use them in redesigning other types of legal information as well. And of course, we also discuss the future of contract design with AI. Tune in to hear more!
In this episode we meet with Sarah Fox, a contract simplification specialist and the creator of the 500 word contract. Sarah shares with us how she came up with the idea of the 500 word contract and what kind of feedback she has since received from users and other lawyers. We also hear her tips for contract simplification and how to use them in redesigning other types of legal information as well. And of course, we also discuss the future of contract design with AI. Tune in to hear more!
Sarah Fox is a recovering lawyer transforming the way people do business. After decades dealing with huge deals in the construction sector, she realised that long, complex and bad contracts were costing time, money, deals and relationships. And after all that, they were usually just shoved in a drawer! There was a better way. Now Sarah advocates for short, simple contracts of less than 500 words. And delivers keynotes that inspire people across industry how to streamline deals and enhance customer relations with contracts that represent their values, embed trust, and keep everyone protected.
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 benefit from good storytelling skills too. In the context of law and legal design, storytelling can help make people’s experiences of the law and justice visible and relatable, and help understand what measures are needed to fill gaps in the legal system.
In this episode we deep dive into the world of storytelling with Senior Design Strategist Emily MacLoud and Principal Design Strategist Luke Thomas, both at Portable. Portable is an Australian-based design agency specialized in using design and technology to create positive impact in areas like justice, public sector, mental health and more. With Emily and Luke, we discuss the elements of a good story and how to craft one for the purposes of legal storytelling. Emily and Luke also share their insights on using design tools like user journey maps in story building, and how to address sensitive topics in law with storytelling.
But does a story need to have a happy ending? And who is Becky, and what does she use storytelling for? Tune in to find out.
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 practical for their own personal situation. However, many legal innovation efforts seem to be focused on fine-tuning and polishing formal legal services, with fewer solutions aligning with how people really want and need their justice problems solved.
But how can we fill the 'engagement gap' between people and the legal system? What exactly does being people-centered entail? What should we pay attention to when seeking more systemic changes in law and access to justice? In this episode, we discuss these questions with the inspiring Zainab Malik, Senior Justice Sector Advisor at The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) and the leader of the Justice Innovation Labs. Zainab introduces us with case examples of HiiL's projects in Tunisia, Uganda, and Nigeria, alongside her insights into creating an enabling environment for legal innovation. We also discuss the role of technology in improving access to justice. Is it sensible to digitalize court services or make legal help apps when people lack access to basic commodities, such as mobile phones or electricity?
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 document automation and what are the benefits for it. With over a decade of experience in digitalizing legal work, she tells her secrets on what to do and what to avoid in automation projects. We also learn why organizations should create and maintain contract playbooks.
We won't miss the discussion on the role of AI and GPT tools in document automation either. Catherine explains whether human-made templates are still needed in the era of AI, or should we concentrate on prompting and training AI tools to raise ourselves to the next level in document drafting. We also hear how Catherine views the general impact of technology on legal work over the past decades. Has there been any significant milestones yet? Or are we lawyers still working like it was the 1970's?
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 learn from Dan and J.P., virtual reality can be a particularly powerful tool when it comes to improving access to justice. Virtual courts or data visualizations not only make law and justice more accessible, but also enable new forms of collaboration and transparency, and help reduce the costs of dispute resolution. Importantly, virtual reality can also make us more empathetic. With immersive visualizations we can step into the shoes of “the other”, and experience events for example from the perspective of a physically impaired person.
While the benefits of using virtual reality in the legal context become evident, there are also some concerns related to its reliability. Just like any data, also the data used for virtual reality simulations can be biased or flawed. How do we ensure that the visualizations convey the information as truthfully as possible? Are there some quality metrics for the safe use of virtual reality? We also discuss the threats and possibilities of AI in creating virtual reality content. But if courts become more virtual, do we lose an element of human connection in turn? And further, is there a risk virtual reality makes court proceedings too theatrical? Listen to the episode to hear how Dan and J.P. respond to our queries.
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.
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Tässä podcast-sarjamme erikoisjaksossa keskustelemme legal designista, eli suomeksi oikeusmuotoilusta, kolmen suomalaisen legal design -pioneerin kanssa. Vierainamme ovat ennakoivan sopimisen ja sopimusmuotoilun uranuurtaja, Lapin yliopiston työelämäprofessori sekä Vaasan yliopiston yliopistotutkija Helena Haapio, Laurea Ammattikorkeakoulun oikeusmuotoilu-koulutusohjelman isä Jukka Linna sekä Juristin muotoilukoulun perustaja Hannele Korhonen.
Keskustelemme vieraidemme kanssa erityisesti oikeusmuotoilun taustasta ja tulevaisuudesta Suomessa. Helena kertoo miten kotimaisen ennakoivan oikeuden ja ennakoivan sopimisen 25-vuotinen tutkimus on osaltaan vaikuttanut oikeusmuotoiluilmiön syntyyn, ja Jukka avaa maailman ensimmäisen oikeusmuotoilun maisteritason koulutusohjelman, eli Laurea ammattikorkeakoulun oikeusmuotoilun ja oikeudellisen erityisosaamisen YAMK-koulutuksen alkutaivalta. Hannele kertoo puolestaan miten Juristin muotoilukoulu sai alkunsa ja millaisten muotoiluprojektien parissa hän on saanut työskennellä.
Kuulemme myös miten vieraamme selittäisivät oikeusmuotoilun merkityksen kuuluisalle Pihtiputaan mummolle, sekä pohdimme kuka voi kutsua itseään oikeusmuotoilijaksi. Visioimme lopuksi oikeusmuotoilun tulevaisuutta suomalaisena vientituotteena. Miten oikeusmuotoilu onnistuu tekoälyn kanssa? Entä onko oikeusmuotoilusta apua ihmiskuntaa koettelevien isojen kysymysten, kuten ilmastonmuutoksen, ratkaisemisessa?
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 sea of contracts, struggling to keep track of important deadlines and obligations? Do you find yourself lost in a maze of paperwork, wasting valuable time and resources? Join us as we explore the benefits of implementing a CLM system with Isabelle and Elisa and discover how it can revolutionize the way you manage your contracts. You will gain valuable insights from their experiences, lessons learned, and best practices. Get inspired by their journey and learn how to unlock the full potential of your own CLM system. Whether you're a contract manager, legal professional, or business owner, this podcast episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to revolutionize their contract management practices.
In addition, we also talk about starting law careers after law school and give tips to recent graduates. Isabelle and Elisa share their stories and experiences working as a lawyer in creative spaces with artists, social media influencers and their agents.
This episode was made in collaboration with Presicely the user-friendly platform for enterprise contract management. Check out their offer for our listeners: Free contracting assessment - Precisely (preciselycontracts.com)
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Isabelle Engelhard is a German qualified lawyer working in-house as a Legal Counsel at We Are Era since 2020. Alongside her traditional law studies to become admitted to the German bar, she also holds a LL.B. degree focusing on in-house counseling from the University of Mannheim, Germany and a LL.M. degree in Intellectual Property Law from Cardozo Law School in New York City, USA. As Legal Counsel at We Are Era she advises all non-legal departments as well as management in all legal matters arising from the company’s business units, including the legal areas of Contract Law, IP and Copyright Law as well as Data Privacy Law, Employment Law and Corporate Law. In the past 2 years she has also focused on the topics of Legal Tech and Legal Design and together with her colleague Elisa just recently implemented the company’s first CLM System to improve the internal workflows and to make the interdisciplinary work between the legal and non-legal departments even more efficient and legally secure, all in favor of the company’s big portfolio of clients.
Elisa Ensmenger is a German jurist working in-house alongside Isabelle as a Legal/Contract Manager at We Are Era. She holds a LL.B. degree with a focus on Intellectual Property Law from Humboldt-University Berlin and a LL.M. degree with a concentration in Arts, Sports and Entertainment Law from Penn State Law at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. She has joined Isabelle in 2022 and this is actually Elisa’s first job out of law school. We Are Era caught her eye because Penn State’s motto is “We Are!”, so when she saw the job ad from We Are Era, she felt like this was the perfect job match for a Penn State alum – and she was right! Besides the various exciting topics that they cover on a day to day basis, one of the most exciting ones is implementing the company’s first CLM System.
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 Tech Association supporting companies and programs that create technology solutions helping people navigate legal matters to foster hope, independence, and self-empowerment to contribute to a fairer legal system. We talk about justice tech having an impact on access to justice but since access to justice is not a technology, but a systemic problem, we also concentrate on what else could we do as a society.
We also discuss AI and legal tech in general. Just recently Henna met with some law students and learned that the generation we believed was born to use technology is really questioning whether or not there will be entry level legal jobs in the future (Yes, there will!). We asked Maya's opinion about this and discussed the future of legal.
Maya also shares her experience in participating the "90 day Finn Program" and how to survive the Helsinki November with all the seasons in just one month.
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With her unique background spanning VC, law, behavioral science, and change design, Maya Markovich delivers technology, process, and business growth services worldwide. For nearly 6 years she launched and scaled industry-first Nextlaw Labs/Nextlaw Ventures at Dentons, the world's largest firm, delivering next-generation technology, process client and business growth services across the globe. Maya is currently justice tech executive in residence at Village Capital and executive director at the nonprofit Justice Technology Association. She also advises multiple high-growth startups, investor and venture funds, and consults on legal department and law firm innovation and transformation initiatives, building future-proof methodologies and tech to advance the legal industry, its clients and consumers via achievable, sustainable and scalable
design and implementation.
In 2020 Maya was named one of five “Influential Women of Legal Tech” by ILTA, a “Woman Leading Legal Tech” by The Technolawgist in 2019, and an ABA Legal Technology Resource Center “Woman of Legal Tech 2018” for her work in designing, promoting, and driving the future of the legal industry around the globe.
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 since been applied to various fields, including healthcare, software development, and now law.
The core idea of lean thinking is to eliminate waste, increase efficiency, and continuously improve processes. In the legal industry, this approach has gained momentum in recent years as law firms and legal departments seek to increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve client satisfaction. Isabell and Ana have been researching how the Lean philosophy would also help on the public sector, especially in court proceedings.
In this episode, we will explore the principles of lean thinking and how they can be applied to the practice of law. We will also discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that come with implementing lean thinking in the legal industry.
Join us as we delve into the world of lean thinking in law and discover how this approach can help legal professionals achieve better results for their clients and themselves in the courtrooms.
Ana Lúcia Martins is an Assistant Professor at ISCTE-IUL and an integrated researcher at BRU-Iscte (Business Research Unt). She holds a PhD in Management, with a specialization in Operations Management and Technology. She currently serves as Iscte Business School Vice-dean for Teaching and Innovation, and as Vice-President of Iscte’s Pedagogical Council. Ana teaches Operations Management, Logistics Management, Service Operations Management, and Supply Chain Management. Ana has authored close to 100 scientific articles. She has authored book chapters in logistics management and lean management in the justice systems. Her current main research topics are operations management in humanitarian settings, logistics management, supply chain management, and lean management in the services area, mainly in judicial and healthcare systems.
Isabell Storsjö is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Law at the University of Turku. She holds a doctoral degree in Supply Chain Management and Social Responsibility as well as a law degree, and has always been interested in topics that combine the two fields of knowledge. One of the areas where they intersect is justice system reform and legal process improvement, and Isabell started investigating the problems with prolonged legal proceedings, especially in Finland, in 2011. She has published on lean thinking in the justice system in academic journals and books, and has also done research on cooperation between actors in the criminal procedure in Finland. Isabell has followed legal design since attending the first Legal Design Summit as a law student, and is especially interested in the process (or service) design, organization design and system design levels of the concept.
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 an episode with us and what an episode it turned out to be!
Alice Rawsthorn, a British Design Critic and author joined us to discuss about design as an attitude and how it can be incorporated into law. Alice talks about why great design is a human right and explains how we understand design and its potential in different fields of life and what is the level of importance to incorporate design into our responses in times of crisis, such as in the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
We also talk about how design, or design thinking, has increasingly gained popularity in different fields of professions, and law is just one of the examples. Alice explains if there are some “red flags” in this development.
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Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and author, whose books include Design as an Attitude, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design at MoMA, New York. Alice’s weekly design column for The New York Times was syndicated worldwide for over a decade. In all her work, Alice champions design’s potential as a social, political and ecological tool that can help to foster positive change. Born in Manchester and based in London, she is a founding member of the Writers for Liberty campaign for human rights and of the advisory board of the Democracy Next research and action institute as well as a member of the UK government’s Honors Committee for arts and Media. Alice and Paola are co-founders of Design Emergency, a podcast andmin research platform that investigates design’s role in forging a fairer future.
Ayşe Elif Yıldırım is a lawyer and academic and most recently a Visual Communication Design student. After traveling and living in many countries of Europe, she is now based in Ankara, Turkey. She has several academic degrees in different fields of law, most recently she was granted her Ph.D. degree with distinction for her doctoral research conducted under the scholarship of Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology in the field of Business and Human Rights. Always being interested in interdisciplinary fields of work that combine two distinct ways of thinking, Elif is now focusing on Legal Design and how we can use it to solve complex challenges we are facing in our contemporary world.
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 people face in accessing legal information, including the cost of legal services and the complexity of legal language. We also examine the impact that this lack of access can have on individuals. We continue exploring how different technological solutions can help Access the Law, also beyond different jurisdictions and Inna tells us the story of Lawrina and how it all began for their team. Lawrina is really ambitious in content creation and Inna explains what kind of processes they have developed to keep updated and how the members of the lawyer directory can participate in the work.
Since Lawrina's story began in Ukraine and Inna and some of her team members work from Kyiv, we also talk about the Russia's massive assault against independent Ukraine. We examine if legal design and legal tech can play a role in the reconstruction and healing of Ukrainian society. And since many of us are looking for ways to help Ukraine and Ukrainian people, we ask Inna what would be the best ways to do this.
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Inna Ptitsyna is Product Communications Manager at Lawrina. She has a law degree and great expertise in legal innovations. Along with the work for Lawrina, Inna is a part of the international community of Legal Hackers, where she gives presentations about the importance of PR and marketing for lawyers.
At Lawrina, Inna is responsible for setting out a strategic and comprehensive communications plan, delivering it, and ensuring that a coherent message runs through all product communications, including marketing activities.
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 designers. Lawyers are trained to be risk-averse and skeptical of new ideas and we still face the challenge that organizations are not that familiar with the concepts of legal design. And even if they have heard of legal design, it might be difficult for clients to see the value in investing in design solutions. So how do we overcome these barriers?
Anna has great news! During her years offering legal design services, she has seen the swift in the market and there definitely is a need for legal design. One strategy is to start small. Rather than trying to convince the entire legal industry, start with a pilot project to create interest and showcase the impact of design. And help the client to see the impact by creating KPI's that are easy to measure.
As our listeners know, in this podcast we are inspired by the becoming-of-stories people have about discovering design and its potential for law, so we also hear Anna's story and she tells us how she experienced the career change when becoming a legal designer and an entrepreneur at the same time. We also discuss whether legal designers experience similar competition and pressure as lawyers do in the legal industry.
Anna Posthumus Meyjes is a Legal Designer and founder of Aclara Legal Design consultancy. Anna brings creativity, design and a user-centered approach to law. Her focus is on information design and user-centricity in legal services. Aclara Legal Design redesigns traditional, text-heavy legal communication and documentation to make them engaging, readable and memorable. Anna practiced law in private practice for 10 years before founding Aclara Legal Design.
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 for the Better World is coming out this March.
Don shares his interesting career stories and we talk about writing books. Our main focus in this episode is on designing for a better world and what’s law got to do with it. Design thinking has become very popular during the last decades, and has expanded to many new areas of business and society - such as law - with a promise of driving innovation and positive transformation. Lawyers, managers, doctors, civil servants, business owners - you name it - are encouraged to think and act like “designers” and organize their work like design teams do. But is there some red flags in this development and what are Don's thoughts about this?
The way law seeks for betterment of society is by passing on new regulation. However, law may not always be the best tool to influence human behavior. We discuss that instead of making new laws, should we design the legislation more in a way that would lead to a smaller amount of laws and try to figure out a way to guide people’s behavior in other ways and what those other ways could be from Don's point of view.
Lastly, Don explains how he sees the future of design thinking and does it have the potential to become the default approach to problem solving, no matter the discipline or the context.
Don Norman has lived multiple lives: University professor, Industry executive, consultant, keynote speaker, and author. He has been an electrical engineer, a psychologist, cognitive scientist, computer scientist, and designer. He retired from the University of California, San Diego in 1993, returned in 2014 to become the founding Director of the Design Lab: He retired in the seventh year of his five-year appointment on Dec. 31, 2020. He also has retired from Northwestern University, from the Nielsen Norman group, and from being a trustee at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology. He now has retired five times and has the title "emeritus" from all four places.
He is the co-founder and principal of the User Experience/Usability consulting firm, the Nielsen Norman group, where he is now emeritus. He has been an IDEO fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of IIT's Institute of Design in Chicago (now emeritus at IIT). Along the way he has been a VP at Apple, an executive at HP, with experience at startups ranging from investor, adviser, and member of the board of directors. He has received three honorary degrees, the Franklin Institute medal for Cognitive and Computer Science, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering. In October 2021 he went to London to receive the Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design Education for 2021. While in London he spent three days with people from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and at the London Design Museum which just opened its exhibit on "The Waste Age." The major topic at both places was "What Can Design Do?" as we discussed how to convince manufacturers and designers to design for the Circular Economy with Circular Design principles. Both these visits played a major role in his new book.
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's changing legal industryt at Precisely, the user-friendly platform for enterprise contract management. He founded the company in 2014 and with his team, is on a mission to set a new standard for digital contracting.
Quite often lawyers are risk aversive and not that many wants a career outside of the traditional way of lawyering. Nils-Erik, however, has made career choices and has been changing the legal industry since 2009. There's a lot of peer support for those of us, who (against their parents' wishes) decided to become legal tech managers instead of respectable judges. So if you are struggling with your career choices, this one is definitely for you!
Nils-Erik tells the story behind Precisely, and his experiences from start-up life in the legal sector. We all know that living a start-up life isn't about fancy beanbag chairs, pingpong games and microbrewery ales but it's very hard work and tolerating the unknown. And as Nils-Erik has lived the legal start-up life for quite a few times, who would be better than him to share some thoughts on building a company and leading a legal career outside the traditional law. We also talk about what does it take to grow a legal business from start-up phase into the growth phase and beyond and why there should be more lawyers as entrepreneurs.
Such an inspiring episode to start the new season with, we do hope that you enjoy this as much as us!
Nils-Erik Jansson is a lawyer and serial entrepreneur from Gothenburg, Sweden, who founded Jansson & Norin, Sweden’s first NewLaw firm, which was exited to Fondia Oy in 2017. With 15 years of experience practicing business and contract law, he saw his industry peers struggling with the repetitive admin work associated with contracts thus founded Precisely in 2014. For the last six years, with the Precisely team, he has been on a mission to set a new standard for digital contracting.
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 his legal design and has visited the podcast before. To make this even little more special (and magical with some Christmas spirit) we will reveal Santa's real identity later this year. How ever, you can guess who he is and submit your guesses through social media. We will draw a prize amongst all the answers.
But, this episode is not just about Holiday spirit. We cover hard topics like what are the threats posed by legal design and what are the most challenging topics in this field. Henna & Nina share their most remembered five episodes (and believe us, it was HARD to name only five because we love all the episodes!). We discuss what we have learnt from the podcast and how our understanding or perspective to legal design has developed or changed throughout the podcasting. We also reveal our dream projects when it comes to Legal Design and Santa makes a wish for all the lawyers out there.
So Deck the Halls and join us for this Season Finale!
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 crises will become more frequent in the future, due to climate change escalating other phenomena, we need to create new, agile ways to manage unpredictable force majeure type of events. There might be situations where governments have only a few hours to react in order to protect their citizens, or just 24 hours to pass a new law. The new reality will demand us to change also the way we design regulation - or what we think a regulation is in the first place. There is a tremendous need for law to change and the required work might seem overwhelming, but Indy puts us back on track and reminds us that there are examples of gigantic systemic change.
We also cover some big topics like democracy and talk about the need for creating better legal concepts and models, such as property right or legal personhood, to transform governance.
Indy Johar is focused on the strategic design of new super scale civic assets for transition - specifically at the intersection of financing, contracting and governance for deeply democratic futures.
Indy is co-founder of darkmatterlabs.org and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00 - https://www.architecture00.net, a founding director of open systems lab - https://www.opensystemslab.io (digitising planning), seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) - https://www.wikihouse.cc and Open Desk (open source furniture company) https://www.opendesk.cc.
Indy is a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub https://bloxhub.org (Denmark Copenhagen) - the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization and was 2016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University. He was also Studio Master at the Architectural Association - 2019-2020, UNDP Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member 2016-20 and RIBA Trustee 2017-20. He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School.
Most recently, he was awarded the London Design Medal for Innovation in 2022.
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 Lorraine Gamman, Adam Thorpe and Marcus Willcocks who work at the Design Against Crime Research Center in the UK.
The mission of Design Against Crime Research Center is to disrupt crime by bringing together government, businesses, local communities, prisoners and returning citizens to generate strong socially responsive, co-created crime prevention strategies and crime diversion projects. Lorraine, Adam and Marcus tell about their projects and we hear what ethical aspects using design against crime have.
We discuss about how crime-doers and prisoners differ as targeted end-users or participants in a design process and how design can empower prisoners to change the path of their lives. In addition, our host Henna, inspired by her own neighborhood in Helsinki, asks questions how to approach solving local crime issues using design.
This, dear listeners, is also a huge milestone for Legal Design Podcast as this marks our 50th episode! Thank you for your kind words and support and thank you for listening. Many more to come!
Dr. Lorraine Gamman is Professor of Design at Central Saint Martins and Director of UAL’s award-winning Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC), which she founded in 1999.
Adam Thorpe is Professor of Socially Responsive Design at Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London (UAL). He is Co Director of the Design Against Crime Research Centre and Coordinator of the UAL DESIS Lab (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability).
Marcus Willcocks leads the Public Space strand of the award-winning Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC), at the University of the Arts London.
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 improve the client experience also in legal industry as it might speed up the delivery and make law more understandable to end users.
Often, when we talk about legal tech, we focus on how it might help lawyers. Teemu and his team at Futurice has focused on the end users of law and started implementing technology that could make law easier to understand and use for their clients. With his team he has automated legal work to help non-lawyers understand what law is about and how to use it in every day business life. And this has been really successful for both the end users but also for the lawyers. Automating tasks and processes has freed up the time for lawyers to concentrate on more meaning work.
As we learn in this episode, what happens before implementing technology is really important. Teemu shares his experience on how to drive the change in legal departments and orgniszations and what importance design thinking has in these projects.
Teemu Oksanen is a tech-savvy in-house lawyer with a law firm background currently working as General Counsel at a full-service digital innovation company Futurice. He is a huge fan of legal tech. He thinks the practice of law is undergoing a major change, and that the change is for the good for both the lawyers and the society as a whole. In his free time, he loves to play with his two dogs, Lex and Dana.