Latest Episodes

Episode 60: Contract Lifecycle Management with Isabelle Engelhard and Elisa Ensmenger

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.

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 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)

Episode 59: AI Enhanced Justice Tech with Maya Markovich

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.

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.

Episode 58: Lean Thinking in Law with Isabell Storsjö and Ana Lúcia Martins

Ana Lúcia Martins and Isabell Storsjö

Welcome to this episode of our podcast where 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.

Episode 57: Design in Times of Crisis with Alice Rawsthorn and Ayşe Elif Yildirim

Alice Rawsthorn and Ayşe Elif Yildirim

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.

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.

Episode 56: Empowering Consumers with Access to Legal Information with Inna Ptitsyna

Inna Ptitsyna.

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.

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.

How to help Ukraine?

Inna has kindly provided us with the following information. Please, check it out and help in any way you can!

https://lawrina.com/blog/how-can-you-help-ukraine-during-the-russian-invasion/
https://helpukraine.center/
https://supportukrainenow.org/

Episode 55: Strategies for Building Buy-In for Legal Design with Anna Posthumus Meyjes

Legal Designer, Entrepreneur Anna Posthumus Meyjes

In this episode, we meet with Anna Posthumus Meyjes to talk about creating buy-in for legal design. As we know, design thinking and legal design, are relatively new concepts in the legal industry, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way lawyers and clients interact with law. But how to convince others to buy into this new way of doing law? That’s what we’re going to explore in this episode.

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.

Episode 54: Designing for a Better World with Don Norman

Don Norman.

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.

Episode 53: Creating Start-Up Culture for the Legal Industry with Nils-Erik Jansson

Nils-Erik Jansson.

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.

This episode is sponsored by Precisely – the user-friendly platform for enterprise contract management. Precisely has a special offer for our listeners! Check it out: Free contracting assessment – Precisely (preciselycontracts.com)

Episode 52: Legal Design Podcast Q & A Holiday Special

Nina Toivonen, Santa Clause, Henna Tolvanen.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! And to make it even more special, we have prepared a Q&A Holiday Special Episode! Even Santa himself is a Legal Design fan and joins us to bring Holiday Spirit to you dear listerners.

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!

Episode 51: Joining the Boring Revolution with Indy Johar

Indy Johar,

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.