Legal Design Podcast – Sivu 2 – In this podcast hosts Henna Tolvanen and Nina Toivonen discuss how to make law better for (real) humans with guests representing intriguing backgrounds and knowledge.

Episode 47: Video Killed the Witnessing Fear with Nina Immonen and Tero Jyrhämä

Witnesses play a very important role as they help to clarify what has happened by telling the judge or jury everything they know about an event. Although their role is necessary in providing real-life elements and facts to the case to be judged, they possibly are the most neglected group of stakeholders when it comes to the court proceedings.

The process is often designed in a way that assumes witnesses already know how to behave throughout the trial. And while this might be the reality for some expert witnesses who go to court quite often, this certainly isn’t so with ordinary witnesses for whom a court proceeding probably is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event.

Based on research, witnesses take the task seriously, but feel stressed and as if they were accused – even the invitation letters are written in an imperative language and there is a lack of information, for instance how to get to the courtroom, what is going to happen during the process and what their duties are about.

In this episode we interview senior specialist and district court judge Nina Immonen and public legal aid attorney Tero Jyrhämä, who took the challenge to create better experiences for witnesses with a group of students at the Laurea legal design and legal expertise programme. Tero and Nina tell us about the project and what they learned about the experiences of witnesses and how to best address them with human-centric design. We also discuss how to make legal design more mainstream in public legal services.

The guidance videos for witnesses that we are talking about can be found here: As a Witness in a Trial – YouTube and Tuomioistuinvirasto − Todistajana oikeudenkäynnissä – YouTube

Nina Immonen is a district court judge, currently working as a senior specialist at the National Court Administration in Finland, with a recently developed interest in legal design. ”I feel passionate about new ways of communicating the legal field to people. It’s always a win win.”

Tero Jyrhämä is a next generation lawyer serving his legal knowledge understandably and emphatically. Today Tero works as a Public Legal Aid Attorney, incorporating his service design skills into his everyday work to the benefit of both his clients and employer.

This episode is brought to you by Precisely – the CLM platform setting a new standard for digital contracting. For more information, go to preciselycontractsl.com/ldp.

Episode 46: Designing Contracts without Lawyers with Milva Finnegan and Anna Hurmerinta-Haanpää

14 syyskuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

In this episode we concentrate on contracts and how to make them more functional. We are joined by Milva Finnegan and Anna Hurmerinta-Haanpää who both have completed their doctoral dissertations on contract design.

Milva and Anna talk about the transition from understanding contracts as mere legal risk management tools to instruments of communication, and how to design user-friendly contracts that are fit for purpose. Our guests help us understand better the status quo in contracting. We talk about why so many contracts (still today) are mostly about managing legal risks, and therefore full of legal jargon. Contracts are typically understood as some sort of “weapons” or “risk management tools” that should try to safeguard the interests of contracting parties. However, in this episode we learn what other purposes there are for contracts.

We dive deep and talk about whether lawyers really understand the full potential of contracting, or did we just stop caring at some point. And what if lawyers weren’t the ones to design contracts and what special skills different professionals can bring to the contract design process?

Milva Finnegan, PhD, recently completed her doctorate degree in Economics in business law at the University of Vaasa in Finland. Her research focuses on merging contract law and contract design to produce simplified and usable contracts that all users can understand. She recently joined KPMG US as the director of the Client Contract Value Center. Prior to KPMG Milva ran a contracts consulting company, Karhu, LLC, for 10 years. Her company worked with clients implementing contract management best practices, integrating electronic Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) systems, and taught workshops on how to redesign and simplify contract documents. Prior to starting her own company Milva worked at The Boeing Company over 12 years in both contracts and finance disciplines on various multi-million-dollar plus government and commercial programs.

Anna Hurmerinta-Haanpää is a University Lecturer at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Law. She defended her doctoral dissertation on the functions of contracts in interorganizational relationships in spring 2021. At the moment her research interests include collaborative, responsible and sustainable contracting. Besides her research, she is eager to develop legal education.

This episode is brought to you by Precisely – the CLM platform setting a new standard for digital contracting. For more information, go to preciselycontractsl.com/ldp.

Episode 45: Democratizing Legal Information by Cartoons with Hallie Jay Pope

31 elokuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Welcome back to Legal Design Podcast! This marks the start of season 4. For this season premiere we are joined by the legendary legal information designer Hallie Jay Pope.

Hallie has done amazing work making law better by designing legal information and one of her goals is to democratize legal information. As we know, legal information is often hard to obtain and even harder to understand because it’s full of legal jargon and sentences so long that publishers have to minimize the print in law books.

But Hallie is here to change this. She’s known for her amazing work as a cartoonist and visualizing legal information in general. She explains the “threats and opportunities” of using comics, or images and visualization in legal communication. Hallie gives examples on projects she has been working on at the Graphic Advocacy Project and tells us about finding the Creative Advocacy Lab at the University of The University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law.

We also talk about the bigger picture and how access (or lack of it) to legal information has an impact on big things like democracy and how we make decision makers understand how vital access to legal information is to justice systems.

And we have some exciting news for you guys. We are proud to announce that for this season, we are sponsored by Precisely, the CLM platform setting a new standard for digital contracting. For more info, go to preciselycontracts.com/ldp.

Hallie Jay Pope is a legal information designer, cartoonist, and educator. She is the founder and president of the Graphic Advocacy Project, a nonprofit that works with advocates and communities to share legal knowledge. Hallie is currently a visiting professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law where she runs the Creative Advocacy Lab, a legal information design clinic that re-envisions lawyers as community educators, problem-solvers, and storytellers.

This episode is brought to you by Precisely – the CLM platform setting a new standard for digital contracting. For more information, go to preciselycontractsl.com/ldp.

Episode 44: Sprinkling Legal Design Candy to the Caves of Law with Laura Hartnett

8 kesäkuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

We have to have the courage to embrace and share our own personality; not put down the personalities and unique qualities of others. And to reinforce this exchange – we need leadership.

Lawyering culture is often perceived as conservative, and somewhat difficult to change – the social structures that shape legal work today have not changed much from the 18th century. The image of law – quite often – is white, middle-aged men working long hours drafting documents no-one else understands. It is no wonder if the lawyers of the 21st century find it unmotivating to pursue legal traditions that don’t support their values, viewpoints and wellbeing.

In this episode we meet with Laura Hartnett, a legal consultant whose mission is to make lawyer work better, especially for female and minority lawyers. Laura wants to chuck the insane hours, endless drafts and revisions, and help lawyers redesign their work and business environment in a way that there is room for different personalities with different backgrounds. With Laura, we discuss how to identify the needs of different lawyers and what can be done to meet those needs and make lawyering better, for everybody.

We also discuss how legal design can increase the client commitment, and why it is important to create space for legal design having the future generation in mind.

Laura Hartnett is the founder and legal consultant at Law By Design. She has over 15 years of experience as a management consultant, litigator for national and international law firms, and in-house counsel for a Fortune 100 company. Today, she teaches lawyers how to redesign their practice of law from a human-centered approach, one that works better for both lawyers and clients, with a special aim to keep women and minorities staying and thriving in the practice of law. She is also a yoga addict, karaoke enthusiast, and proud mom of two creative girls.

Episode 43: What Legos Got to Do with Legal Research, Amanda Perry-Kessaris?

24 toukokuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

In this episode we meet with Amanda Perry-Kessaris, professor of Law at Kent Law School, to discuss what design can do for legal research. As we know, the possibilities of design in the realm of law are almost endless, but can design also change the way we research law and practice academic legal analysis? And if it does, should we be worried that design takes over traditional law?

There’s a need for legal design critique, we have to know what value we add when we “design law” – we can’t just give old things a new form.

Amanda is known to discuss about doing law by design mode and in her research Amanda highlights three lawyerly concerns: the need to communicate; the need to balance structure and freedom; and the need to be at once practical, critical and imaginative. If we address these concerns with the traditional way of doing law, lawyering seems almost impossible. But could design mode ease these concerns?

We also focus on the legal research. Traditional legal research and legal thinking struggle with the idea of having multiple perspectives to legal issues, not to mention using other information sources than legally binding sources to solve legal problems. But could design ease law and legal research with these struggles and could law become more like “a real science” that operates with empirical data and experiments, perhaps also more interdisciplinarily?

Amanda Perry-Kessaris is Professorof Law at Kent Law School.

She specialises in empirically grounded, theoretically informed, cross-disciplinary approaches to law; and to the economic lives of law in particular.

Her recent publications include Doing Sociolegal Research in Design Mode (Routledge 2021)a monograph exploring what design can do for sociolegal research; and Design in Legal Education (Routledge 2022), a collection co-edited with Emily Allbon, which explores what design can do for legal teachers and learners in higher education, legal practice and beyond.

To find out more you can access Amanda’s academic publications via SSRN, presentations on Vimeo, blog at Approaching Law; or you can follow her on Twitter @aperrykessaris.

Episode 42: Visiting Virtual Courts with Dan Jackson, Molly French and Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee

11 toukokuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Molly French (on top), Dan Jackson and Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee.

In this episode we talk about virtual reality in courts and how it can promote access to justice. Having to go to court can be once in a lifetime experience for quite many people. It might be nerve- racking and even scary not knowing what is going to happen at court, especially for self represented litigants. A lot of courts might not even see this problem because for courts and people who work there, it’s everyday life. Besides financial resources, not being familiar with the court processes might affect people to seek resolution to their cases just because the whole concept is so hard to understand.

We meet with Dan Jackson, Molly French and Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee who have created The Colorado Virtual Courthouse, a guided 360-degree virtual tour of a Colorado courthouse, designed to help Self Represented Litigants navigate court and improve access to justice. It introduces key court staff, explains common court procedures, and provides resources and information to promote better legal outcomes for self represented litigants.

Dan Jackson has directed the NuLawLab at Northeastern University School of Law since 2013. Dan is a 1997 graduate of Northeastern Law and a 1990 graduate of Northwestern University. Following a postgraduate clerkship with The Hon. Hugh H. Bownes at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Dan worked for 13 years with the law firm of Bingham McCutchen, ultimately serving as the firm’s director of attorney development after practicing in the employment law group. Prior to law school, Dan worked as a designer for theater. He continues to do so, most recently with the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival and The Provincetown Theater.

Molly French currently works as Technology Manager at Colorado Legal Services in Denver, CO. She is on the advisory board of the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project, and has served as the Chair of the Colorado Access to Justice Commission’s Technology Committee, and is currently serving as a member of the Communications and Technology Committees. She is curious about and interested in all things technology-related to assist in the promotion of access to justice, including the integration of virtual reality into online tools, and broadband expansion efforts.

Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee jointly founded HELM Social Design Studio in 2015, the first social design studio in South Asia dedicated to partnering with human rights defenders and their organizations to ideate, fund and build social design solutions that promote human rights and access to justice (http://helmstudio.org/). Her work is informed by more than a decade of experience working with more than 20 grassroots campaigns and civil society organizations in the U.S., South Asia, and East Africa, using legal, media and community organizing approaches. Shikha is a PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley. She has also completed a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a BA in English and Ethnicity, Race and Migration from Yale University. Her research takes an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective in understanding labour markets, supply chains, migration, and variegated citizenship with a focus on gender, race, and caste in the global economy.

Episode 41: Meaningful Work Makes Happier Lawyers with Frank Martela

27 huhtikuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Doing meaningful work will promote happiness and increase your life satisfaction and doing work you hate will make you miserable. This is obvious, of course, but yet there are many lawyers who stay in jobs that aren’t right for them.

It is hard to make a change because we have the image of perfectly successful lawyer in our head and that image might not be what we want from our working life. During the podcast series, we have talked to some ”recovering lawyers” who have found themselves miserable and made bold career changes. In this episode we concentrate on meaningfulness in work life and how important it is for all of us.

In this episode we get to meet philosopher and researcher Frank Martela. Experiencing purpose and meaning is a fundamental part of having a good life – also according to science – and many people make career changes, such as becoming a legal designer, in search of it. But how do you make your work feel more purposeful if it already doesn’t? Frank will share some useful and practical insights for both indiciduals and organizations on meaningful work backed up by scientific research.

We also talk about problem solving and learn that philosophy actually might have an interesting connection to design thinking. If you thought that philosophy is far from the practical every day life, this episode is really for you because after listening to Frank, you will want to start to apply philosophy into your daily (working) life.

And of course, we had to take the opportunity to pop up the big question: What’s the meaning of life?

Frank Martela, PhD, is a philosopher and researcher of psychology specialized in meaningfulness, human motivation and how organizations and institutions can unleash human potential. He is a University Lecturer at Aalto University, Finland, and has two Ph.D. ’s from organizational research (2012 Aalto University) and practical philosophy (2019 University of Helsinki). His scientific publications have appeared in journals ranging from Journal of Personality, Nature Human Behaviour, and European Review of Social Psychology to Southern Journal of Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Academy of Management Review, and Organization Studies. He has spoken at universities on four continents including Harvard and Stanford, written for Scientific American Mind, and Harvard Business Review, and been interviewed by New York Times, Le Monde, New Scientist, and Discover Magazine, among others. His book A Wonderful Life – Insights on Finding a Meaningful Experience (HarperCollins 2020) has been translated to 27 languages including French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian.

Episode 40: Becoming Legal Designers with Aku Nikkola and Christine Inkinen

12 huhtikuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Traditionally, law school has been all about reading books and taking exams. People might graduate without seeing a real legal document during their studies and often the real life lawyering doesn’t meet the expectations of recent graduates. In this episode, we meet with Aku Nikkola and Christine Inkinen to talk about what design can offer for legal studies.

Aku and Christine tell us their stories of how they decided to pursuit a career a little different from the traditional legal work and how they became legal designers. We talk about their latest venture, the first ever legal design course organized for law degree students at the University of Helsinki. Aku and Christine are both recent graduates of law school and it is interesting to hear from them what seems to be missing from the traditional legal education. If we want to change the law better for real humans, we should focus on the education and make sure that future lawyers learn the needed skills already at law school.

Besides discussing what design can offer for legal studies, we talk about the legal design market. Aku and Christine share their views and experience on selling legal design projects and we discuss whether the supply meets the demand in the market at the moment.

Dot. Legal is an award-winning legal design consultancy from Helsinki. Dot. is known as a forerunner in all things legal and design.

Aku Nikkola is a legal designer and a partner at Dot. Aku is a lawyer second and a front-end wizard first, a true visual perfectionist who understands and wields the power of fonts, colors, icons, and animations; always to the benefit of the end-user.

Christine Inkinen (or Kiki, as we call her) is a legal designer and a partner at Dot. Kiki is a creative problem solver, who focuses on translating technical legalese into accessible and beneficial information for end-users – proving that the pen is still sharper than the sword.

Episode 39: Technology Empowered Global Immigration with Octavian Tantu and Karita Niemelä

30 maaliskuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Octavian Tantu and Karita Niemelä from KPMG Finland.

Business opportunities can emerge anywhere in the world and many corporations operate globally. This creates a huge demand for relocation and there are companies who send employees almost daily to different countries. Keeping up with immigration rules and regulations can be a huge task for any HR department and immigration professional, let alone for those who send employees to various different countries. In this episode, we talk to Octavian Tantu and Karita Niemelä from KPMG Finland about their work developing technology to streamline the immigrations processes at firms.

Octavian and Karita share their insights and experience on working with legal tech projects in multidisciplinary teams. We concentrate on one of their joint projects, Immigration Expert. The Immigration Expert tool helps people moving from one country to another to assess imigration requirements. Octavian and Karita tell us about the developing process and what were the initial problems (or the most common problems) in the immigration process the tool now solves.

We also discuss how technology plays an inevitable role in creating better working practices and how Octavian and Karita see the role of tech in improving the performance of legal professionals. And because we love future predictions in this podcast, we also ask Octavian and Karita how do they see their work changing in the future and will technology play a more major role.

Octavian (Tavi) Tantu is currently the Head of Tax & Legal Technology for KPMG Finland. His background is in Tax and Legal Technology and he has also worked as a tax and global mobility consultant. Throughout his career he has worked in various technology projects ranging from global mobility, immigration to tax preparation and global compliance applications in several different countries. As part of these projects he has fulfilled the roles of business analyst, product owner and service manager and has also helped implement and optimize the software development processes and technology teams. As a technology enthusiast, Tavi is always looking for new opportunities to help teams and businesses find the right balance of technology and process optimizations whilst constantly exploring new ways of collaborating and developing technology.

Karita Niemelä works as a senior consultant within KPMG Finland’s People & Change department with strategic, change and project management consulting. Previously, Karita has worked within the Tax and Legal department with global mobility advisory. She has worked with various different client engagements and projects including organizational development and project management for clients from different sectors. Karita has also been part of the global technology project KPMG Global Immigration Expert and worked in daily collaboration with different stakeholders of the project and been part of the development and execution of the tool. As a consultant, her way of working is founded on organizational and process development with technology and people oriented mindset. Karita has studied business administration with strategic business development as her major and her thesis was about change management of digital servitization.

Episode 38: Leading by Love with Mia Koro-Kanerva

16 maaliskuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

It sure isn’t every day that we hear a lawyer talking about love and management in the same sentence let alone following this management method. But now we’ve put them in one podcast episode! Are you ready?

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.

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.

Mia Koro-Kanerva is the CEO of the Finnish Real Estate Management Federation with a big heart and a mission to make real estate management becoming the best possible thing that can happen to a housing company and it’s owners. She’s a lawyer by training but have been leading people for the last 12 years with great love and passion. That probably has also granted her the moniker “Love Leader”.

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