legal tech – Legal Design Podcast

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

12 toukokuun, 2023 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

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.

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

15 maaliskuun, 2023 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

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

1 helmikuun, 2023 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

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 49: Creating Tech Friendly Ecosystems for Law with Teemu Oksanen

26 lokakuun, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

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.

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 32: Demystifying Legal Tech with Colin Levy

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Legal Tech is one of the popular buzzwords you can’t help hearing when talking about the future of law these days. But what exactly is legal tech? That is what we’re going to cover in this episode with Colin Levy.

I see legal tech as sort of cultural movement to embrace technology, and some of the concepts that underly technologies in the practice of law and delivery of legal services. My goal, as I see it, is try to bring more and more people into the community and make it more broader and diverse.

Colin explains how legal tech is different from legal design and what kind of common misunderstanding people may have about legal technology. Colin also tells us what to consider when buying legal tech solutions or when designing technology for lawyers and their clients.

In addition, Colin also talks about how he sees legal tech as a cultural movement to embrace technology, and some of the concepts that underly technologies in the practice of law and delivery of legal services.

Colin S. Levy is Director of Legal and Evangelist for Malbek, a leading CLM company as well as a seasoned lawyer and legal tech speaker.

Throughout his career, Colin has seen technology as a key driver in improving how legal services are performed. Because his career has spanned industries, he witnessed myriad issues, from a systemic lack of interest in technology to the high cost of legal services barring entry to consumers. Now, his mission is to bridge the gap between the tech world and the legal world, advocating for the ways technology can be a useful tool for the lawyer’s toolbelt rather than a fear-inducing obstacle to effective legal work. Colin has also been driven to effectively empower, inform, and inspire others not only regarding the law and legal services, but also tech, interdisciplinary collaboration, and process improvement.

Episode 23: Doing Law in the 21st Century with Astrid Kohlmeier and Meera Klemola

29 syyskuun, 2021 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Meera Klemola (left) and Astrid Kohlmeier.

Access to justice, digitalization, billable hours, burning the midnight oil, comprehensibility, working culture… Those are the topics that often come up when discussing what needs to change in the legal industry. How to do law in the 21st Century with the tools and mindsets from the 18th Century? What would Astrid and Meera do?

In this episode we are joined by the legal design legends and leading global experts Astrid Kohlmeier and Meera Klemola. Astrid and Meera are also published authors, their book ”The Legal Design Book – Doing Law in the 21st Century” was published earlier this fall.

Astrid and Meera tell us about the book project (and give valuable tips for the legal publishing industry!). They also share their insights about the core elements of doing law in our era and why we are going through transformation as an industry exactly now. They both have tremendous experience on Legal Design projects and working with different clients and they help us imagine what can be legal designed with sharing some examples on those projects.

We are certain that after listening to this episode, everyone will see the benefits of Legal Design so clearly that it will definitely become the mainstream way of doing law in the 21st Century!

Astrid Kohlmeier is a lawyer and internationally
renowned legal design pioneer. She has been
combining law and design for more than 15 years, with senior roles in the insurance, litigation, finance, and service design industries. The legal design expert advises legal inhouse departments and law firms such as Clifford Chance, Linklaters, Airbus, SAP, NetApp and many more. Winner of several design awards as well as honoured as “woman of legal tech”, she develops user-centric legal solutions with a focus on innovation and digital transformation. Astrid is a member and lecturer of the Executive Faculty at the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession, co-founder of the non-profit
organization “Liquid Legal Institute e.V.”, speaker at relevant conferences worldwide and works with a global network of legal designers. She is actively engaged at the intersection of education and method development to establish the profession of “ legal designers” worldwide.

Meera Klemola is globally recognised as one of the pioneering voices in Human Centred Design for legal professionals and legal business. Dubbed by The Legal Forecast as one of the first ‘Legal Designers’ and the host of the world’s first Legal Design Summit, Meera continues to lead and actively contribute to the discourse on the evolving role of design in law as well as corporate learning and development. Meera is a trusted advisor to some of the largest brands, corporations, law firms and in-house legal teams. She also co-teaches with professors at law schools, is a frequently requested keynote speaker at global innovation conferences
and company retreats and is a contributing author to various platforms on the topics of design in law, modern work and leadership. She holds multidisciplinary qualifications in law, design management and business.

Episode 19: Will AI Cause Lawyer Extinction, Jim Chiang?

1 syyskuun, 2021 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

We kick off the second season with Jim Chiang, the CEO and Founder of My Legal Einstein.After having a relaxing summer break and resting our brains we are back with a bang!

Artificial Intelligence is such a hot potato in the legal industry it deserves an episode of its own. And there certainly can’t be value adding AI without design thinking behind it. We are joined by Jim Chiang who is a pioneer when it comes to AI and is now leading My Legal Einstein on its journey to help lawyers find better ways of working.

We lawyers are known for our not so functional ways of working. Most of our processes are based on manual work and we still do a lot of copy-pasting. A few years back there was a lot of discussion about whether or not the robots are going to take over the legal work but we are still at the place where we lack imagination of how to add AI to our work. But this is where Jim can help us lawyers. His examples are so practical that AI actually makes sense, finally.

The systems at the moment don’t include high-level reasoning or thought and computers can only do what us humans have taught them to do. One of the goals for Legal Design is to find better ways for lawyers to work so that we can focus on actual legal work and problem solving instead of wasting our time copy-pasting. But how do we make sure that we don’t teach AI our bad processes and up with AI that just knows how to copy-paste?

After talking to Jim, we can safely encourage you to set your alarm clocks for tomorrow morning, there is still a need for human lawyers and legal designers. But with the help of AI the future might be a little brighter for lawyers and other professionals working in the legal industry because AI can enhance our ability to perform our tasks and optimize our practices. Tune in to our discussion with Jim to learn what you can expect from AI.

Jim Chiang, CEO and Founder, My Legal Einstein – Before starting My Legal Einstein, Jim led the AI engineering teams at Conga and Icertis, the two market leaders in the CLM (contract lifecycle management) product space. Jim has served multiple executive roles leading product and engineering organizations. Jim has over 20 years of experience in big data analytics and AI algorithm development. Jim holds a Bachelors of Engineering from MIT.

16. Episode: Systemic Change in Law with Nóra Al Haider

13 kesäkuun, 2021 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Good news guys! In order to make law better, lawyers don’t have to become designers or coders. But what we need to have are curiosity and an open mindset. In this episode Henna and Nina are joined by Nora Al Haider to discuss how to make more of a systematic change in law.

Quite often, lawyers see legal problems only in a legal way. But because law is interlinked to other systems, we have to start inviting other disciplines into the space of law without judgement. And we have to go beyond design and simply start to ask other professionals how they solve problems and explore in multidisciplinary teams. And when we learn new ways to solve problems from other disciplines, we create new methodologies and that is where the change begins.

Nowadays, the legal industry turns to legal design and legal technology when trying to find a way towards more human-centric law, but those two are not going to solve our problems alone. We need more systematic change and we have to make sure that the projects aiming to change the law and the legal system aren’t just single projects happening here and there. Because of her unique and interesting career path and background, Nora can see the differences between the American and European legal systems and she shares her insights on what should be done in both systems in order to make law more accessible in a more sustainable way.

Nóra Al Haider is the Policy and Design Lead at the Stanford Legal Design Lab. Nóra is a multilingual lawyer and interdisciplinary researcher from the Netherlands. She combines the fields of law, design and tech to increase access to justice and equity in the legal system.

Her pioneering and innovative creations from social media bots that provide legal advice to analyzing the legal needs of users on online platforms earned her international acclaim in the legal field. Nóra’s legal design projects and interactive art installations have been spotlighted at courts, bar associations, legal organizations and in law schools around the world. She is driven by merging various disciplines, processes, and methodologies to enact systemic change in the justice system. Nóra holds a Bachelor (honours) and Research Master in Law from Utrecht University.

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