There is no legal design without the “legal”. Making law better by design, therefore, always requires proper legal research and legal analysis. In this episode we are joined by a legal design veteran Jose Torres to legal research through design and how to build multidisciplinary teams to solve legal problems.

The traditional ways of finding and creating legal information, however, do not seem to go well along with the iterative and future oriented design approach. Where legal analysis traditionally looks back to tell “what was wrong”, design seeks to find solutions that are fit for purpose and usable in practice to actually fix the problem. But traditional law and design thinking are not at odds against each other, even if it may seem like it. As our guest in this episode, Jose Torres, points out, design is an empirical research method that helps lawyers not only to find the right solutions, but also to ask the right questions.

Jose Torres has vast experience of legal design from both the academic world but also in practice. Jose shares stories about his career and how legal design has shaped it. For him, legal design is the normal, and only,  way to practice law. Jose currently works as a partner at the law firm Lexia Abogados in Bogotá, Colombia, leading the legal design, crypto and fintech practice. Jose tells us how design techniques can be used as legal research methods, and how to build a design minded legal research team and who should be included.

Jose Torres is a partner at the law firm Lexia Abogados in Colombia, where he leads the legal design, crypto and fintech practice. He is a former fellow at Stanford University’s Legal Design Lab 2016-2017. Jose has previously worked at Facebook, Skadden Arps and the WTO. He has been practicing legal design for 8 years. He is also an angel investor in legal tech in Colombia.