About us
Henna Tolvanen
I work as a Legal Counsel and Legal Tech Specialist. To be honest, it took me a while to graduate from law school because I didn’t feel comfortable doing legal work the traditional way. During my years in legal publishing I learned about legal design and it changed the way I see legal work today. We need to move forward from giving legal advice in legalese and really start to solve our clients’ problems and offer real-life applicable solutions. In order to do that, we need more discussion on how to understand the end-users and their (legal) needs to make law more functionable.
Many industries have recently gone through major transformations resulting that many clients of legal services are starting to pay attention to how and what we lawyers deliver, not only the result. Traditional methods for delivering these services are simply outdated and there is a genuine need for redesigning legal processes, services and products. All this starts with listening and empathy.
Nina Toivonen
The many ongoing changes in our reality explain why legal design is so niche at the moment. Legal design can be seen as a by-product of the global mega trends, such as digitalization and the transformation from product-dominant logic to service-dominant logic in business. For me the most interesting change that influences the legal design movement is the latest paradigm swift in understanding human behavior, especially the neurobiology behind thinking and emotions. I’m convinced that our human nature explains why we need design in law.
I worked several years as a legal counsel in the public sector, but I’m currently dedicating my daytime to legal design studies and my PhD. I’m enjoying this thirty-something student life in Atlanta, although my heart will always belong to the slushy streets of Helsinki.