We are Henna and Nina, the hosts of the Legal Design Podcast. We met each other while volunteering as the producers of the Legal Design Summit 2019 and became friends. The idea of this podcast was born from our curiosity to learn more about legal design and the need to spread the word about this interdisciplinary and human centric approach to law and develop it through discussion. While we educate ourselves, we also want to offer anyone interested in legal design a chance to learn with us. That’s why we chose our learning path to be in the form of a podcast.
Besides learning, the purpose of this podcast is to give a voice to different ideas, insights and viewpoints that support the legal design philosophy, the realization that justice is created by designing the legal system fit for real humans. We want to explore law ”out of the box” and challenge the traditional boarders between law and other disciplines. We believe that humanity, empathy and design thinking belong fundamentally in law and legal services.
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 Traditional methods for delivering these services are simply outdated and there is a genuine need for redesigning legal processes, services and products.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.