Tag: compliance by design

Episode 20: Breaking the Awkward Silence with Niina Ratsula

September 8, 2021 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 0 Comments
Niina Ratsula. Photo: Robert Lindström.

Is it possible to be compliant if it’s not part of the organizational culture? We write policies and tick the boxes, but at the end of the day it’s really the culture that defines if we’re compliant and ethical. Culture determines what is acceptable and valued no matter what is written in the policies. We welcomed Niina Ratsula to discuss about doing the right thing.

Many people may find the concept of “culture” a bit difficult to understand and explain, especially in the working life. For us humans it is quite challenging to become aware of our own behavioral patterns, yet realize we’re being part of and contributing to a “culture”. However, culture is the key component of corporations and it will eat your strategy for breakfast if you’re not making sure that the desired behavior happens outside the policies and even when no one is watching.

Culture starts with people and should be everybody’s business in the organizations. It is not enough if the values only reflect the management, they should represent the entire organization and all its people. Most of the times it is easy to recognize what is right and what is wrong, but the our working culture might not encourage us to actually speak up about the wrong doings. How can we encourage people to speak freely and without a fear? How to break the awkward silence?

In addition to compliance culture, we talk about work ethics. Traditionally, we have overlooked some topics in the legal industry. However, these are the days that also law firms have to start paying attention to their own culture. Is it ethical to expect people to burn the midnight oil? Should we match people with the excisting culture or should we match the culture with people? Tune into this episode to learn more about designing and re-designing the organizational culture!

Niina Ratsula is an ethics, compliance and governance professional, with a strong focus on corporate cultures and internal control. Niina is known for “translating codes of conduct from paper into daily actions and decision making”.

Niina spent 12 years in multinational corporations (Nokia and Kemira) focusing on ethics, compliance, internal controls and audit. In 2018 she started her own business Code of Conduct Company and is now supporting organizations in building their ethics and compliance programs, ethical leadership and internal control projects. Niina was awarded the recognition as the ‘responsible business influencer’ in Finland in 2019.

Niina is also an author and has written several books in Finnish on the topics of Internal Control, Internal Audit and Ethical Leadership. She defended her PhD. in 2020 with a topic “Interplay between technical and social control – Case study of Nokia’s SOX implementation project”.

7. Episode: Design Compliance with Marie Potel-Saville and Elisabeth Talbourdet

April 11, 2021 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 0 Comments
Elisabeth Talbourdet (left) and Marie Potel-Saville.

In this episode we have Marie Potel-Saville and Elisabeth Talbourdet visiting us. Marie shares the story of founding Amurabi, the Legal Innovation by Design agency, and they both tell how they became legal designers. We also talk about designing compliance. If organisations want their stakeholders to comply with certain rules and regulations, they have to design how to make that happen. 

Marie started her career working for the biggest law firms and the most known companies, but after coming across with Legal Design and seeing what an impact it has, she founded Amurabi to continue on working with making law more functional. Elisabeth started her career as an in-house lawyer but quickly moved to Legal Design.

Marie and Elisabeth have worked on many projects on designing compliance. The definition of corporate compliance encompasses the efforts to ensure that organizations are abiding by both industry regulations and government legislation as well as internal policies and procedures. Compliance for employees is often just a set of rules written in legalese and it might be hard to understand how they affect their daily life at work. However, these same rules and complying with them are vital to organisations to prevent and detect violations of these rules, which are to protect the organisations from fines and lawsuits.

The common approach to compliance, however, is to “tick the box” when certain formalities in the company’s compliance protocol have been accomplished, without making sure whether people really know and understand what is expected of them. No wonder we get to read so often about corporate misconduct in the newspapers. If organizations really want to succeed in corporate compliance, it might require some human-centric design and understanding of social psychology and neuroscience. ”If you really want people to comply, then of course you have to design it”, says Marie. “There is no formalistic compliance, there’s only effective compliance”.

Marie Potel-Saville combines over 15 years of Magic Circle experience at Freshfields and Allen & Overy in London, Brussels, Paris and EMEA General Counsel experience at Estée Lauder Companies and Chanel, along with a Master’s degree in Innovation by Design (ENSCI). After having seen the results of Legal Design in her own legal division, she founded Amurabi to share its potential: more than a theory, it’s a tool for empowerment. In addition, she is a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, University of Management of Singapore, Assas and contributes to initiatives of social service (access to justice, civic education, prevention).

Elisabeth Talbourdet graduated from La Sorbonne, Sciences Po, King’s College London and Columbia Law School and trained as a lawyer amongst renowned law firms in London and Paris. Elisabeth discovered Legal Design working in-house and was immediately taken by this new approach to law. She sees Legal Design as a solution to make legal information clear and actionable – and to change the way legal recommendations are perceived, understood and applied. A legal design pioneer of her generation, Elisabeth has already worked on over 30 projects and facilitated dozens of workshops and conferences within Amurabi.