design thinking – Legal Design Podcast

Episode 57: Design in Times of Crisis with Alice Rawsthorn and Ayşe Elif Yildirim

Today, we have planned something extraordinary for you. We finished the last season with a little riddle and asked our audience to guess who was the Special Legal Design Santa in our season finale. We received some answers, thank you for those, and the promised prize was drawn. Our lucky winner is Elif Yildirim, a lawyer and legal design student from Turkey and we invited Elif to plan and co-host an episode with us and what an episode it turned out to be!

Alice Rawsthorn, a British Design Critic and author joined us to discuss about design as an attitude and how it can be incorporated into law. Alice talks about why great design is a human right and explains how we understand design and its potential in different fields of life and what is the level of importance to incorporate design into our responses in times of crisis, such as in the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria.

We also talk about how design, or design thinking, has increasingly gained popularity in different fields of professions, and law is just one of the examples. Alice explains if there are some “red flags” in this development.

Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and author, whose books include Design as an Attitude, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design at MoMA, New York. Alice’s weekly design column for The New York Times was syndicated worldwide for over a decade. In all her work, Alice champions design’s potential as a social, political and ecological tool that can help to foster positive change. Born in Manchester and based in London, she is a founding member of the Writers for Liberty campaign for human rights and of the advisory board of the Democracy Next research and action institute as well as a member of the UK government’s Honors Committee for arts and Media. Alice and Paola are co-founders of Design Emergency, a podcast andmin research platform that investigates design’s role in forging a fairer future.

Ayşe Elif Yıldırım is a lawyer and academic and most recently a Visual Communication Design student. After traveling and living in many countries of Europe, she is now based in Ankara, Turkey. She has several academic degrees in different fields of law, most recently she was granted her Ph.D. degree with distinction for her doctoral research conducted under the scholarship of Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology in the field of Business and Human Rights. Always being interested in interdisciplinary fields of work that combine two distinct ways of thinking, Elif is now focusing on Legal Design and how we can use it to solve complex challenges we are facing in our contemporary world.

Episode 55: Strategies for Building Buy-In for Legal Design with Anna Posthumus Meyjes

March 2, 2023 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Legal Designer, Entrepreneur Anna Posthumus Meyjes

In this episode, we meet with Anna Posthumus Meyjes to talk about creating buy-in for legal design. As we know, design thinking and legal design, are relatively new concepts in the legal industry, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way lawyers and clients interact with law. But how to convince others to buy into this new way of doing law? That’s what we’re going to explore in this episode.

Without buy-in, legal design will remain a rather small concept and it’s potential to improve legal industry will go unrealized. We all know that getting buy-in can be a challenge for legal designers. Lawyers are trained to be risk-averse and skeptical of new ideas and we still face the challenge that organizations are not that familiar with the concepts of legal design. And even if they have heard of legal design, it might be difficult for clients to see the value in investing in design solutions. So how do we overcome these barriers?

Anna has great news! During her years offering legal design services, she has seen the swift in the market and there definitely is a need for legal design. One strategy is to start small. Rather than trying to convince the entire legal industry, start with a pilot project to create interest and showcase the impact of design. And help the client to see the impact by creating KPI’s that are easy to measure.

As our listeners know, in this podcast we are inspired by the becoming-of-stories people have about discovering design and its potential for law, so we also hear Anna’s story and she tells us how she experienced the career change when becoming a legal designer and an entrepreneur at the same time. We also discuss whether legal designers experience similar competition and pressure as lawyers do in the legal industry.

Anna Posthumus Meyjes is a Legal Designer and founder of Aclara Legal Design consultancy. Anna brings creativity, design and a user-centered approach to law. Her focus is on information design and user-centricity in legal services. Aclara Legal Design redesigns traditional, text-heavy legal communication and documentation to make them engaging, readable and memorable. Anna practiced law in private practice for 10 years before founding Aclara Legal Design.

Episode 54: Designing for a Better World with Don Norman

February 15, 2023 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

We have a very special guest joining us. We talk to the legendary Don Norman, also known as the godfather of design, who started his interesting career life as electrical engineer, ended up to be a psychologist, cognitive scientist and computer scientist, and eventually a designer. Don has authored many design classics, such as The Psychology of Everyday Things, and his latest book, Design for the Better World is coming out this March.

Don shares his interesting career stories and we talk about writing books. Our main focus in this episode is on designing for a better world and what’s law got to do with it. Design thinking has become very popular during the last decades, and has expanded to many new areas of business and society – such as law – with a promise of driving innovation and positive transformation. Lawyers, managers, doctors, civil servants, business owners – you name it – are encouraged to think and act like “designers” and organize their work like design teams do. But is there some red flags in this development and what are Don’s thoughts about this?

The way law seeks for betterment of society is by passing on new regulation. However, law may not always be the best tool to influence human behavior. We discuss that instead of making new laws, should we design the legislation more in a way that would lead to a smaller amount of laws and try to figure out a way to guide people’s behavior in other ways and what those other ways could be from Don’s point of view.

Lastly, Don explains how he sees the future of design thinking and does it have the potential to become the default approach to problem solving, no matter the discipline or the context.

Don Norman has lived multiple lives: University professor, Industry executive, consultant, keynote speaker, and author. He has been an electrical engineer, a psychologist, cognitive scientist, computer scientist, and designer. He retired from the University of California, San Diego in 1993, returned in 2014 to become the founding Director of the Design Lab: He retired in the seventh year of his five-year appointment on Dec. 31, 2020. He also has retired from Northwestern University, from the Nielsen Norman group, and from being a trustee at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology. He now has retired five times and has the title “emeritus” from all four places.

He is the co-founder and principal of the User Experience/Usability consulting firm, the Nielsen Norman group, where he is now emeritus. He has been an IDEO fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of IIT’s Institute of Design in Chicago (now emeritus at IIT). Along the way he has been a VP at Apple, an executive at HP, with experience at startups ranging from investor, adviser, and member of the board of directors. He has received three honorary degrees, the Franklin Institute medal for Cognitive and Computer Science, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering. In October 2021 he went to London to receive the Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design Education for 2021. While in London he spent three days with people from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and at the London Design Museum which just opened its exhibit on “The Waste Age.” The major topic at both places was “What Can Design Do?” as we discussed how to convince manufacturers and designers to design for the Circular Economy with Circular Design principles. Both these visits played a major role in his new book.

Episode 52: Legal Design Podcast Q & A Holiday Special

December 8, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Nina Toivonen, Santa Clause, Henna Tolvanen.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! And to make it even more special, we have prepared a Q&A Holiday Special Episode! Even Santa himself is a Legal Design fan and joins us to bring Holiday Spirit to you dear listerners.

We wanted to celebrate the end of this milestone filled season with a Holiday Special Q&A episode. We received some brilliant (and hard!) questions from you dear listeners, thank you so much for them! So in this episode our hosts Henna & Nina are on the hot spot answering them. But to make this even more special, we have a Special Santa joining us! This Santa knows his legal design and has visited the podcast before. To make this even little more special (and magical with some Christmas spirit) we will reveal Santa’s real identity later this year. How ever, you can guess who he is and submit your guesses through social media. We will draw a prize amongst all the answers.

But, this episode is not just about Holiday spirit. We cover hard topics like what are the threats posed by legal design and what are the most challenging topics in this field. Henna & Nina share their most remembered five episodes (and believe us, it was HARD to name only five because we love all the episodes!). We discuss what we have learnt from the podcast and how our understanding or perspective to legal design has developed or changed throughout the podcasting. We also reveal our dream projects when it comes to Legal Design and Santa makes a wish for all the lawyers out there.

So Deck the Halls and join us for this Season Finale!

Episode 51: Joining the Boring Revolution with Indy Johar

November 24, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

This week we meet with Indy Johar from Dark Matter Labs to discuss why and how our systems of governance should be reformed and why we need all professionals, including lawyers, joining this “Boring revolution”. We, of course, look things from the legal (design) perspective so we concentrate on what role (legal) design has in making our societies fit for the needs of the 21st Century.

Global crises will become more frequent in the future, due to climate change escalating other phenomena, we need to create new, agile ways to manage unpredictable force majeure type of events. There might be situations where governments have only a few hours to react in order to protect their citizens, or just 24 hours to pass a new law. The new reality will demand us to change also the way we design regulation – or what we think a regulation is in the first place. There is a tremendous need for law to change and the required work might seem overwhelming, but Indy puts us back on track and reminds us that there are examples of gigantic systemic change.

We also cover some big topics like democracy and talk about the need for creating better legal concepts and models, such as property right or legal personhood, to transform governance.

Indy Johar is focused on the strategic design of new super scale civic assets for transition – specifically at the intersection of financing, contracting and governance for deeply democratic futures.

Indy is co-founder of darkmatterlabs.org and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00 – https://www.architecture00.net, a founding director of open systems lab – https://www.opensystemslab.io (digitising planning), seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) – https://www.wikihouse.cc and Open Desk (open source furniture company) https://www.opendesk.cc.

Indy is a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub https://bloxhub.org (Denmark Copenhagen) – the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization and was 2016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University. He was also Studio Master at the Architectural Association – 2019-2020, UNDP Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member 2016-20 and RIBA Trustee 2017-20. He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School.

Most recently, he was awarded the London Design Medal for Innovation in 2022.

Episode 50: Fighting Crime by Design with Lorraine Gamman, Adam Thorpe and Marcus Willcocks

November 9, 2022 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

From left to right: Marcus Willcocks, Adam Thorpe and Lorraine Gamman.

Often, when societies want to reduce crime, the idea of more severe punishments comes up. But as lawyers have learnt in criminology classes, that is certainly not the way to go. There are more and more studies showing that more severe punishments not only do not prevent crime but may actually have the opposite effect. In this episode we talk about how to fight crime by design and hear from experts Lorraine Gamman, Adam Thorpe and Marcus Willcocks who work at the Design Against Crime Research Center in the UK.

The mission of Design Against Crime Research Center is to disrupt crime by bringing together government, businesses, local communities, prisoners and returning citizens to generate strong socially responsive, co-created crime prevention strategies and crime diversion projects. Lorraine, Adam and Marcus tell about their projects and we hear what ethical aspects using design against crime have.

We discuss about how crime-doers and prisoners differ as targeted end-users or participants in a design process and how design can empower prisoners to change the path of their lives. In addition, our host Henna, inspired by her own neighborhood in Helsinki, asks questions how to approach solving local crime issues using design.

This is also a milestone for Legal Design Podcast, as this marks our 50th episode! Thank you all for your kind words and support and thank you for listening! Many more to come!

Dr. Lorraine Gamman is Professor of Design at Central Saint Martins and Director of UAL’s award-winning Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC), which she founded in 1999. An authority in applied social design practice, she is co-creator of a range of award-winning anti-crime product interventions and online resources that interpret and address offender techniques. Lorraine teaches in the UK and overseas as Visiting Scholar to international design schools and is currently advisor to the UK’s National Criminal Justice Arts Allowance (NCJAA). She has co-developed significant research funded projects and design outputs and presents extensively on her research and design approaches. She works with policy-makers, crime prevention practitioners, students and communities; and draws on creative teaching and learning methods to involve prisoners in designing against crime.

Adam Thorpe is Professor of Socially Responsive Design at Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London (UAL). He is Co Director of the Design Against Crime Research Centre and Coordinator of the UAL DESIS Lab (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability). He is Principal Investigator of the Public Collaboration Lab, a platform for teaching & learning, knowledge exchange and research focused on participatory design for social, service and policy innovation, delivered in partnership with London Borough of Camden (2015-present). Adam is the Lead Academic for MAKE, a maker space supporting creative collaboration between residents, students and other stakeholders in Somers Town (2018-present) and leads the EU H2020 funded T Factor research for UAL which explores the potential contribution of participatory approaches to temporary urbanism to more inclusive regeneration (2020-2024).

Marcus Willcocks leads the Public Space strand of the award-winning Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC), at the University of the Arts London. As Research Fellow, he is also active with the Socially Responsive Design Innovation hub and Public Collaboration Lab at UAL. He fuses research-led design practice and practice-led research, through place-based, socially responsive and collaborative practices.Willcocks’ focus centres social, safer and equitable connections between people and places. In particular, how real-world applications of research learning and design practice can give way to deliverable innovations and improvements in local-level wellbeing. In his external practice, Marcus is Senior Urban Designer with Sustrans and a Design Council Expert. Marcus holds a Master’s in Design and Public Space, a Diploma in Crime Prevention through Urban Design and Planning, and a BA (Hons) in Product Design.

Episode 34: Making Legal Design Mainstream by Education with Hannele Korhonen

December 15, 2021 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

In this season finale, we meet with Hannele Korhonen to talk about the importance of education when making law better.

Looking from pedagogical point of view, I would say that one effective way to change the mindsets is really education, because change on the individual level is all about learning. It’s about unlearning the unhealthy or undesired ways, and learning new ones.

During this podcast series, we have discussed a lot about how to make Legal Design mainstream. Our this week’s guest, Hannele Korhonen, believes that it can be done with educating people. However, Legal Design is not taught in many law schools yet, but learning happen mostly elsewhere. In this episode, Hannele, the founder and legal designer shares the story and pedagogical philosophy behind Lawyers Design School. At Lawyers Design School, Hannele teaches the new ways of doing law to serve legal customers better and this way find more meaning and purpose to lawyers’ work. Hannele believes in social learning that encourages interaction with others. This way, students will be preparing the skills they need to be successful at work, where most learning is done through on-the-job experiences and interaction with others.

We also talk about curiosity and its meaning in design thinking processes. It takes a curios mind to be able to discover new possibilities. Lawyer’s may be used to do things the same way and they already know how it will come out. But in being curios, lawyers and other legal professionals are able to discover how to do things in a new way with better, more human-centric and client-centric results.

In addition, together with Hannele, our hosts Henna and Nina share their experience and thoughts on their joint collaboration, Sustainable Futures by Legal Design, a virtual event that was held online in November 2021.

Hannele Korhonen, LLM, BSc (Econ) and Vocational Teacher, is the Founder and Legal Designer at Lawyers Design School. She combines legal background of 20+ years with business, legal tech, legal design, service design and pedagogy. Hannele is an ex-corporate lawyer, law firm founder and co-founder in legal tech. She is an experienced teacher and workshop facilitator.

Lawyer’s Design School offers courses and workshops on legal design and design thinking for lawyers and legal teams. Our mission is to drive human-friendly and sustainable law.

Episode 33: Tackling the Chaos Cycle of Insurances by Design with Anthony Novaes

December 8, 2021 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

Many people feel that terms and conditions of insurance contracts aren’t meant to be understood. It’s small print and full of industry specialized jargon, aiming at preventing legal risks, but, on the contrary, actually provoking them. In this episode Henna and Nina meet with Anthony Novaes, a Brazilian lawyer and legal designer, who explains the pain points of insurances and how to address them with the help of legal design.

People purchasing insurances that they don’t understand, causes problems on the next phases of the supply chain. All this makes the insurance industry the perfect candidate for legal design.

Insurance law is a one of the heavily regulated areas of law, which implies that there are many interests involved which need balancing, and particular groups that need governmental protection (or governmental control). The problem of heavy regulation is that it makes the market complex and unpredictable to navigate, especially for anyone who doesn’t have the training for that. Legal design can be of great help to make insurances more functional, and also prevent disputes related to them. Legal design can also offer alternatives to traditional legal regulation, as it can help create policy measures that satisfy the needs of the stakeholders better.

Anthony Novaes is a Brazilian Insurance, Reinsurance and Private Pensions Attorney. He is author of the first academic investigation on legal design applied to insurance and of articles focused on legal innovation, civil law, civil procedural law, legal design, and insurance. He has a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) from Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie and a postgraduate specialization in Insurance Law from Escola de Negócios e Seguros. He has attended the international executive program “Insurtechs: innovación y disrupción digital en seguros” from Pontificia Universidad Argentina and has additional degrees on design, law and innovation. He is currently specializing in Digital Business at Universidade de São Paulo. He is a member of the Brazilian section of Association Internationale de Droit des Assurances (AIDA Brasil), where he is a part of the national working group on Civil Liability Insurance. He was certified as a Legal Design Expert Practitioner by Legal Creatives. He is a teacher and coordinator of the course “Seguros 4.0” at Future Law, which offers the first discipline on legal design and insurance in the world.

Episode 31: Developing the Brazilian Legal System by Design with José Faleiros

November 24, 2021 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

The Brazilian legal system is facing many challenges and undergoing major changes due to application of new technologies. As we know, law itself changes slowly but legal design can assist in this change and bring out the positive. This week we talk to José Faleiros Jr., a Brazilian lawyer and the co-editor and co-author of the book “Legal Design: Teoria e Prática”.

We can’t deny that there are very complex problems to be solved. A solid judicial system is crucial for democracy. To be solid, it needs to be efficient and it needs to be trustworthy. Legal Design helps to create efficiency, and as a consequence, trust.

José tells about the Brazilian legal system and its challenges. For example, in 2020 the Brazilian judicial system had 75 million legal processes lacking a solution. A solid judicial system is also crucial for democracy. And to be solid, the system needs to be efficient and trustworthy and this is where legal design can help.

José Faleiros Jr. is a Brazilian lawyer and a Ph.D Candidate in Civil Law at the University of São Paulo and also a Ph.D Candidate in Law, Technology and Innovation at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. José has focused his professional work and his academic research on cyberlaw, especially on themes such as Internet regulation, personal data protection, AI impacts, blockchain, cryptocurrencies and tort law. José has long been interested in how design might have impacts on law and has dedicated himself to studying such impacts by investing in design as a hobby. Among other publications, he is the co-editor and co-author of the book “Legal Design: Teoria e Prática”, published in Brazil by Editora Foco, in April 2021.

Building a Human Centric Brand with Dinko Kortzanov

November 17, 2021 legaldesignpodcast 0 Comments

I think this is where lawyers have not managed to change the branding (of their services): people are not 100 % sure that if they go to a lawyer, their problem will be fixed. This comes back to design thinking. One of the universal traits of design thinking is that you want to empathize with the people so that you understand what they’re dealing with and what their problem is. And you want to reassure them that you have a solution to their problem.

Legal services are not famous for their human centricity. Quite contrary, legal services have a reputation for being expensive, unpredictable and lacking transparency. Design as a human centric method to enhance user experience would therefore have a lot to offer for legal services. Often lawyers might think that they are client-centric because it says so on their webpage, but how to make sure that they really are and how to start the journey towards client-centrism? And how can lawyers tell about their expertise in social media? In this episode we have a pleasure talking to Dinko Kortzanov who work as a Managing Director in the oldest marketing communications agency in Finland – McCann – where he leads a data driven creative agency, specializing in using research, data and customer insights to help brands earn a meaningful role in peoples lives.

In addition to guiding us being more client-centric, Dinko shares his tips on how to do marketing and selling in legal industry. These topics aren’t thought at law school so selling and marketing might feel a little awkward for legal service providers. But Dinko’s brilliant advice will make selling process more client-centric and can actually help lawyers deliver more meaningful and value adding services to their clients.

But why should we stop using the word “sell” ? Tune in to hear the answer.

Dinko Kortzanov is originally from Bulgaria, having arrived in Finland in the late 80’s with his diplomatic parents. Growing up in an international and diplomatic environment gave birth to his passion about human centricity already at a young age.

As his LinkedIn profile states, Dinko’s “biggest enthusiasm comes from meeting different people and helping them solve all types of challenges successfully”.

He has 10+ years or experience from marketing, and has focused his passion by utilizing Design thinking methods for different problem solvings.Currently he’s working as Managing Director in the oldest marketing communications agency in Finland – McCann – where he leads a data driven creative agency, specializing in using research, data and customer insights to help brands earn a meaningful role in peoples lives.

Tag: design thinking