Tag: design

Episode 60: Contract Lifecycle Management with Isabelle Engelhard and Elisa Ensmenger

Time for our season finale dear listeners!

We are joined by Isabelle Engelhard and Elisa Ensmenger to talk about how to design technology-led future proof legal department. Isabelle and and Elisa both work at We Are Era, a media company and they have recently started their legal transformation journey with implementing a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) System.

Are you tired of drowning in a sea of contracts, struggling to keep track of important deadlines and obligations? Do you find yourself lost in a maze of paperwork, wasting valuable time and resources? Join us as we explore the benefits of implementing a CLM system with Isabelle and Elisa and discover how it can revolutionize the way you manage your contracts. You will gain valuable insights from their experiences, lessons learned, and best practices. Get inspired by their journey and learn how to unlock the full potential of your own CLM system. Whether you’re a contract manager, legal professional, or business owner, this podcast episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to revolutionize their contract management practices.

In addition, we also talk about starting law careers after law school and give tips to recent graduates. Isabelle and Elisa share their stories and experiences working as a lawyer in creative spaces with artists, social media influencers and their agents.

Isabelle Engelhard is a German qualified lawyer working in-house as a Legal Counsel at We Are Era since 2020. Alongside her traditional law studies to become admitted to the German bar, she also holds a LL.B. degree focusing on in-house counseling from the University of Mannheim, Germany and a LL.M. degree in Intellectual Property Law from Cardozo Law School in New York City, USA. As Legal Counsel at We Are Era she advises all non-legal departments as well as management in all legal matters arising from the company’s business units, including the legal areas of Contract Law, IP and Copyright Law as well as Data Privacy Law, Employment Law and Corporate Law. In the past 2 years she has also focused on the topics of Legal Tech and Legal Design and together with her colleague Elisa just recently implemented the company’s first CLM System to improve the internal workflows and to make the interdisciplinary work between the legal and non-legal departments even more efficient and legally secure, all in favor of the company’s big portfolio of clients.

Elisa Ensmenger is a German jurist working in-house alongside Isabelle as a Legal/Contract Manager at We Are Era. She holds a LL.B. degree with a focus on Intellectual Property Law from Humboldt-University Berlin and a LL.M. degree with a concentration in Arts, Sports and Entertainment Law from Penn State Law at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. She has joined Isabelle in 2022 and this is actually Elisa’s first job out of law school. We Are Era caught her eye because Penn State’s motto is “We Are!”, so when she saw the job ad from We Are Era, she felt like this was the perfect job match for a Penn State alum – and she was right! Besides the various exciting topics that they cover on a day to day basis, one of the most exciting ones is implementing the company’s first CLM System.

This episode was made in collaboration with Presicely the user-friendly platform for enterprise contract management. Check out their offer for our listeners: Free contracting assessment – Precisely (preciselycontracts.com)

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

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 54: Designing for a Better World with Don Norman

Don Norman.

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 51: Joining the Boring Revolution with Indy Johar

Indy Johar,

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 23: Doing Law in the 21st Century with Astrid Kohlmeier and Meera Klemola

Meera Klemola (left) and Astrid Kohlmeier.

Access to justice, digitalization, billable hours, burning the midnight oil, comprehensibility, working culture… Those are the topics that often come up when discussing what needs to change in the legal industry. How to do law in the 21st Century with the tools and mindsets from the 18th Century? What would Astrid and Meera do?

In this episode we are joined by the legal design legends and leading global experts Astrid Kohlmeier and Meera Klemola. Astrid and Meera are also published authors, their book “The Legal Design Book – Doing Law in the 21st Century” was published earlier this fall.

Astrid and Meera tell us about the book project (and give valuable tips for the legal publishing industry!). They also share their insights about the core elements of doing law in our era and why we are going through transformation as an industry exactly now. They both have tremendous experience on Legal Design projects and working with different clients and they help us imagine what can be legal designed with sharing some examples on those projects.

We are certain that after listening to this episode, everyone will see the benefits of Legal Design so clearly that it will definitely become the mainstream way of doing law in the 21st Century!

Astrid Kohlmeier is a lawyer and internationally
renowned legal design pioneer. She has been
combining law and design for more than 15 years, with senior roles in the insurance, litigation, finance, and service design industries. The legal design expert advises legal inhouse departments and law firms such as Clifford Chance, Linklaters, Airbus, SAP, NetApp and many more. Winner of several design awards as well as honoured as “woman of legal tech”, she develops user-centric legal solutions with a focus on innovation and digital transformation. Astrid is a member and lecturer of the Executive Faculty at the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession, co-founder of the non-profit
organization “Liquid Legal Institute e.V.”, speaker at relevant conferences worldwide and works with a global network of legal designers. She is actively engaged at the intersection of education and method development to establish the profession of “ legal designers” worldwide.

Meera Klemola is globally recognised as one of the pioneering voices in Human Centred Design for legal professionals and legal business. Dubbed by The Legal Forecast as one of the first ‘Legal Designers’ and the host of the world’s first Legal Design Summit, Meera continues to lead and actively contribute to the discourse on the evolving role of design in law as well as corporate learning and development. Meera is a trusted advisor to some of the largest brands, corporations, law firms and in-house legal teams. She also co-teaches with professors at law schools, is a frequently requested keynote speaker at global innovation conferences
and company retreats and is a contributing author to various platforms on the topics of design in law, modern work and leadership. She holds multidisciplinary qualifications in law, design management and business.

Episode 22: Measuring the Impact of Contract Design with Katri Nousiainen

Katri Nousiainen.

“I personally believe that we need law and economics, and economic theory of legal design. We need to have these to do the scientific measurement, which is necessary for legal design to be seen as a state of a science – and this will naturally facilitate further its use.” says Katri Nousiainen.

There is increasing interest and demand towards contract design. While contract design might be a daily activity in some of the organizations, others might need more prove of why it is important and what’s the impact of contract design. When the impact of design can be scientifically measured, it will make the use of design methods in legal context more appealing as the positive effects for the business can be seen clearly.

But how to measure the impact? This week we are joined by Katri Nousiainen who is conducting her PhD study that focuses on the total impact of design in the framework of commercial contracts. Katri tells us about her reasearch work and explains why research is essential to understand the big picture of contracting. 

Katri Nousiainen is a lawyer and professional in legal education. She is conducting  pioneering empirical research on impact in Legal Design and Ethics in Commercial Contracts  with a twist of Law and Economics. She gives expert legal lectures on various practice areas  of Commercial Law, Legal Design and Law & Technology. She is an invited keynote speaker  at conferences and seminars across Europe. Currently she is conducting her research at the Harvard Law School, in the Center for Legal Profession (US) and at the University of  Cambridge (UK).