Avainsana: legal department

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

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 35: Value of legal design for in-house counsels with Sarah Ouis

Sarah Ouis.

New season premiere! We kick We start the season off with the wonderful Sarah Ouis who’s the founder of Law But How? and Legal Design Manager at ContractpodAI to talk about the role and value of legal design for in-house legal teams. Sarah also tells us the inspiring career change she made  when converting from successful in-house counsel into a thriving legal designer.

Without my in-house experience I would have never come across Legal Design so I’m grateful for those years. But I belong to the legal design space now. I feel more purpose.

This episode is dedicated for in-house legal teams as we concetrate on how could legal design help the work and work load for in-house teams. Quite often, in-house legal departments have divided their operations into compliance and litigation units. Legal design, as a proactive method to prevent legal risks, may be something that is easier to connect with compliance practices, but it can be help in traditional legal problem solving too.

Nowadays, the in-house legal departments are being brought closer to the business and legal KPIs are playing a vital role when measuring the success of legal departments. The importance of design is often understood only after seeing what impact it has. For lawyers, it might be hard to think of the ways to measure the impact of legal design. That’s why we asked Sarah for ideas about the KPIs with which the impact of legal design projects could be measured.

Sarah Ouis is the founder of Law But How? A legal design agency focused on simplifying legal information through visualization and helping legal teams and legal service providers create more engaging legal content.  She also works as a Legal Design Manager at ContractpodAi. Before diving fully into the legal design world, she’s been developing a career as an in-house lawyer whilst significantly growing her visibility on social media for her work in legal design.