Tag: legal department

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

May 26, 2023 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 0 Comments

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

March 2, 2023 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 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 35: Value of legal design for in-house counsels with Sarah Ouis

February 2, 2022 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 0 Comments
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.