Tag: legal education

Episode 40: Becoming Legal Designers with Aku Nikkola and Christine Inkinen

April 12, 2022 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 0 Comments
Christine Inkinen and Aku Nikkola.

Traditionally, law school has been all about reading books and taking exams. People might graduate without seeing a real legal document during their studies and often the real life lawyering doesn’t meet the expectations of recent graduates. In this episode, we meet with Aku Nikkola and Christine Inkinen to talk about what design can offer for legal studies.

Aku and Christine tell us their stories of how they decided to pursuit a career a little different from the traditional legal work and how they became legal designers. We talk about their latest venture, the first ever legal design course organized for law degree students at the University of Helsinki. Aku and Christine are both recent graduates of law school and it is interesting to hear from them what seems to be missing from the traditional legal education. If we want to change the law better for real humans, we should focus on the education and make sure that future lawyers learn the needed skills already at law school. 

Besides discussing what design can offer for legal studies, we talk about the legal design market. Aku and Christine share their views and experience on selling legal design projects and we discuss whether the supply meets the demand in the market at the moment. 

Dot. Legal is an award-winning legal design consultancy from Helsinki. Dot. is known as a forerunner in all things legal and design.

Aku Nikkola is a legal designer and a partner at Dot. Aku is a lawyer second and a front-end wizard first, a true visual perfectionist who understands and wields the power of fonts, colors, icons, and animations; always to the benefit of the end-user.

Christine Inkinen (or Kiki, as we call her) is a legal designer and a partner at Dot. Kiki is a creative problem solver, who focuses on translating technical legalese into accessible and beneficial information for end-users – proving that the pen is still sharper than the sword.

10. Making Law Better with Cat Moon

May 2, 2021 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 0 Comments
Cat Moon.

Future law will be done by the law students of today. To make the legal systems and legal practices fit for purpose in the digitalized era, it is necessary that lawyers know more than just the law. But what are the skills needed for the lawyers of the fourth industrial revolution? And more importantly, are contemporary law schools committed to building those skills?

Back in the day when Henna and Nina were law students, it was possible to graduate from law school without ever seeing an actual legal document, yet practising how to make one. It is no wonder if law graduates struggle adapting to real working life, if the real working life never visits lecture halls.

In this episode we discuss how to make law better through legal education with Caitlin “Cat” Moon. Cat teaches law and legal problem solving in the Program on Law and Innovation at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee. Cat explains why we need human centric design thinking to solve the legal problems of today, and how to build 21st century legal competence by using the Lawyer Skills Delta Model. She also talks about her popular Legal Problem Solving course at Vanderbilt, and we hear what skills podcast making can teach for a future lawyer.

Caitlin “Cat” Moon teaches in the Program on Law and Innovation (PoLI) at Vanderbilt Law School, where she also serves as the Director of Innovation Design and directs the PoLI Institute (innovatethelaw.com), Vanderbilt Law’s innovation-focused executive education platform. In addition to co-organizing Music City (Nashville) Legal Hackers, Cat co-founded the Summit on Law and Innovation (SoLI), which brings together experts across legal, technology, and other disciplines in collaborative legal innovation projects.

Cat currently teaches Legal Problem Solving, a course in human-centered design for law,as well as Law as a Business, Blockchain and Smart Contracts, Legal Operations, and Leading in Law. Cat also serves on the leadership team of the Medical Innovators Development Program and is on the faculty of Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, where she brings cross-disciplinary experience to innovation across medicine and the law.

Cat regularly speaks, facilitates workshops, and coaches individuals globally on the application of human-centered design methods and processes to lead innovation in both the legal profession and legal education. Before joining her alma mater Vanderbilt Law’s faculty, she practiced law for 20 years and still maintains an active law license.

2. Episode: At the Intersection of Legal and Design Thinking with Michael Doherty

March 7, 2021 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 0 Comments
Michael Doherty

Should legal texts be written in the form of poems? Is legal design legal science? What happens when legal and design cultures collide? In the second episode of the podcast series Henna and Nina discuss with Michael Doherty about the relationship between law and design disciplines from philosophical, educational and cultural point of views.

In this episode we also find out that comprehensibility in law is not a new trend, but has been discussed through times. What will it take to make it mainstream? In this episode Henna is let loose and gets to ask funny questions about her law school nemesis, Legal Theory.

Michael Doherty is Professor of Law, and Associate Head of the Law School, at Lancaster University, UK. His main teaching and research areas have been constitutional law and human rights and he is author of Public Law, 3rd ed. (Routledge, 2021). His key interest in higher education has been teaching and learning in law, and he co-created the Connecting Legal Education online community in 2020. He has been the Director of Teaching and Learning at his former and current law schools for over 15 years. He was elected Chair of the Association of Law Teachers in 2004 and served on the ALT committee for 8 years.

Prof. Doherty’s recent publications include ‘Comprehensibility as a rule of law requirement: the role of legal design in delivering access to law’ (2020) in 8(1) Journal of Open Access to Law; ‘The Relationship between Legal and Design Cultures: Tension and Resolution’ in M Corrales, H Haapio, M Hagan and M Doherty (eds), Legal Design: Integrating Business, Design, & Legal Thinking with Technology (Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2021); ‘Re-imagining a law degree: Using service design methods in curriculum design’ (with Tina McKee) in E Allbon & A Perry-Kessaris (ed), Design and Visualisation in Legal Education: Access to the Law (Routledge, forthcoming 2021).