Tag: legal transformation

Episode 32: Demystifying Legal Tech with Colin Levy

December 1, 2021 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized Comments Off on Episode 32: Demystifying Legal Tech with Colin Levy
Colin Levy.

Legal Tech is one of the popular buzzwords you can’t help hearing when talking about the future of law these days. But what exactly is legal tech? That is what we’re going to cover in this episode with Colin Levy.

I see legal tech as sort of cultural movement to embrace technology, and some of the concepts that underly technologies in the practice of law and delivery of legal services. My goal, as I see it, is try to bring more and more people into the community and make it more broader and diverse.

Colin explains how legal tech is different from legal design and what kind of common misunderstanding people may have about legal technology. Colin also tells us what to consider when buying legal tech solutions or when designing technology for lawyers and their clients.

In addition, Colin also talks about how he sees legal tech as a cultural movement to embrace technology, and some of the concepts that underly technologies in the practice of law and delivery of legal services. 

Colin S. Levy is Director of Legal and Evangelist for Malbek, a leading CLM company as well as a seasoned lawyer and legal tech speaker.

Throughout his career, Colin has seen technology as a key driver in improving how legal services are performed. Because his career has spanned industries, he witnessed myriad issues, from a systemic lack of interest in technology to the high cost of legal services barring entry to consumers. Now, his mission is to bridge the gap between the tech world and the legal world, advocating for the ways technology can be a useful tool for the lawyer’s toolbelt rather than a fear-inducing obstacle to effective legal work. Colin has also been driven to effectively empower, inform, and inspire others not only regarding the law and legal services, but also tech, interdisciplinary collaboration, and process improvement.

7. Episode: Design Compliance with Marie Potel-Saville and Elisabeth Talbourdet

April 11, 2021 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 0 Comments
Elisabeth Talbourdet (left) and Marie Potel-Saville.

In this episode we have Marie Potel-Saville and Elisabeth Talbourdet visiting us. Marie shares the story of founding Amurabi, the Legal Innovation by Design agency, and they both tell how they became legal designers. We also talk about designing compliance. If organisations want their stakeholders to comply with certain rules and regulations, they have to design how to make that happen. 

Marie started her career working for the biggest law firms and the most known companies, but after coming across with Legal Design and seeing what an impact it has, she founded Amurabi to continue on working with making law more functional. Elisabeth started her career as an in-house lawyer but quickly moved to Legal Design.

Marie and Elisabeth have worked on many projects on designing compliance. The definition of corporate compliance encompasses the efforts to ensure that organizations are abiding by both industry regulations and government legislation as well as internal policies and procedures. Compliance for employees is often just a set of rules written in legalese and it might be hard to understand how they affect their daily life at work. However, these same rules and complying with them are vital to organisations to prevent and detect violations of these rules, which are to protect the organisations from fines and lawsuits.

The common approach to compliance, however, is to “tick the box” when certain formalities in the company’s compliance protocol have been accomplished, without making sure whether people really know and understand what is expected of them. No wonder we get to read so often about corporate misconduct in the newspapers. If organizations really want to succeed in corporate compliance, it might require some human-centric design and understanding of social psychology and neuroscience. ”If you really want people to comply, then of course you have to design it”, says Marie. “There is no formalistic compliance, there’s only effective compliance”.

Marie Potel-Saville combines over 15 years of Magic Circle experience at Freshfields and Allen & Overy in London, Brussels, Paris and EMEA General Counsel experience at Estée Lauder Companies and Chanel, along with a Master’s degree in Innovation by Design (ENSCI). After having seen the results of Legal Design in her own legal division, she founded Amurabi to share its potential: more than a theory, it’s a tool for empowerment. In addition, she is a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, University of Management of Singapore, Assas and contributes to initiatives of social service (access to justice, civic education, prevention).

Elisabeth Talbourdet graduated from La Sorbonne, Sciences Po, King’s College London and Columbia Law School and trained as a lawyer amongst renowned law firms in London and Paris. Elisabeth discovered Legal Design working in-house and was immediately taken by this new approach to law. She sees Legal Design as a solution to make legal information clear and actionable – and to change the way legal recommendations are perceived, understood and applied. A legal design pioneer of her generation, Elisabeth has already worked on over 30 projects and facilitated dozens of workshops and conferences within Amurabi.

5. Episode: Innovation in Courts with Andrea Lindblom

March 28, 2021 legaldesignpodcast Uncategorized 0 Comments
Andrea Lindblom

Courts, like all legal institutions, are designed for lawyers. However, the people whose lives going to court affect the most are the legal laymen. How these real end-users of courts would benefit, if their needs were addressed by re-designing the court experience?

In this fifth episode of the podcast series we talk about the possibilities of innovation, technology and legal design in courts with Andrea Lindblom, who works as the Chief of Administration in the District Court of Helsingborg, Sweden. 

Courts are known to be the blind services of the justice, pursuing objectivity, formality and the rule of law. For non-lawyers, however, a court process can be full of obscurities and evoke feelings of disconnection, anxiety and lack of control over one’s own case, not to mention the possibility of financial losses. For most of the people going to court is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, often leaving bitter-sweet memories that last for life. But what if legal design could help make the court experience more satisfying, and not just for the end-users but the lawyers as well?

Making courts more human-centric is not the only update courts might need these days. Courts are struggling to keep up with the rapid technological development and the new ways of providing court services in the digital world – all while resources are tight and case numbers going high. Experimenting for new ideas does not come easy, though, as lawyers are traditionally trained to look backwards when solving problems. Design thinking mindsets such as “fail fast” and “be curious” are rarely combined to the work done in courts.

How to initiate the needed change in courts, Andrea? “I think it is quite urgent that courts have an open mindset towards, for example, new  technology, and new ways of doing things. We need to find ways to experiment lightly, gently, because it’s much better for us to fail small and early in a process, then massively and late”.

Andrea Lindblom graduated from Lund University (law) in 2009. She has been working at Helsingborg District Court since 2011. During the last few years she has focused on issues relating to the presence of the courts and judges on social media and how digitalization affects the courts. In March 2019 Helsingborg District Court arranged Sweden’s first legal tech & design workshop in the public sector. Andrea was awarded Legal Innovator of the Year in 2019 and was one of the winners in the category Public Services, Politics & Social at European Women of Legal Tech in 2020.

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).