I had a lot to think about on my way back from Helsinki.
The Legal Design Summit has a longstanding reputation of being THE event in the industry.
I first joined two years ago, and was excited to come back, this time to also share my own work and perspective as a speaker.
As a side note and a little wink, I was incredibly excited to enjoy the summit in the company of members of our Czech Legal Ops community. If that sounds fun, we are reconvening for three interesting sessions this Q4.
Big topics in legal design
The Summit is an incredible safe space for jamming and co-creating, and a perfect venue to discuss AI in legal design, legal design as a methodology, design maturity of the field, holistic legal design, and (of course) future of legal education.
There were of course many more themes, but these stuck with me, both in and out of sessions.
AI in Legal Design
AI is the colleague that the legal designers are still making their minds about.
In law, there are always two levels to every practice: what the practitioners do and what the people do in their everyday lives – and AI adoption is no exception.
On the professional practice, the various flavours included improving efficiency in the problem space, agentic legal design, AI-powered design sprints, augmenting creativity and ideation, rapid prototyping, and, of course, meaningful usage and prompting.
On the everyday, Kim Raad noted that the job of the lawyer as the gatekeeper of law is over. This democratization of access to legal information (of varying degree of reliability and quality) is a huge and very impactful topic. As a resource, Margaret Hagan explores what good legal Q&A looks like here.
Towards a legal design methodology
Legal Design community is slowly taking in this long-standing innovation lore, with bespoke design process diagrams increasingly popping up in case studies.
As the community and the field mature, there are naturally more opinions as to how the work should be done.
The IDEO-style empathize-define-prototype-test is a brilliant opener for newcomers – but perhaps we have gotten to a point to bake something more bespoke for legal design.
Education and design maturity of legal design as a field
A related issue: if we have degrees of maturity to the legal design doing, how do these translate into a pool of qualifications that practitioners should gain?
This concern was whispered across the gorgeous halls, in particular by the newcomers: how do I do this thing properly.
When does one actually earn their right to call themselves a legal designer?
Some get another degree in design or come into it after a bootcamp or a certification. Some work in multidisciplinary teams, pairing up with UX or service designers. Some just do a lot of it.
All of these are legit if practiced deliberately. While there is not much gatekeeping in this enthusiastic community, there is a shared feeling about a certain vocational standard to legal design as a practice.
Sustainability, non-human, and experiential narratives
There was a more holistic vision for legal design beyond human-centric design as well, manifested by multiple sessions, especially:
- The brilliant panel on trauma-informed legal design (Aaron Leakey, Jeremie Quiohilag, Scott Young) asked what is the difference between lived experience of justice and justice as formulated in the conventional legal system – and at what level the design of justice can or should be felt
- Nina Toivonen spoke about our environment as a stakeholder in legal design process. How can we represent nature in legal processes, and gauge the planet’s needs and preferences?
Law is not an isolated phenomenon, but instead has complex interactions with other systems, be it societal or planetary.
Focusing just on the lingo or the institutions may not adequately address underlying human or planetary needs.
Bonus: Future(s) of Legal Education, a.k.a. what I talked about at the summit?
I listened to all the talks with slight jitters, as my own panel was scheduled on the second day of the conference.
The brilliant minds behind the Summit brought me together with three brilliant co-conspirators:
- Michael Doherty, the first-ever legal design professor, the Editor-in-Chief of the Legal Design Journal, and an absolute rockstar
- Ruy Coppola, Jr., innovator and educator with an incredibly dedicated clique of students and a proclivity for colorful socks
- Tiago Guerreiro, a litigator that teaches law to children and has the best grasp on belonging that I have seen in a very long time
The perspective that I brought to this lineup was all about Legal Futures and the question of designing future-proof legal education.
At least some of the youngsters that Tiago introduces to law today will go to law school – around the year 2040. What will legal education, the legal system, and the world look like and feel like then?
In my practice, I nowadays borrow greatly from design futures, speculative design, and futures studies.
As these methods are fairly new in legal design context, I was more in teacher mode, instead of deep diving and nerding about the Futures Cone.
I, however, intend to do that here over the coming months. In the meantime, you might enjoy this digest from a futuring workshop I led earlier this year.
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Three swift, actionable takeaways from our panel
- Listen to your students, care, and above all learn their names
- Futures perspectives can have an incredible byproduct of switching off of the lawyer’s critical mindset – because it is the future hypothetical, it is not personal
- If we are to innovate, we should also explore the metrics behind legal education. I use a variety of quantitative and qualitative metrics, but I also liked Ruy’s addition: is there a spark in the students’ eyes?
One final idea to think about
What would you like to see in the future of legal design – as your practice, as a community, as a concept?
Legal design is not just a creative add-on to law, but an opportunity to reimagine law from first order principles.
Generative AI has the potential to supercharge design possibilities, but also forces us to ask ourselves, if design is still the right lens.
Our design choices ultimately influence not only how we practice and teach, but how law and justice are experienced by people and communities in the decades ahead.
Michael concluded our panel with one important note: regardless of the technology, a lot of our work as educators and legal designers ultimately relies on human connection and empathy.
And these are the real cornerstones of legal design, in Helsinki and around the world.
Baru
