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Legal design is the application of human-centered design to law, making legal systems and services more accessible, usable, and satisfying. Today, we are joined by fantastic legal design leaders Tessa Manuello, Astrid Kohlmeier, and Sarah Ouis.  

Tessa Manuello is the Founder and CEO of Legal Creatives, an online educational platform empowering legal professionals from 50+ countries to think more creatively about the law, build better brands, and win new customers. Astrid Kohlmeier is a lawyer and internationally recognized pioneer in legal design. For more than 15 years, she has combined law and design in senior positions in the insurance, litigation finance and service design industries. Sarah Ouis is an experienced legal design consultant and visual legal design coach. She is also a successful legal content creator coach, reaching millions of views on social media and followed by some of the most highly regarded legal industry leaders. 

Tune in as they share the importance of legal design and the possibility of having a legal design career that those in law school might have in the future. They also share how they got into legal design and how their training impacted their work and interest in the space. Finally, they reveal a key takeaway many should consider in making their practice more creative. 

Relevant episode links:

Astrid Kohlmeier , Legal Creatives , Sarah Ouis - LinkedIn , IDEO  , Legal Design Summit in Helsinki 

About Tessa Manuello:

Tessa Manuello is the Founder & CEO of Legal Creatives, an online educational platform empowering legal professionals from 50+ countries to think more creatively about the law, build better brands, and win new customers. 

Tessa is known as one of the world’s most influential thought leader in Legal Design and Innovation. She holds 3 LLMs including one from Sorbonne in France, where she was born and raised; South Africa where she studied International Human Rights for a year, and Canada where she moved to specialize in Conflict Prevention and Resolution. She worked in arbitration and mediation in one of the world's most renowned institutions, managing cases and reviewing arbitral awards. When in 2013 she discovered creativity as a structured approach to resolving problems, and turn challenges into opportunities and breakthrough innovations, she started researching the potential of creativity as a structured innovation methodology for the legal sector. 

Tessa undertook academic research at the intersection of creativity, the law and mediation, and her paper was recognized as the best of the law faculty for that year. In 2017 she founded Legal Creatives as an online platform designed to empower legal professionals to innovate and use design and creative thinking mindsets, methods, and techniques. 

In 2019, she curated and delivered the world’s first course in a law faculty entirely dedicated to teaching creativity and traveled the world to share her research by delivering masterclasses in North and South America, also speaking engagements in Europe, and then continued remotely. Since 2020, she's been working remotely from Brazil, continuing her work online with international audiences, also now exploring Web3, the Metaverse, NFTs, and Blockchain to design the future of the law.  

About Astrid Kohlmeier:

Astrid Kohlmeier is a lawyer and internationally recognized pioneer in legal design. For more than 15 years, she has combined law and design in senior positions in the insurance, litigation finance and service design industries. The legal design expert advises legal departments and law firms such as Clifford Chance, Linklaters, MERCK, Airbus, SAP, NetApp and many more. Honored with several design awards as well as being a "woman of legal tech", she develops user-centric legal solutions with a focus on innovation and digital transformation. 

Astrid is a member and lecturer of the Executive Faculty at the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession, co-founder of the non-profit "Liquid Legal Institute e.V.", speaker at relevant conferences worldwide and collaborates with a global network of legal designers. She is actively engaged at the intersection of education and method development to establish the profession of "Legal Designers" worldwide. The book "Legal Design", which she co-authored with Meera Klemola, is available in English and German and covers the framework of legal design and its step-by-step application. It is a practical guide written by legal industry practitioners and is a helpful way to approach legal innovation, digitalization, and change management in legal organizations. 

About Sarah Ouis:

Sarah Ouis is an experienced legal design consultant and visual legal design coach. Driven by a strong desire to problem solve creatively in the legal industry, she takes pride in assisting legal teams and legal service providers transform their delivery of legal services with legal design. 

As a legal design consultant, her goals include improving the usability and accessibility of legal information through different mediums, from contracts to policies to social media content. 

Sarah is also a successful legal content creator coach, reaching millions of views on social media and followed by some of the most highly regarded legal industry leaders. In addition to her primary job functions, Sarah has been featured on the LinkedIn 2022 directory of women who inspire through their work.

I'm pleased to have a special program. I have been waiting to bring these amazing leaders in legal design to the show who are all over the world. This is not US based. It is worldwide based. I'm excited to introduce their work and the importance of legal design, and the possibility of having a legal design career that those in law school might have in the future. I will introduce all three of our panelists, then we will get chatting. 

Astrid Kohlmeier is the author of a wonderful legal design book, which I highly recommend. Tessa Manuello is the leader of Legal Creatives and has created an amazing legal design community. Sarah Ouis is my first entry. She was the first one that introduced me to legal design and did an amazing job doing a cool design for one of my projects. She boiled down ten pages of written stuff to a few slides of visuals that can give what I was interested in conveying to clients in the appellate realm. Thank you so much for joining us, and I look forward to this discussion.  

First, I wanted to start with fundamentals and maybe more than fundamentals once we get talking about what legal design is. When we use that term, what are we talking about? It could be an array of things. What it means now, what the concepts are, how it is being applied now, and where it might be applied in the future. Astrid, I was going to start with you on this because you have the book, and you have the definitions in the book. I thought maybe we start with that first and then layer on top of that.  

Thank you very much for the introduction. I'm happy to go into a definition of what legal design is. We could maybe talk for one and a half hours only about the definition because there are many outside there. There is one core concept that we could agree on altogether since it is a young profession and a young theory or method.  

In simple words, it is embedding the idea of design and the design process into the law. All of us could agree with that. What does it mean? It means combining law and design to get to legal solutions. This is a very important part of the legal design. On the other hand, to make it accessible, easy to understand, and engaging.  

Often, people think legal design is only visualizations in contracts, for example. It is not only about visualization, and anything in a contract. It is even more. It is a whole concept. It is a whole idea of how to get to user-centric solutions where the user and needs are always in the middle of all investigations. At the end of your journey, when designing something, maybe some visualization comes into place. All three of us here in this call could agree on this more or less definition without having me being the one who makes the definition for the word.  

The user-centric point is the key. That is what is driving how you are looking at problems or making things clear. You are thinking about the user when you are doing that. That is a concept that the law hasn't had in it previously. It is an area of specialization that lawyers and those trained in the law deal with. Lawyers are talking to lawyers, and lawyers are talking to judges. The client isn't involved in that. That concept is revolutionary to the law. I had a question about design thinking. Design thinking has been brought into Stanford Business School. They are popular and well-known for having done that in a management context. How does legal design relate to that design thinking approach in a business context? 

Design thinking is the described process of how designers approach their work. It got institutionalized at Stanford. Companies like IDEO adopted that early, and they were the ones who also drove the expression design thinking. You can't use anything now on our mobile phones or anything without design thinking. It is the concept of the most successful innovation method worldwide. 

To your question, how does it relate to business or legal business? It is what legal design brings into place. It is adopting the idea of design thinking and placing it into challenges of the legal realm in any part. It may be legal content that might be easier to understand. It might be the concept of access to justice and how people can fulfill their rights or have access to judges in their system, but it could also be about how we come up with legal tech solutions or digitalization. This is an endless list, but just to mention a few things here. When it comes to business law or legal business, it is the idea of having the concept laid here in the legal field, but also always make sure that you don't forget about the law because if you forget about the law, then you only have design thinking.  

You have to integrate it with the substance of what we are talking about. Never forget what context you are in. Thanks so much for talking about that connection between design thinking and the business context. I went to a school at Stanford. I'm focused on what they are doing in their various schools. That has been a big thing for the school of business. I'm glad you connected those dots and that it is not in a vacuum.  

Some of those things are happening in the business world, which is where a lot of people in the law work. It is also now being brought to the law. Tessa, I wanted to have you weigh in on this in terms of legal design and what it looks like. You have a slightly different role and approach to it and creating a community worldwide of an online school. I'm curious about what you have seen about how legal design started and where it is going. 

Thank you so much for the opportunity to share on the show. It is an honor to be in great company and to talk a little bit about how I see the legal design, where it is going and how it started. Astrid did a great pudding in context and all of that. I'm not going to talk too much about the past, but maybe I could talk about the present. What I see now happening in the legal design space is a lot of interest in contract visualization, adding some visuals to the content, and not just using text but using all sorts of visual aid. That could be icons, illustrations, diagrams, flow charts, and timelines. That could also be as simple as colors and a different font instead of Times New Roman.  

All of those are happening now. There's huge interest on a global scale. Although we don't necessarily see contract visualization being mainstream yet, we do see a lot of projects in many jurisdictions across all continents everywhere around the world. In the community that I lead and legal creators, we got to put focus on that. Although initially, that was not necessarily the idea. Because that is the main interest, we have to adapt also to the needs and the wants of the market. We do see a lot of legal professionals within the community experimenting and learning a little bit of the design portion to be able to integrate that into the legal practice. 

In terms of the future and where it is going, it is difficult to predict because the possibilities are endless for as long as you can imagine. Imagination here is going to be key to being able to leverage this methodology and innovate. There are many innovations that we could potentially think about. Some of them can be very disruptive. Others can be a little bit more incremental. It all depends on the vision we have for ourselves, legal practice, law firm, and legal department. Knowing a little bit about our vision and purpose, why we do what we do, and how we want to do it is going to be helpful. 

To bring a little example, why do I do what I do with legal critics being global, international, and online? It is because that is my purpose and vision. I love to be online and interact daily with people from across the world and share ideas and insights. That led me to create this international global online platform for someone else who may have a different why, purpose, and preferences. The beauty of this methodology is that it can help you reach that goal, whatever goal you have. The methodology works the same even if your interests, goals, objectives, and ambitions are different.  

That was something that I had in mind in inviting all of you because it isn't just that you have different avenues within the legal design. It is that each of those avenues reflects your particular interest, mission, and strengths. There is a lot of possibility with this because it is new. You can put your own stamp on things and create within your own community your own approach to it within that larger concept of legal design. That is something that doesn't usually happen in the law space. It is exciting for that reason that you are able to do that.  

The other point you made is it is certainly in contracts right now, but it is extending beyond. I remember reading about some legal award for a treatise for one of the practice guides. Wolters Kluwer has one that is driven by design thinking and how it is put together. That is another extension beyond contracts to treatises, casebooks, and things like that. That is a real-life example of things that are happening and that people are recognizing. 

This is my initial interest in talking about this with Sarah. She had amazing designs that she was doing on LinkedIn in her own interest. It created new concepts and integrated the brand of companies into things that she was doing. It is a wonderful work from the beginning, as far as I can see. I talked to her about this concept in a briefing. Assuming we are following the rules of the court, how can we make our appellate briefs more accessible? How can we demonstrate concepts to the court? As courts have become more comfortable with even graphs or visual presentations that illustrate concepts and help them decide cases, how can we integrate that more and raise it to a new level in appellate briefs?  

Sarah, I wanted you in on the discussion too in terms of what legal design is to you and how you have approached it. As far as I can see, you approached it from a lawyer specific, how you can train lawyers to integrate some of these concepts into their own work without regularly relying on a legal designer design professional to do it for them. That is an interesting step forward too. 

It is hard to come after Tessa and Astrid because I feel you ladies have said a lot already. There is a little I can add other than I think legal design is what we make out of it. Tessa was talking about possibilities being endless because it is always down to our imagination. If legal professionals can change their mindset and realize the potential that they have to do things differently and problem-solve in a way that is different from what we were taught in law school. 

This is where we can start seeing beyond visualization and better legal documents. These are the most obvious use cases. We could perfectly imagine having a digital journey on the website as opposed to a manual form that you would have to fill out for visualization contracts. At the end of the day, out comes the design process and prototypes that you can work from, but the possibilities are endless.  

The way I came across legal design was without realizing what it was. It was the realization coming from an in-house legal background. The legal department was perceived as the department of no, deal breakers, boring, and inaccessible. I couldn't resonate with this perception. I started to transform the way I was practicing, especially in my interactions with business people in order to challenge that perception and come across as being a business partner and more accessible.  

I started from that observation of the problem. This is where I started to innovate and iterate. One of the first things I created were training materials and putting infographics on PowerPoint. These were my first experiments. I shared them on LinkedIn. When people started to see that, it inspired lawyers. The core message was you don't have to be a professional graphic designer to come up with innovative ideas. You can educate yourself on how to do certain things. The most important thing is being eager to learn, being experimental, having this continuous improvement type of mindset, solving the problem creatively, and always keeping your end user in mind. That is how it all started. 

Be eager to learn. Be experimental and have this continuous improvement mindset, solving problems creatively and always keeping your end user in mind. 

To Tessa's point, the emphasis now is on contract visualization. As lawyers become legal professionals, they become not only aware of the discipline but also self-aware that things need to change. We cannot continue practicing law in the way it used to be 50 years or 100 years ago. Very little has changed. If we look at all the industries, they have profoundly transformed. We can't just stand still. Hopefully, the legal education system will embrace those new disciplines and will empower the next generation of legal professionals to do new things. Most things have started to shift for, hopefully, the greater good.  

Sarah, you are great on the transition to what I wanted to talk about next. I think that each of you came to this or whatever attracted you to legal design are your backgrounds prior to that in serving as in-house counsel, and seeing those concerns which come up so often, as you said, the department of no, and “Are you just costing us money and not helping us in some way with our business?”  

By helping the company be more user and customer-centric, and incorporating that into how the legal department works with the sales department or other parts of the company, you are then showing the value of in-house. As you mentioned, Sarah, as you start having that perspective of let's think about the reader, which would be the judge, court, client, and parties to the deal, you change your internal view of what is important. You start bringing that in a lot of different ways to the practice of law.  

It is an ongoing process. It may start in one way. You see the value there, and then it could move in other ways. The law is generally slow, which is good because we wanted to develop over time and not suddenly so society can handle some of those changes, but it is going against the grain of how the law operates generally. 

As you mentioned, Tessa, in terms of legal tech, I have always seen that legal design and legal tech are connected. People who are in legal tech are generally interested in legal design, and they are put together. I always wondered why that was. To me, I'm like, “Legal design is different.” You would incorporate it as you mentioned. That is a good point. You would think about those things when you are putting your tech together so that you can make it more successful and user-friendly. Certainly, that is there. They see the value in incorporating that.  

I also think there is something broader than that in terms of a different way of thinking and looking at problems that both legal tech and legal design have. There is a larger marriage at that level of conceptualization. I wanted to ask Astrid and Tessa the point that Sarah moved into, which is how is it that you came to legal design, and how do you think that your legal training and more traditional careers in the law prior to that have impacted both your work and your interest in the space?  

I have to add something to what you said about the connection between legal tech and legal design. I have a motto always with clients and consulting law firms, as well as in-house departments. I work with over 5,000 people until now. What I always say when it comes to legal tech and legal design is to not forget that legal tech makes no sense without legal design.  

Legal design is the base for everything because it leads you to the right problems and needs of the stakeholders that you are serving. This also leads you to the right interfaces that you don’t need for a legal tech tool or whatever. If you don’t know what problem you wanted to solve, you cannot build a legal tech tool. Companies that are still building up tech tools without design thinking or legal design fail.  

Building tech tools without design thinking or legal design will always fail, and we see that across the world.

That is more fundamental, Astrid, because you want to figure out if you are going to engineer for the right problem and if you are going to be able to address the problem properly with what you are planning to do. If not, the whole venture is going to fall off a cliff.  

It also brings me back to your initial question, how did I start and how do I get into legal design? I started as a lawyer in a law firm, but then found myself in situations as an associate to only write texts that others wanted me to write in a way they wanted to write them. I saw no sense in it and also realized the way people addressed texts do not understand them. This was twenty years ago. It was super early and it was not a concept right away for me to say, “I have to change it.” 

I moved to the insurance industry in-house in a litigation funding company, which also brought me new ideas. It was a new concept then, litigation funding. It was a startup environment. I had a position on the management team for marketing and communication. I realized when working together with designers that they have different ways of approaching problems. This is where my idea awoke, “Could we maybe combine communication design skills with the law?” This was the beginning of everything in my case. 

If you think about how advertising texts or the people in the design business of advertisement approach problems and end up with only one short sentence that says it all, I was fascinated right away. I thought to myself, “As lawyers, our only working tool is text in our words. We have to know the techniques of what you can do with words.” This was far beyond visualizations or anything. Advertisement industries do exactly that. They combine text and pictures and bring you to buy or want something.  

That was the spark for me to dig deeper into the design. I decided to study design besides my day job. This brought me to the point of how I can make the connection between the two professions because we both need it and especially lawyers need it. In 2013, I ended up connecting those two dots and became an independent consultant for others, making the law accessible and understandable. Also, in the beginning, having more of this conversation about tricks in the advertising industry.  

We then drove together as a community worldwide in the direction of legal design. It may have started for real in 2017 or so at the first Legal Design Summit in Helsinki. That was an initial spark for many people worldwide to come up with the idea, see it as a profession, and have a business out of it. It is interesting information when it comes to the history of how we came to that profession now.  

It is hopping up around the world in that way. People are coming to it, realizing its usefulness from different perspectives. Is there something you think about where the legal world is at or where the world is at generally that it would have coalesced or had that spark around 2017? Astrid, is there something you can point to?  

It was cool that Helsinki as a city supported the university, and students drove the whole movement there to come up with this initial event. It was being at the right time at the right place to understand, “There is something happening here.” There are many people coming together who don't bear anymore sometimes how we work as lawyers, and how we could make it better. We want to have another impact for once, and we want to make it simpler. We do not want to have that complicated wording anymore. We are all asking ourselves, “How could we do that?” 

It came from different angles. The main idea of the concept of design thinking implemented in law was already there but as an initial thought. From Helsinki, many people got back into their own countries and became evangelists more and more. I was an evangelist before, but I did not have the expression of legal design that came up in 2014. It gave us all the opportunity to talk about the things we were not confident about anymore. That was a big driver for the movement.  

Tessa, what about your journey to legal design, was there a specific problem you were looking to solve?  

I have a different perspective from Astrid's story because, in 2017, I was between Montreal and New York. I was on the other continent. I was not able to go to Helsinki. I didn't even know this event was happening. I remember creating Legal Creatives in 2017 in July and this summit was in September. I don't even know about it. My perspective is a bit different, being geographically on the other continent. Although initially, I was in Europe. I was born in France. 

I came to legal design via the root of creativity. I have a legal background. I went to law school. I started my career working as a case manager in the field of arbitration, domestic and international, in a large organization. After a couple of years working there, maybe because of my background being a little bit tech savvy, I was not going over the computer, but I got access to one when I was a teenager. I was comfortable using the technology, although, at the time, the technology was not at all what it is now.  

Maybe because of that, I felt I could do more if I had better tools. At the time, those tools did not exist. We didn't have legal tech back in 2003 or 2004. We didn't have the accessibility of the legal technology or just the technology at large that we have now. Feeling a little bit frustrated and not able to fulfill my purpose, I decided to drop out.  

I moved to Canada and this is where I discovered in Toronto at a creativity conference that we could use creativity to problem solve and innovate in all kinds of sectors. I was mind blown by what I saw, heard, and experienced. Also, the people I met like thought leaders and experts in the field of creativity and creative problem-solving as we also know it. I fell in love with it. I was like, "I feel at home. Those are my people." 

I started to learn more about creativity. Eventually, I made my way back to law using all of that knowledge, research, experiment, and the world of paper on the topic of creativity. That was a niche topic because every research has to be niche. It was creativity in the field of judicial mediation. That was creative ideas under the constraint of time. I love doing the research although it is extensive and a little bit exhausting. It is tough to do research, but I love the process of it.  

As I did the research, I was like, “I love researching, sharing, and teaching.” Hence, I created the educational platform in 2017. This is how I made my way to legal design, which I didn't know at the time existed. As Astrid said, having a name for what we do makes everything so much easier. Because of legal design as a name and concept, people picked up on it. We are all surfing this wave. Whether we come from tech, design, creativity, marketing, law or everything together, it is designed to help in this interdisciplinary approach to innovate and do things differently but to do things better.  

Everything together is designed to help in this interdisciplinary approach to innovate, do things differently, and do things better.

When people think about creativity, they will often think it has to be some brand-new idea that shazams out of the sky. Often, creativity is what you are talking about, which is this cross-interdisciplinary approach to things, seeing one idea or concept in one setting, and then translating it or adapting it to a new setting.  

I had that experience myself when I went back and took some classes in creative writing. Way back in the day, before I became a lawyer, I thought I would be a writer, an author or something like that. I had this early midlife crisis. I went back to short story writing and all this creative writing. What I took away from it was something similar to what you are talking about, which is it was nice to be in that world. I realized it wasn't my world, but there were a lot of concepts to take from it to apply to legal writings that weren't necessarily being done.  

There were a lot of corollaries between creative writing and legal writing that should be there because we are telling a story for the purpose to persuade. We need to tell the best stories we can. We can use tools from traditional creative writing to do that. Most lawyers don't think that way. They think there is legal writing and there are other kinds of writing. Even creative writers think that.  

I had to bring briefs in to show them. I'm like, “We tell stories.” Especially at the appellate level, we are telling a true story based on the record, but we are telling a story designed for a purpose to persuade the court to rule in a particular way. They are true storytelling, all of the concepts you are talking about. I had to bring these in and show them. They were like, “Some legal writing is like that,” but most of it isn't. There are opportunities to do that.  

That interdisciplinary cross-disciplinary is a sweet spot that people don't think about in terms of creativity, but it’s where a lot of magic happens. What you are all describing is people coming with all of those different perspectives, bringing different aspects of interdisciplinary thought into the law. Legal design is a big tent as a result of that because there are many different things that are incorporated. Thanks so much for raising that point, Tessa. That is an important one. People don't often think about it that way.  

It’s not just your personalities, interests and skills that you bring to legal design, but your backgrounds, the problems, and the why of what you are doing, as Simon Sinek would say. You're bringing different missions to it. I have a question, Sarah, because you deal with a lot of lawyers and help them integrate some designs into their work. If the best of my visual and drawing ability is stick figures, can I still incorporate legal design when I'm visualizing for the user? How do I do that?  

You can. You wouldn't want to see my drawings. The most important thing is upskilling. Have an open mind and be open to learning other disciplines. Similarly to Astrid, I took the path into the legal design without realizing that it was a thing. I also decided to upscale and I went to study graphic design. That is where I dive into visual design principles. That is when I realized that it is a methodology. It is not tool-dependent. You don't have to use the other suite. You don’t have to be a professional designer to design information in a certain way. It is all about upskilling and diving into certain principles.  

You have to be a professional designer to design information in a certain way. It's all about upskilling and diving into certain principles.

The thing that lawyers typically do, especially with computers is work from Word. You can do things in Word as long as they use the tools and you have the right methodology for it. You can apply those visual design principles at least to the readability of the documents, be it the contract or policy or what have you. You can start incorporating other graphic design elements such as icons and illustrations, etc.  

It all goes down to anyone can do it as long as you have an open mind and you are keen on experimenting and learning. That includes learning from people who have been on that purposely outside of the legal industry. I wanted to learn from the perspective of people outside of the industry to see what they do when they design adverts, and what things I could incorporate with legal information.  

In that instance, sometimes I have found that for people who are experts in that way, it is best to see them in action. If you ask them to explain what they are doing, they internalize things so much that they forget to tell you the various steps or what they are thinking about when they are doing those designs.  

I want to get to something tangible that people can either take away or think about. We have talked about some of the applications. It helps to have visuals, but we are not in video format. I'm wondering if maybe each of you could talk about one key principle or takeaway that a practicing lawyer or an in-house counsel could think about, whether it is an approach to how they look at their documents or one particular technique from advertising or something else that is helpful in this context. Sarah, do you want to start with that?  

One concrete application that would benefit anyone who wants to get going is not trying to reinvent the wheel. Try to look at problems that you are having in your practice, whether you are in-house or in private practice. Try to find ways to problem solve it using design thinking and design principles. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. It can be a two-pager, NDA, policy, or social media for that matter. It can be an article that you have written that you would like to maybe revisit. You realize that it is not that clear. It could be made better. Ask for feedback. 

I would always encourage legal professionals to experiment, get going, and practice design thinking and design principles on the concrete problem they are facing. If you can think of a problem, something that we always mention is documents. Take one contract, try to rip it apart, and try something else. There are lots of free resources online. If you take training, it is even better if you can learn from someone else. You don't have to start fancy but dive into those principles and practice. This would be my two cents, design thinking and design principles.  

Social media is a good entry point for a lot of people because more people have gone online over the pandemic, but that requires re-conceptualizing and repackaging of things. If you have a long article, there is no way that it is going to translate well in the social media realm. You need to adapt it to that medium because it is different from other kinds of things that lawyers are used to. It is short usually so you want it to be concise. That is a good thought piece to work with first. Tessa, what do you think about one takeaway or principle that people could consider in making their practice a little more creative?  

Thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit of some of the practical tips, strategies or insights. The most important thing about this methodology is that it is an iterative methodology. What that means is a bit like what Sarah said, you don't need to get it right or perfect the first time. For lawyers, that may be a little counterintuitive because everything needs to be perfect the first time. This methodology is creating spaces for you to experiment with new things, new ways to draft contracts, new ways to communicate legal information, new ways to work together in your law firm or legal department, and new ways with your customer. When you create a safe space to experiment, one thing that I would recommend to do is to always ask for feedback. Asking for feedback is not something we used to do in the law because we are supposed to have it right. We are the expert. With the methodology, feedback is critical to this iterative process.  

A simple way to ask for feedback is whatever you do, whether it is trying to redesign the document or ask your customers or your users. Although it may sound a little bit scary to do, they are going to appreciate it a lot because you care for the information you deliver and the service. Ask about the redesign you do. What are some of the things that your customer like in this new design? What are some of the things that they may still have a little bit of difficulty understanding? What are some of the ideas that will make this even better for them? It is all about serving them, and maybe what other things they don't like. 

Most of the time, what customers say when they read legal docs is they don't like fine print. That is a paradox because everything is a fine print. Start incorporating some icons to highlight important parts of the document or maybe do a little different layout and information. Is it better? Is the experience of reading the document better?  

Asking for feedback is great. That will help you be more close to your customer's needs. That will also help you start changing the culture a little bit. When we are closer to the customer’s needs, we are asking for feedback more often, and we integrate that feedback, we can start to change a bit the way we do things using this methodology. I know you ask about creativity. Even if we are creative, we still need to make sure that whatever we produce, create, and deliver is going to be better from the perspective of the customer. Hence, feedback is important. It is not difficult to execute. 

Even if we are creative, we still need to ensure that whatever we produce, create, and deliver will be better from the customer's perspective. 

It’s like a little mindset. You have to get over that. Our training is to get it right and don't be wrong. It has to be 100% perfect. Don't ask anyone about it because you are supposed to be able to figure out what 100% perfect is. That is why you are being hired. Why would you invite the client’s feedback about that?  

What you said, Tess, leads with what Astrid said earlier, which is you might be creating something in a way that you think is more user-friendly, but the client might be like, “What is this? This is not helpful.” You are not achieving what you hope you are achieving unless you get client feedback on that. It is necessary to this process, and it does make more inherent in your view of like, “I have to think about the client in a different way.”  

We are always thinking about the client in terms of how we protect them, which comes from that 100% view. We want to be 100% right and do the best we can to protect the client. There is also communicating with the client and other things to consider. You need client feedback for that. You have to get over the mindset first. Once you do, you will be surprised at what you hear back and what feedback you will get. Astrid, what do you think about one thing that folks can do?  

Sarah and Tessa already talk about the main principles that you have to take care of. I can add something with a practical use case here. That would be also interesting. In my experience, the most important part of every design project is the initial research. It is the research about the initial needs that are out there. It is good to start with a contract or document and redesign it and get feedback. This is a good way to do it, but sometimes projects are in big need of deep research.  

I want to give an example of the practice. In Kenya, there was a large construction service or a company in that region. We were invited for a redesign project out of the legal operations business path. What they had in mind together with the general council is, “How could we make our legal management directors more user-friendly?” We might have gone into that company and said, “Give me the directive that you have.” We redesign it. We make it easier to understand simple language. We also added icons and everything.  

We made initial research and laid out the whole stakeholder map of who is involved in any directive. We made large research through interviews. We had twenty interviews with different stakeholders of the company. We wanted to find out how people interact with the directive in general. How do they read, and where do they search for information in the organization? What we found out was that, for once, the directors are hard to understand. We have to redesign them by language and also design. The most important thing that we found out through the research was that it was misplaced in the whole ecosystem when it comes to, where do I look for information? 

We not only had to come up with the concept of redesigning the document itself or the content but also the whole experience, where people would look for it, and how they can find it. What we came up with as a solution out of that research was to transform the whole internet into an interactive tool with a question and answer technique, based on a certain technique, of where they could find the answer to the question they had in mind immediately without searching for a document.  

This is another concept, coming back to your question. One of the important hints is never to forget about the initial research because you will find problems that you would not have thought about before. You don't know how people behave, especially if you are in an in-house organization, but also a law firm. It is the same thing. People have their own workflows, how to work, how to search for information, and how to share knowledge. This is another topic in law firms because knowledge is not shared often.  

When you said, “What we decided was we have to figure out workflows and redesign the whole internet,” I have many times at different organizations when somebody says, “It is on the internet.” Everybody cringes because it is there somewhere, but nobody can find it. It is like telling someone to go into a black hole and you were like, “That is not useful.” It is helpful to go back to those fundamentals.  

As researchers, we do the research by ourselves and ask people, “Show me the legal directive. Where is it?” They start searching exactly the way you are describing. They don't find it. In 90% of the cases, they didn't find it or had it stored on their desktop, which is a nightmare. This is a nightmare when it comes out of an organization because you have to make sure that they always have the actual document. That was a major finding only because we made this research and observed how people look for things. 

The other point that you mentioned, which I hadn't brought up but is an important aspect of this too, is the rise of legal operations and that part of the legal department and the leadership in companies, and how that's impacting how people view things. You mentioned that in talking about how the project came out of legal operations. I had some experience with legal ops only because as an appellate lawyer, part of my job is to think big and far ahead in terms of risk for the company, not just taking one case at a time.  

When each of those cases could create a law that could be adverse to the company, and they are all happening across different jurisdictions at the same time, you have to have a larger picture when you are managing those. I didn't realize that fell in legal ops thinking, but it does. Maybe you can talk about legal ops and how that relates to what we are talking about.  

Legal operation is a concept. I don't have to explain it here because everybody knows. To put it in simple words, it more or less has a good project management going on and has a case, a task or a meta intake for the legal organization internally, made convenient and practical, and integrates legal tech tools where it makes sense, to put together resources where you become efficient, and all those things.  

From the organization clock, there is a circle where all this aspect of legal operation sits. In every aspect of this circle, you can design with design thinking methods and legal design. That is what I would also advise legal ops teams who are often in a silo right now, not only in law firms but especially also in in-house organizations, and the position of legal operations is not cleared yet. The companies try to integrate them into their ecosystem but often, it is not so easy.  

Never forget about the initial research because you will find problems you would not have thought about before because you don't know how people behave, especially if you are in in-house organizations and law firms.

This is where legal design comes in because you can find out with the methodology and also with the research where is the real need of the stakeholders that you were serving as a legal ops team. The initial activity of every legal operations team or only one person who is doing legal operations in any organization starts with the research of what the people need and how they wish from this perspective of what they need. How can I make it pleasant for them and delightful so that they come to me and ask for more effectiveness or efficiency and not feel legal operation teams as a burden and someone who comes in and disturbs my workflows? This is what sometimes happens.  

Some in the legal departments say that too, “I have a system.” it does sit at the intersection of lots of different parts of the organization. As a result, there is a great opportunity in terms of proactiveness and risk management but also adding value outside a purely legal environment from legal operations. As you were saying, Sarah, it is another way to show that the in-house department from a legal ops perspective is providing a lot of value to the organization outside of legal disputes or other things like that.  

Thank you so much for mentioning that because I was like, “I forgot about that part.” That is part of the ecosystem as well. Most in-house departments are trying to deal with the issue that is in front of them at any point in time, and have almost the luxury of being able to think that far ahead and work with risk in a proactive way. It is something that the efficiencies from legal ops allow.  

As you mentioned before, Tessa, it has an impact on how in-house counsel views both their role and what they are doing in terms of dealing with the things in front of them, or are they responsible for some more forward-thinking of the organization as a whole. That then will impact the organization also. It has an ecosystem effect when you start tweaking each of these things. People bring different perspectives and different thinking. It is a way to have people who may not be as eclectic thinking as the three of you still benefit from that different approach. It is a different way of thinking about things.  

What you said, Tessa, about creative, it can be hard for people to let go because we want it to be 100% right, but it is valuable to let your imagination go a little bit. I have tried to not think about things rationally at times. There is a process called soul collage, where you bring different magazines, photos or pictures that you see, whatever calls to you at a particular point in time, and you create that collage.  

That to me is a way to get out of that because you are not trying to do a perfect thing. You are not intentionally doing anything other than thinking about your intuition. You are using your intuition to create something. Having done that, I feel a little bit more released to apply that in a legal context. Sometimes there might be little exercises you can do, whether it is yoga, meditation, walking or whatever to take you out of that overthinking logic base that lawyers tend to be in.  

This has been completely amazing. I enjoyed the conversation, and I have learned a lot from each of you. I wish that we had an even longer time to talk about it, but I hope that this will be an invitation for people to look at what each of you is doing and to consider incorporating legal design into their practices, way of thinking, and management of in-house. Even law professors perhaps can think about incorporating some of this in teaching their students. 

There is a lot of value here and collectively, so much experience that all of you have that everyone is able to benefit from in this show. It is amazing. You are leaders in your field. I'm grateful that you all agreed to participate in this. I usually end with a few lightning-round questions. I was going to ask a few questions of you before we close to get to know you all a little bit more too. The first question might be interesting in this context because you are also multi-talented. I will start with Sarah. Which talent would you most like to have but don't have?  

I would say probably organization. That is a real skill that I wish I could have but I don't, unfortunately. Maybe the creative aspect of my brain.  

Astrid, what do you think?  

I would like to have the talent to be me in any place where I could think of. For example, right now, in this conversation, I would have to be with you and see you personally in a second. That would be the superpower that I would like to have. When it comes to my personal, I would love to sleep immediately without thinking too much.  

Our brains can be overactive sometimes. That can be hard. Tessa, what is the one talent that you would like to have but you don't?  

I'm not sure it is a talent, but one thing I've always felt a little bit ashamed of is my handwriting. I feel my handwriting has not evolved since I was a teenager. That also translates sometimes when I sketch. I find my sketch to be imperfect. The outcome of that is I became invested in using digital tools to help me write. I use Nero for taking notes. I use all sorts of tools for sketching digitally because I'm ashamed of my handwriting and sketches.  

That is something no one would think, given everything that you do. Two things from the handwriting part, I talked with the chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. She said that some of the schools no longer teach handwriting. We talked a little bit about that. It is impactful in terms of how people think both in terms of access to history. Are you going to be able to read handwritten stuff from 100 years ago directly if you were never taught handwriting?  

Second of all, how that impacts whether it is good handwriting or bad. Mine has gotten worse over the years too, but that is a different way of thinking. When you are using different tools and you have to boil down something to write notes in handwriting as opposed to typing notes on a laptop. I find that, at least for me, a different experience. What I recall and how I recall it is very different. There is something about that process that happens through the hand. You have probably gotten to adopt using the other tools and may not experience that anymore. It seems like whatever tool or process you are using impacts what you take away from something.  

The handwriting, I still use it. I just don't show it. 

I still make edits in hand on some of the briefs for people. Most of the time, it is legible. Other times, people were like, “What is that word?” That goes back to processing. I process better at editing if I see the actual document printed out. The next question is, who is your hero in real life? I will start with Astrid on this one.  

My personal hero at home is my husband because he is patient with me, which is important. A true hero, especially at the moment, is every single Iranian woman who is fighting for their human rights at the moment on the streets. Those are heroes, and we can't underline that enough. 

My husband is a good chef. I just got married. 

Congratulations. That is so amazing.  

I was thinking as Astrid said that. I'm like, “I'm pretty sure he is my next hero.” We need to do a part two in a few years. My number one hero is my dad, hands down. Out of all the men in the world, my dad is my hero.  

You have an amazing story about your family. Your immigrant story is pretty powerful.  

My parents migrated from Algeria to France. Having done the same, even though the circumstances were different from France to the UK, I appreciate how much sacrifice and concessions it takes to make a move. Now my dad is my number one hero for sure. 

That’s excellent. Tessa?  

I have a clarification question. Is it in real life?  

Not someone you just read about in books or something, but someone you have either met or part of your life in some way. 

It is difficult to pick just one. There are many heroes that I get mentored, although I have never met them, like Nelson Mandela and Gandhi. It is brave, the stories. I'm deeply connected to that sense of justice and lifelong commitment to a cause. Those are heroes to me. If I go closer into my network, I would say both of my grandmothers. They immigrated from different parts of the world. I have immigrated too, but in the 21st century, it is a lot easier.  

I think about my grandparents coming through Ellis Island and what is involved even in that track.  

They had to take boats and sometimes walk because there was nothing else. With everything happening in the world, realizing all of the efforts of our ancestors and what they have done for us to be there is mind-blowing.  

You can have that connection in spirit with people you may never have met, but that inspired your mission or your approach to life as well. I thought that was a good addition, Tessa. The last question is, what is your motto if you have one? I will start with Astrid on this one.  

My motto is never to stop being curious and don't be afraid of stupid questions. 

That’s very fitting for our discussion so far. It fits in the whole ethos of legal design. It does sound like you are in the right spot for you. Tessa, do you have a motto?  

I have a motto that is intimately related to what I do, which is thinking creatively about the law. It is all that I work about. From a more personal perspective, I came up with this motto some years ago when I started to say, “Let's do today whatever we can do so that tomorrow, we can do something else.” Why procrastinate if we can do stuff today so we can do different stuff or new stuff tomorrow? I don't know how it came to me but I was like, “This is powerful.” This is where I started Legal Creative. Even if it is one small action I can do now, even if it is sending an email, it is going to help to close and move forward. It is going to help everything move forward.  

Going back to what I said earlier, asking the feedback, for instance, maybe you can ask for an email like, “I love some feedback on that. Would you like to jump on a call with me?” I don't think nobody is going to refuse. Even if they do, at least you are taking the step. This is important when we are pioneers. All of us are pioneers. We need to have the courage and the bonus to take the action step, even if we don't know exactly what is going to be the outcome.  

There are many different ways of thinking about that. One is being in the present. Doing what you can in the present and moving forward from there. The second thing is sometimes you can get overwhelmed by having too much. You think, “There is all this stuff. My list is huge. What I want to accomplish is huge. I have no idea how I am going to do that.” It is one bite at a time to keep moving forward.  

Third in that is the point that you were elaborating on, which is you don't need to see that very end to take the first step. Take the next one and see where it ends up going. That most encapsulates this show and how it started. One step at a time and following the flow. In this case, I am the steward of something that is more than me and contributes to others individually and I hope, to the profession in a way that is meaningful. Sometimes, you take one step at a time and go, “Where is the flow taking me? I'm here to be the steward of the flow of whatever is happening.” Sarah, do you have one or something close to it? 

I have a combination of two that are linked together. It ties nicely with what Tessa said earlier. It is that big things start small, and one is better than zero. As an industry, we have to dive into this shift, aiming for perfection, waiting for the right time, being adverse to change, and moving towards the mindset of incrementally improving one step at a time. Going back to Astrid's point of asking the right questions but equally, not being afraid to sound stupid. Have an open mind, be curious, and start it now. There isn't such a thing as tomorrow. It sums it up quite nicely. 

There is a great synergy between all of your mottoes and approaches, but also unique to each of you and how you view things. That is a perfect way to conclude and distill how each of you is your different approaches to design and the profession. I'm glad that all of you joined. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I hope that the audience will also. Maybe they will dabble in some legal design or reach out to one of you to figure out how to do that. Thank you so much once again for joining this special edition of the show, Astrid Kohlmeier, Sarah Ouis, Tessa Manuello, and leaders in legal design worldwide. Thank you so much.