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Podcast Episode: Rethinking Legal Through Design with Astrid Kohlmeier
Intro: Who Is Astrid Kohlmeier?
00:00–00:50
Electra introduces Astrid, a pioneering legal designer, lawyer, and co-author of The Legal Design Book. They set the stage for a conversation about modernizing legal systems through the lens of user-centric design.
00:50–07:40
Astrid explains the fundamentals of legal design—what it is, how it differs from legal ops, and why it’s gaining traction. She emphasizes the importance of merging legal expertise with design thinking to create systems that actually serve users. The Evolution of Legal UX
07:40–14:30
They explore how the legal profession is slowly evolving from static, document-heavy workflows to more fluid, user-driven systems. Astrid shares examples of how contracts and services can be redesigned for clarity and engagement. Lawyer + Designer = Magic
14:30–21:00
This segment dives into Astrid’s experience as both a lawyer and designer. She shares her unique challenges and advantages in blending the two worlds, and how multidisciplinary teams can drive true legal innovation. Challenges in Adoption
21:00–28:15
They discuss the barriers legal teams face in adopting design methods, from internal resistance to the need for cultural shifts. Astrid offers tips for overcoming skepticism and building buy-in. Designing for Legal Teams and Users
28:15–34:30
Astrid explains how to approach legal design at both the internal team level and the end-user level. She stresses the role of empathy, iteration, and usability in crafting legal experiences that work. Global Perspectives + The Future of Legal Design
34:30–End
They close with a discussion of global trends, from the EU to the U.S., and where legal design is headed next. Astrid reflects on what she hopes the next generation of legal professionals will prioritize. Outro
Electra wraps the conversation and invites listeners to explore Astrid’s work and The Legal Design Book.
Full Transcript
Electra Japonas (00:00)
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Future Contracts. Today I have a very special guest with me indeed, Astrid Kohlmeier Astrid, I’ve been a huge fan of yours and your work for years now, so it’s an absolute pleasure to have you here today.
Astrid Kohlmeier (00:16)
Likewise.
Electra Japonas (00:18)
Awesome.
So ⁓ Astrid, you are a legal designer, you’re a lawyer, you’re an author, provocateur, and your work sits at the intersection of visual thinking, building human-centered systems, being very user-centric, and you’re also working with the public sector now. But legal design, is, you wrote a book on legal design, and I think you are the main authority for legal design in the legal innovation space.
has its fans and also has its critics. I think you’ll agree. So today we’re gonna be talking about legal design today, but we’re not gonna be celebrating it and talking about all of its merits, which there are many of, we’re gonna be pressure testing it. So it’s great to have you as the person to do that with. So Astrid, before we begin, I’d love to hear from your perspective, what is legal design?
Astrid Kohlmeier (01:14)
Yeah, that’s a very good question. And I would answer that very fast because I think, ⁓ as you said, maybe not talking ⁓ about too much of theory and going more into practical aspects today. But it’s more or less a method. This is what we can say, to make law and everything that is connected to legal services and workflows more accessible. Let me put it like that. For example, we redesign legal content.
processes and make them user-centric and plausible for all the ones who are affected. And I guess that’s a pretty good definition of the basics, I would say.
Electra Japonas (01:59)
Yeah, why do we need legal design? Why don’t we just do those things anyway?
Astrid Kohlmeier (02:04)
Yeah, we need legal design because we as lawyers are trained in a very specific way in universities in a different, in a certain mindset. So we are trained to be the ones who be perfect and deliver the perfect solution only right from the start. Our mind is ⁓ trained in a very academic and static way, I would say. And legal design is just contrary to it.
So we bring in creativity, we bring in ⁓ an adaptive mindset, we bring in ⁓ ideas that are just not known in the legal field yet. And it’s a ⁓ pretty good combination, I would say, for each lawyer to set up a new skill set like legal design. What can he or she do with legal design?
you can be ⁓ more concentrated on the real underlying needs of anything that is connected to the law and the legal stuff that you’re doing. ⁓ Because we have a method toolkit, let’s say, that ⁓ makes you learn how to research problems and how to research human centric needs or human needs that I underline. And I guess… ⁓
That’s why we need legal design because at the moment, and just to round that up, we see a lot of frustration with the legal results that are out there because normal humans that are not trained in law are not able to understand what we produce.
Electra Japonas (03:50)
Right, yeah, so are we selfish? A lawyer’s quite selfish and quite kind of more focused on how they deliver the outputs rather than how someone will consume the outputs. Is that basically the gist of it?
Astrid Kohlmeier (04:07)
Yeah, I think so, but I would not blame the lawyers for that. I would blame the system for that, as I said. So the universities are not equipped also as well in ⁓ skill sets that are differently to only academic. And I guess it’s more a question of education and how we train our young students and lawyers. So I wouldn’t blame the lawyers themselves. They do a pretty good job in the way they are trained, I would say.
Electra Japonas (04:35)
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. I think that you’re just trained to be really risk averse. And when you’re at university, the lecturers are like, make sure that when you do this, you’re taking into account all the case law and the precedent and you’re just, you’re terrified. So you’re constantly creating things that might one day go in front of a judge. And I always had this like vision in my head that the judge is going to read this contract that I wrote and say, what stupid lawyer.
drafted this. So there’s like this shame element as well. But I’m going to be judged on my legal skills. I’m always drafting for the judge. But the judge probably won’t ever see it. It’s actually not for the judge.
Astrid Kohlmeier (05:08)
I’m just.
Yeah, exactly. But this is a belief in so many lawyers. If you ask maybe 190 will exactly say that. But maybe we should start thinking about that we are not only writing for other lawyers on the other side or for judges, because litigation is probably not the only thing we will look after as lawyers. We should more focus on the practical things and who we want to support.
with our stuff that we are delivering in the first place. So it’s an exception that anything is going to be litigated. And if you take our method seriously, make it all more accessible, easier to understand, maybe using plain language where it’s possible, using visuals, integrating all the stuff that we have in the design field, then you could also foster
⁓ to prevent litigation. So the best thing would be that it never went into the courtroom. And this is probably something we should focus more on than only acting risk averse and put everything that we know from our education ⁓ and legal wisdom into our contracts or products that we produce, ⁓ any content that you think of.
Electra Japonas (06:44)
Totally. We are quite, ⁓ we’re trained to be quite pessimistic, aren’t we? It’s like, do this for the worst case scenario. But I think there’s a mindset shift from, I’m here to mitigate risk to, I’m here to enable business. And as soon as you do that in your head, it’s much easier for you to naturally be more user centric. And just on the user centric bit, because you and I had the…
Astrid Kohlmeier (06:49)
Yeah.
Electra Japonas (07:10)
⁓ the incredible opportunity to be in a taxi together in Athens not so long ago. And we talked about the pros and cons of this whole kind of movement and innovation and how AI is going to have an impact. And it was a great, great chat. But we were talking about ⁓ one of the barriers to kind of legal design going mainstream is that it’s quite difficult to explain what it is and what the result of it is.
without too many words and therefore it can be hard to productize. So as someone who tried to build a business previously on selling legal design as a methodology, I found it very hard to communicate what it was and its benefits. But, and so I’m going to try and, because I think legal design is totally life changing if you fully embrace it in all its glory.
So I’m going to try and do some jargon busting.
with this podcast episode. So what does user centricity mean?
Astrid Kohlmeier (08:12)
user centricity means to put the human in the center and be aware of in which roles he is. So imagine any person, no matter if it is a judge, a lawyer, a teacher, whatever, can be in different roles in different life situations, let’s say. So a judge is a citizen, but a judge is also
a legal expert. A lawyer is a citizen, might be also a parent, and is also an expert in his field. And if we talk about user-centricity, then we focus on in which role a human is acting in a certain situation, let’s say. And guess that’s for explanation ⁓ very good, because I agree with you, it’s sometimes hard to explain.
It’s not a jargon, for example, using the word user centricity that is very common. And that’s why you need to explain like all the time. And I guess this is maybe also something that we, Leak Designers could take ourselves on the nose and say, maybe we also failed to give the right expressions right away and explain it in a way that people understand without asking too many questions.
My answer to that is then oftenly I show you use cases or I show you results because then the imagination flows very easily. most of the time the reaction is, ⁓ why haven’t I considered that before? I mean, this is so, it’s a no brainer to be honest. So it’s a no brainer to use visuals, to be more ⁓ explanatory, use infographics, whatever.
But I guess the magical source is in using the right words that are more common, more than user-centric, for example, but also showing examples of work results. I guess that makes it more easy to explain.
Electra Japonas (10:22)
Yeah, yeah, okay, thank you for that. That was a good explanation. You talk about visuals and legal design is more often than not associated with contract design. And we know that legal design is more than just contracts, but a lot of the talk and the hype around legal design when it was happening was around beautiful contracts. But now, generative AI has come to the fore.
And with LLMs, can draft, can summarize, we can restructure contracts in seconds. Has legal design in the realm of contracts been rendered irrelevant now, do you think? Or is there a new role for it to play in an AI world?
Astrid Kohlmeier (11:10)
Yeah, there many aspects to answer that question, I would say. So first of all, I think it’s not irrelevant in terms of AI. And as I said at beginning, we are talking, when we talk about legal design, about a method that can be applied to anything that is connected to the law, let’s say. And that also includes processes, workflows, and not only content. And you’re right when you say that at the beginning, maybe there was more about
how to make things pretty, making a contract more attractive to be then more understandable, which is by the way, fact. And it’s not a neglect, I would say. So it’s true anyway. But ⁓ the method and 2Kit has so much more ⁓ to offer when it comes to the underlying processes to come to a result. And this is where also AI comes into play, because we are all…
Let’s say most of us are using AI as a tool to make things easier, but also to get assistance by writing or drafting contracts, by drafting any content or what comes across. what AI is not taking away from you as a burden, as a user, as a lawyer, is to be aware of what is the actual problem that I need to solve.
And legal design is a method that has a toolkit for two phases. And the phase one is how to come down to the problem itself. it’s a problem definition tool. And there we use certain techniques, such as deep user research. ⁓ And I don’t want to get too much into details, but let me just frame it into the two phases. It’s a problem finding phase. And the second phase is the problem solving phase, where you then
Apply all the creativity that you might ⁓ need for prototyping, for coming up with crazy ideas and so on. But as I was saying, AI is not ⁓ helping you ⁓ by thinking as a human, what is the problem that I need to solve? You can maybe integrate AI systems and chatbots to support you on your journey to define the problem.
But yet, in my hope at least, it’s necessary that you as a human connect the dots first and then maybe go into a proper prompting and let the prompt maybe be more specific then because you can actually know what do I have to solve here. And maybe just one sentence more about that. I guess, yeah.
99 % in all of our cases that we are doing in legal design, see that the assumed problem is not the one that you really need to solve. Because the root of a problem, the cause of a problem sometimes lays in a total different path, not the legal path, more in the stakeholder, ecosystemic surroundings in a
business situation or so. And this is what an AI cannot help you with, but your brain and your human brain still can. So I would say it’s not redundant yet. ⁓ You can integrate it in your legal design processes to support you. ⁓ But legal design per se ⁓ is way more than making things pretty. And you know, last thing about that, if you come then to the creative
problem-solving phase, why not integrating AI tools such as visualization tools, Adobe, Create-A-Suite or whatever you have ⁓ that supports you in even doing things better. So why not? guess it’s a super cool tool set to add on.
Electra Japonas (15:24)
Yeah, I think that whenever you speak about legal design, people immediately think about contracts, people that aren’t working in the field. you talk to the broader legal community about legal design, those that understand what it is, or those not understand what it is, but have heard of it before, immediately associate it with pretty contracts. And obviously that’s doing legal design a disservice because at the…
At its core, legal design is a way or a methodology through which you can understand the problem in real detail, which is something that we often skip, right?
People skip that a lot. just go straight into the solutioning, which is often just such a wrong move because you’re solving the wrong problem or you’re solving for a problem that’s not even there. And so you’re wasting your time, basically. So there’s that bit, to your point, there’s the first phase where you’re understanding what the problem is and actually articulating the problem.
Astrid Kohlmeier (16:25)
Jesus.
Electra Japonas (16:25)
which is another
thing that people don’t do because if you’re trying to solve a complex problem, not just in terms of how your T’s and C’s are structured, but how your whole legal department is structured, how your tech stack is structured, how your processes with the businesses work, you will not be able to deliver something that has an impact across the board unless you’re all speaking the same language and you’re all working towards the same goals. The first thing is,
And it’s amazing when you go into these legal design workshops and you speak to people and you think that they’re all coming in understanding what the problem is. But actually then they’re all on different pages and they’ve got slight variations of the same problem statement in their heads, but taken together, there’s huge deviation. So if you were to skip that bit, everyone’s going off doing their own thing. And then in the end, it’s just an absolute mess spaghetti scenario that you’ve got to untangle.
And it’s horrendous. So yeah, there’s that first phase. And then with AI coming to the fore and it being used for a lot of contract drafting. And I know that a lot of teams are uploading their Ts and Cs into tools, even generic tools like ChatGPT and asking it to restructure it so that it’s more readable or user friendly.
⁓ So from that perspective, I think AI tools are going to help, but they’re also going to highlight the broader benefits of legal design to the improvement of the legal function. Whereas before it was all about the contracts, now it’s going to be like, actually the AI can help with that bit. There isn’t a huge problem solving piece to be done with.
every single contract. You have simple contracts that you can just put into chat GPT and go, this is a consumer contract, make it more readable. ⁓ And then legal design might finally have its true moment as a methodology that people will apply to really make a difference and an impact as to the way that they work is my hope.
Astrid Kohlmeier (18:31)
Yeah, mine too. No, but maybe
coming back to that, just because while you were talking, that is just such a, I don’t know, a failure moment when you think you know what the problem is and actually you don’t know. 90 % of all services that are going wrong or business ideas that do not
I don’t know, ⁓ be successful are exactly about that. That you assume that you solve a problem, but you did not research it. You did not invite like any actual stakeholders in asking what their needs are and what their pain points are. And if you don’t do that properly, then you are just lost because you will end up by solving the wrong problem and nobody needs the solution. And that’s specifically
When buying in, I see that in many organizations, in companies, but also in the public sector, like everywhere, buying in technical support in law, in the legal departments, is often driven by only little people and IT personnel, for example, which are not aware of what are the real workflows that we need to cover, what are the real problems that we see in that journeys.
And ⁓ how can we support in a very early phase of our technical and digital processes to prevent that it’s getting messy at the end? So, and I guess that is something we cannot underline ⁓ plenty enough and even more. Don’t assume that you know the problem, like never. Always research it first.
No matter if you buy in legal tech tools, no matter if you integrate a chatbot, no matter if you draft a new contract or if it’s about your terms and conditions on your website or your data privacy terms on your website. Don’t assume that you know that what people want to read, want to see needs to be solved.
always research first. guess if we, you know, transfer the first question that you said, what is legal design? And it probably is exactly that. Always go a step back and request everything and the status quo that you have. And I guess maybe that’s easier than saying legal design is a method that is doing blah, blah, blah. It’s more about asking better and new questions and search for the problem.
Electra Japonas (21:21)
Love that. It’s true. mean, you go into, even when I was kind of supporting people to choose the right technology for their legal departments, you go in, they’re like, we need CLM. We need contract life cycle management. Do you? Why? What are you trying to solve? And then when you start to get into that conversation, you realize that they do not need CLM. What they need is a better document.
You know, that methodology, that going through that thinking process and asking the right questions of the right people has just saved you half a million pounds. So it’s an important, almost like a life skill to really question the things that you assume, particularly in a world where there’s a lot of pressure. Like there’s lots of pressure to buy AI, to buy tech, to have really beautiful T’s and C’s. And it’s like, do you need this stuff?
try and figure out why you think this. And that’s also an interesting process as well for yourself. But if you can master that, it’s just, it’s a better decision-making framework, I think, legal design. gives you a framework in which to think because people love a boundary. They love a boundary. Children love boundaries, but so do adults. And I think that frameworks like this give you thinking boundaries that allow you to move.
in a linear way almost. It’s not totally linear, but it is, there is a linear, linearity, is that word, to it that allows you to think about the right things at the right time and question a lot of your assumptions. So yeah, for me, legal design and studying that, the whole sector just really helped me with my career, I think, and just making better decisions in all walks of life. So I advocate for it strongly.
Astrid Kohlmeier (23:14)
would, if I can, add something to the CLM topic because we had just recently, last week in our summit, a panel about it, CLM 3.0. And I was like, you know, provoking, asking the question, can you please tell me what is CLM 0.0? Because I’m actually not sure what you are talking about. And the actual point was that we wanted to talk about contract layering.
which is something ⁓ how you structure information for different stakeholders, for example, where legal design and graphic design and all the things that we know are ⁓ very handy and we need it. But we were talking about CLM 3.0 and contract layering, two different things maybe connected at one time if you know what contract lifecycle management really is.
I just figured out that most of the lawyers just do not know what a life cycle is, to be honest. Or what the life cycle of a contract is. And this is why I really provocatively, I don’t know the word, asking maybe we should start with life cycle in contracting from the very beginning right now. Because we, we designers, we…
have a name for ⁓ Life Circle, ⁓ we call it Journey, say, or ⁓ where we start at a very first ⁓ step coming into a contract that might be not even drafting a contract. It’s maybe about thinking about that we need to make a deal and we have a situation. This is where contracting begins. And this is also a life cycle of a contract.
a life cycle management system could start. But this is just not in the heads of us lawyers because the skill set is not there that we have a journey ⁓ to look at and not a life cycle from the contract itself. So that’s why I really advise let’s go back to CLM 0.00. And just also because of the fact that most of the CLM systems that I see in organizations do not work.
So just let’s face it, I think we need to go back.
Electra Japonas (25:42)
We definitely need to go back. And also just on the topic of CLM, which is an area that I feel quite strongly about because I’ve seen so much failure of CLM. don’t think I’ve ever heard an incredible success story of, implemented CLM and it’s been amazing and everyone loves it. Literally never.
Astrid Kohlmeier (25:53)
All the time.
So you see, I guess, but I think we can support. So I think it’s, it’s a very cool idea to have a contract life cycle management ⁓ on board. think it’s genius, but here the skillset of legal design would help you to really do the right job to then call your process a CLM. I guess probably the two of us can.
Electra Japonas (26:10)
Thank you.
Astrid Kohlmeier (26:30)
support organizations in that. And once you add up that skill, and it’s often the mindset, it’s not about the technique then anymore. It’s more about, again, finding out where are the real problems, where does my contract really start and where does it end? What do I do with it at the end? How do I need to store? How do I make data accessible? So this is in talking in terms of AI and ⁓ digitalization.
That’s the stuff that is really interesting about. But then the human factor comes into place and the human factor destroys everything if you don’t stick to a standard. And most of the time there are some standards around, but the human brain is just working differently. It says, yeah, but my case is a little bit different. I cannot use the standard here. I need to add up a little bit here and there and there. Then you just probably totally fade it out if you’re not
probably foresee before that there might be a human inter looping system ⁓ that is needed in your CLM system, for example. just to not get too much into CLMs. But I think it’s a very interesting point here how legal design could even help you in shaping your internal processes in a very clever way to then end up in a
functional and maybe successful contract lifecycle management.
Electra Japonas (28:01)
Totally. And just on that point, and I don’t want to kind of like talk about CLM for the whole podcast, even though I totally could. I think that one of the things that I’ve seen that has been problematic is that the vendors haven’t applied that approach. And that comes down to business constraints, which I fully understand.
When you’re selling a monolith of a CLM and it’s an enormous enterprise system and there’s all these different features that no one’s going to need at the same time, it almost gives pressure to the customer to utilize everything at once, right? And they want to get as much value as possible out of the tool that they’re paying maybe hundreds of thousands for a year immediately. And that’s unrealistic.
So this is why I really believe in this new wave of modular CLMs where you can buy what you need when you need it. And also the fact that we now have AI and AI agents are really going to play into that point that you just made, which I think is really, really important. There’s this rigidity to the kind of the second generation of CLMs, which is you do this, then you do this, then you do this. And if you deviate, you’re screwed.
But now with AI and AI agents and this autonomous kind of way of working, I think that we’ll be able to overcome some of that to some extent. Obviously, you still have to map out some journeys. But if you can take AI, AI agency, modularity in the tech systems that are now going to start to be sold in a less monolithic way.
and layer on top of that legal design, you’ve just transformed legal. Totally. So I can’t wait to see what’s gonna happen over the next five years because I think we’ve been talking about transformation for years and every year I used to go to conferences and think to myself, we’re talking about the same stuff that we were talking about five years ago. There is no transformation, it’s a myth, it’s not gonna happen. I think that now it will happen as long as we…
Astrid Kohlmeier (29:47)
Right. Totally.
Electra Japonas (30:13)
take the right approach and use this AI wave to rethink not just, you know, how can I do this with AI, but how do I do things full stop and do I even need to do them? And if so, how can I augment myself? Not just like hoard control, but how can I augment what I do to ⁓ just make my life easier, better and deliver more value to the business? I’ll stop.
Astrid Kohlmeier (30:37)
Right.
No, no, totally, totally true. I think the reason why we ended up in that situation that we have the feeling that we exactly at the same point like five years ago, because I totally agree on that, is that we had with the first phase of legal tech coming into place, the same hope that we have today with AI. the hope is that, ⁓ there is now a digital system
that is cleaning up all the mess that I produced before. Just let’s frame it like that. Because it’s exactly what’s happening. ⁓ until now, nobody cleaned up the processes. And exactly what you said, it only can work. even exactly, and especially in the times of AI, it only can work if we now do it properly. But that, again, means going some steps back and
really put into order what you have to ⁓ solve in your organization and be clear of what is really necessary, what is not necessary, why do I do things like I do it and could I make that maybe a little bit more intelligent, better, can I get rid of stuff, so it’s now the time or never, I guess, to clean up the system and this is probably the next takeaway maybe. So asking better questions.
Go a step back and clean up your mess.
Electra Japonas (32:09)
Yeah, clean that mess up. ⁓ What do you think? So legal design, obviously a no-brainer, but what are the barriers to scaling legal design? So we know that people have budget restraints and it’s hard to get buy-in, what kind of, why is legal design not mainstream? Why isn’t that the way that we all just work naturally to the point where you don’t even call it anything? It’s just how we are.
Astrid Kohlmeier (32:11)
You
Yeah, I ⁓ think about it lots of time. I don’t know, to be honest, I don’t have the proper answer here. But I guess that the legal design movement was just a little bit too late compared to the legal tech movement. And maybe here again, it comes to a wording.
Because in my opinion, Leaguer tech makes no sense without Leaguer Design. This is what I always say like for years. And I guess it’s just not ⁓ assumed or valued in the same way as Leaguer tech. this tangible thing like digital tool that you have, is easier to imagine.
There is a tool, is, I don’t know, a license that you buy in, and then you can work with something. That is super easy to understand for the human brain. But a method like legal design that is helping you to shape everything in the right way is not as convenient to buy in as a tool. And I guess that’s probably the reason why it didn’t scale up so much. It requires… ⁓
the willingness to change, requires the willingness to rethink and it requires thinking in the end. And probably that is not valued in the same amount than something robust, something tangible, like, you know, let’s put it in a digital software or a product, something that you really need. ⁓
can have in your hands and do something with it. So it’s a mindset ⁓ thing and it’s a concept. And probably this is the reason why it didn’t scale up in the same way as legal tech. just by saying out loud, ⁓ or saying that out loud, probably it can’t scale in a way that we expect a product to scale. And maybe this is also a misconception in the expectation that we have.
Electra Japonas (34:36)
Yeah.
Astrid Kohlmeier (34:57)
I think we need to consider that it is an additional skill set that is very easy to adopt. And it’s also for every lawyer out there ⁓ very good to have on board because then you ask better questions and research all the problems that you have. But maybe it’s also our expectations as legal designers that we compare it to a product which it is not. So it’s more a concept.
Maybe we should more compare to which concepts scale up in another way.
Electra Japonas (35:32)
Yeah, yeah. I think the other thing is that it pushes the accountability on the customer. So it tells the customer, you’re going to have to do some work here to find the solution. But by the way, I don’t know what the solution is. Whereas when you’re selling tech, you’re going, here’s the solution, buy it now and it will solve all your problems. And it might not, but it is much more consumable than a methodology that sounds like hard work.
So it’s inherently difficult to sell. It’s inherently difficult to sell internally to your stakeholders, to your legal team, to your finance team. We’re going to give you a budget for it. It is an inherently difficult product to scale. But I think that you’re right. If we start thinking about it in terms of outputs and communicating it.
Astrid Kohlmeier (36:00)
Yes.
Electra Japonas (36:25)
slightly differently and almost, you know, have a taste of our own medicine as legal designers in really understanding why this is not landing in the way that we would hope just because on the… If you speak to any legal designer, I’ve never met a community, like a sub-community of the legal innovation space that’s so passionate and so determined and they’re fully, fully, fully… They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid
Astrid Kohlmeier (36:47)
Yes, tell me.
Electra Japonas (36:53)
to fully as have I, I fully believe in this way of working and thinking and operating. And it’s just, it’s just a no brainer. It’s simple. ⁓ but it is hard to communicate. And I think that it’s the job of the legal design community to think about this and to come together and to find a solution because AI is amazing.
But we do need to apply legal design principles and thinking processes in order to make it work so that for it to have a real impact going forward. And it’s a shame to miss this opportunity because we’re not doing that. So this is a call to anyone in the legal design space to contact Astrid. ⁓
you
Astrid Kohlmeier (37:44)
We should also as a community rethink about that. We are starting discussing that. We also know discussions with other League designers that this may be a barrier a little bit. But on the other hand, compared to five years ago, League design is a thing. League design is a…
at least an expression that many have heard. I would not say all because we always have to start from the beginning. But maybe we do ourselves an advantage by starting and reframing again what our expectation is from the out, as you put it.
And maybe also think about the wording itself. So I think if we would have a product like a mobile phone or something like that, then we would have been a very easy way to sell it also in a way. But on the other hand, once you are, and this is probably also where the passion comes from, we all know that this is the right concept. I’m deeply
convinced that this is the only way to go and all of the legal designers are like that and once you get into contact with our method people don’t go back to normal if they don’t have to. It’s just the other way around. I have experienced so many lawyers that then just wanted to learn more about it but also to even change career paths. So left the legal job
Electra Japonas (39:33)
Thanks.
Astrid Kohlmeier (39:34)
and fully went into legal design. that’s also an interesting fact maybe. ⁓ But let’s discuss how we can scale up our concept. So I’m totally in.
Electra Japonas (39:49)
Yeah, Astrid, just to bring this to life a little bit for anyone who’s listening and who’s not that familiar with legal design, can you give us an example of a simple legal design project that you’ve delivered, say with the redesign of a contract or something that’s tangible and universal, what were the steps that you took and how is that different to…
how you might go about it without implementing legal design thinking.
Astrid Kohlmeier (40:22)
One use case, and I will now go into the public sector. guess that’s maybe also interesting to see that it’s not only in the private sector, but legal design makes so much sense also, and especially in the public sector. Where we had a project here in Germany by two ⁓ federal states, Bavaria and Nordrhein-Westfalen, with the question, how can we
⁓ integrate AI models into courts and into the processes of judges. And you could have also asked, like you do it in the ⁓ private sector, okay, we need probably an AI chatbot that is safe enough to upload like all the information that we have in the public sector and then use it. But ⁓ since we are around as lead designers,
This time the federal states made it in the right way and we together formed ⁓ the groundwork for that specific project. And the steps that we took where we do it in all ⁓ legal design projects is starting with the question who is involved in our topic? So who are the stakeholders and who has which pain point? ⁓
be a challenge, let’s say. So and this is the first step in how do we research that? ⁓ We made interviews, some one-on-one interviews with several stakeholders from a diverse landscape, but also made a quantitative ⁓ questionnaire for judges and lawyers. And we had over 700 participants in that.
You could then also speak about the results that they are representative now. And you can really rely on the things that you then focus on with your solution. And in this first phase of research, we found out many pain points. Like, for example, AI has to always consider the human in the loop, for example. The things that we know also from AI.
context anyway, but now we have it specifically from judges and also lawyers that are affected from that and that they are wishing also for having the instruments of AI as support because they would also like to speed up their processes. For example, if it comes to actions, is very hard for judges to
overcome because they need to always look into every single case. And in every single case, they need to look at is this probably differently to the one I saw yesterday? So all the specifics and AI can really support you in that maybe comparing the two actions and say this is different to the one that I had before. So the interesting finding was here that
the willingness to change and the willingness to integrate AI in the first place is super high. You could have expected just the contrary of that, right? Okay, but coming to the steps that you asked for. So research, you find out pain points, and then in the next part, you make sense of it and you define the problems. And this is what we did also in that project. So defining where the real problems sit. And only then we started to come up with
a lot of ideas how we can solve that. We did that in a workshop setting with 40 judges and diverse stakeholders. And we came up in that workshop situation with a lot of ideas and so-called prototypes, which is the next phase. So we prototype our ideas, which means we make it tangible, but only in a very rough way, let’s say. The reason for that is that we want to test.
our prototypes, which is the next phase. So you take prototypes that solves your problem and you go directly into testing with real stakeholders. And only that will give you direct feedback that you can learn from. You iterate and then you come up with the next solution that is even better. Or if it doesn’t solve the problem, if maybe users are not convinced from the prototype that you created, you can easily throw it away.
without investing a lot of money. And this is the whole concept, let’s say. So going from a problem-defined definition onto a very rough and fast prototyping phase, then ⁓ ask for feedback, iterate it, and then come up with the final solution at the end. This product in the public sector is not finished yet, so I can’t present you right now with the final solution. But we are in the middle of the process of
Having the prototypes here and having that as a groundwork and concept for IT to come up with first mock-ups that we then can test. And that will be the next phase. And I think maybe also covering the public part here is interesting, it’s not only in, as lead design is not only applicable for contracts, not only applicable in private sector.
It makes so much sense also in public sector. And this is probably also something that I myself ⁓ find so super interesting. We can apply it everywhere and we need to start thinking ⁓ of law as a whole ecosystem that is connected to each other. The judge, as we had just before in the terms of contract, is in one point connected to exactly the thing that you produce in your
business or in your law firm as a lawyer and we should see that as an ecosystem and not only see only our silo that we are working in at this specific time.
Electra Japonas (46:46)
Yeah,
totally, totally. And I think that legal have been able to almost get away with it being in a silo because what we do is difficult. The language we use is opaque. People without legal training find it confusing, maybe scary to understand. So opening it up and making it more accessible, thinking of the user.
Just those things alone can be so transformative for everything that we do, from public to private to contracts to systems to tech implementation. It’s so versatile, this way of approaching problems. Astrid, last question. Where do you hope legal design will be in the next 10 years and what do we need to leave behind?
Astrid Kohlmeier (47:33)
Yeah, I think we need to leave behind ⁓ the expectation that it’s super scalable as a concept when we continue talking about it like that. So and my hope is really for the next 10 years that we, two of us and also the community ⁓ is finding the right way to integrate it in all the systems, the legal systems that we have.
And I say this ⁓ probably also for a longer time, but still this is my wish for the next 10 years, that in each organization sits at least one person that has this additional skill set on board, which is called legal design. That would be my vision for the next 10 years. And if you have one person that is dedicated to that concept and method, he will infiltrate also others.
This is just also the learning and experience from the last years. And I think that could be maybe the solution for how we also scale by broaden it into like everywhere ⁓ we can. And that is probably the vision also for the next 10 years. And also don’t compare legal design to AI, combine it.
Electra Japonas (48:42)
Mm-hmm.
Astrid Kohlmeier (48:57)
So I think it’s not the one or the other, it’s always the combination and seeing everything that we are now producing, ⁓ applying as an additional skill or technique in order to make things in general better. Because this is the aim of at least all the innovators in the scene, to make things better, to make it easier, to make it ⁓ more speedy.
And I guess the vision for it would be, let’s all not only think in our silos, also as league designers, we should also connect to all the different areas that we can apply it. And maybe that is the way we can scale up at the end.
Electra Japonas (49:43)
Yes, love it. Legal design by design. Astrid, it’s been an absolute pleasure to speak to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. You are the OG of legal design. So if anyone hasn’t read Astrid’s book, please go ahead, buy it and read it. It’s incredible. It really gives you the lowdown of what legal design is and how you can apply it.
Astrid Kohlmeier (49:46)
Do you that’s funny?
system.
Electra Japonas (50:07)
a very practical way. ⁓ And thank you all for listening. Please stay tuned for the next episode of Future Contracts. Thank you.
Astrid Kohlmeier (50:16)
Thank you so much. Bye bye.
Electra Japonas (50:17)
Bye.