In this lecture, Helena Haapio, Associate Professor, Finland, will give a lecture on the topic of Lawyers as Engineers, Designers and Architects
Digital attendance will also be possible. After the lecture we invite you to join us for a reception with light refreshments and mingling.
Registration
Deadline January 13. Please register your participation on this online form.
The theme for the lecture is: Lawyers as Engineers, Designers and Architects
“Like engineers, transactional and legislative lawyers want to make something useful that works for their clients.
David Howarth: Law as Engineering, Thinking About What Lawyers Do. Edward Elgar 2013, p. 67.
Business success depends on contracts. While some contracts may need to work as evidence in court, most do not. Instead, they need to work for the parties so they get the results they want to accomplish. For legal teams, contracts are needed to record rights and responsibilities, manage risk, and provide protection in the event of a dispute. Clients want contracts to provide a framework for successful business outcomes and relationships. They value easy-to-use operational guidance. How do we balance and reach these valuable goals, if clients find contracts too complex and hard to understand? Recent research tells us that borrowing tools from other professions can help. Working as legal information designers and architects, adding images and human-centered layers to traditional legal texts can make contracts more useful and usable. With the help of AI tools such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 and ChatGPT, reading and writing contracts can become much easier. And not just contracts: proactive legal design has been successfully applied to other contexts as well, including Codes of Conduct, requests for proposals, trademark and privacy policies, and guidance documents. Who would have thought that a court judgment would win a plain language award or that a contract or legal advice letter would win a design award! But it has already happened.
Digital attendance, Zoom https://uio.zoom.us/j/62669577345