 In this episode, we'll be talking about the thing that hasn't been discussed on any of the previous episodes of the show and that is why you as a service designer must work with lawyers in order to deliver better services for customers. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Angelica from Colombia and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to do more work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. My guest in this episode is the founder of the first service design agency in Colombia called Haptica. She holds a master degree in both law and design. Her name is Angelica Fletchas. Angelica has a really interesting take on how we can make services more user-friendly, more customer-oriented and that is by embracing the field of legal, the field of contracts, the field of law because even though we might not realize that legal is all around us and everything we do, there is always a legal aspect and it's really strange that the design community hasn't really put a lot of effort into making legal, more customer-oriented, more user-friendly and that's what we'll be talking about in this episode. If this is your first time here on this channel, don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos are out and we post a new video at least once a week that will help to level up your service design skills. So that's it for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Angelica. Welcome to the show Angelica. Thank you. Nice to have you on. We've had other guests, I think one other guest from Colombia, but you're the second one and I'm really excited to talk about the topic that you suggested today. Angelica, for the people who don't know who you are, I can't imagine that there are many of them but for the few people who don't know who you are, could you give a 30 second introduction? Sure. Well, I'm Angelica, I'm from Colombia. I'm a service designer but I'm also a lawyer so I did both back at college and I run a service design consultant agency, the name is Aptica and I'm really happy with my job and with my team and that's it, that's what I do. A designer and a lawyer, that's not a thing you hear often so that will be also the theme of this episode, right? Yeah, sure, it's going to be. Let's start with the question that I ask everybody and that is, do you remember the very first time you got in touch with service design? Yes, it was when I was a student, a regular student and I was doing design and a teacher, her name is Natalia Budello, which is really important for me. And she taught me a lot about this and actually my final project at the university was in related to service design so then I began to read and actually we wrote a paper about that here in Colombia and we send it to some huge workshop in Finland and that's how I started to work in the service. Cool. Let's dive into the topic that you suggested because I'm really excited. This will be episode 68 and nobody has talked about this topic yet so we have like something new and I'm really excited about it. So let's go. You have the famous service design show question starters. I have your topic over here. Are you ready to start? Yes. All right. The topic is legal design. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? Can you show it to us? Okay. I have this question. What if all service designers could work with legal topics also and could like introduce this legal content in their services in order to make people happier and closer to legal topics? Legal. Legal. That sounds like scary, fairy. We want to stay away from that, right? That's true. Like if you are not a lawyer, not only if you are a designer but if you are not a lawyer at all, you want to be far away from that topic. Lawyers are not like these people that you want to have next to you. I don't know why. I don't want to feel sorry for all lawyers that are not designers. Sorry. I'm just kidding. Legal means that legal is a really hard word. Like we feel that if we don't know it and we don't understand it, we cannot work together. So we try to run away from that. So what I'm saying here is that you can combine design and legal topics and you can also use legal topics to design better services. So that's how you could combine this and make the law regulations or the legal services closer to people using design thinking and service design. The first question that comes to my mind is what are legal topics? So maybe we'll dive into that even more in depth later but what are some topics that you perceive as being legal topics where design thinking or service design can connect to? Okay. First of all, we have to have in mind that everything has a legal approach. Like this conversation that we are having right now has legal components. For example, if I say something that is not mine and I have to quote with the only sentence. So there is a legal topic. But if my computer doesn't work and I bought it, the guy who sold me the computer is going to have a legal problem. So everything is about legal but we don't know it if we have lawyers. So what I'm saying here is everything has a legal perspective because everything has a regulation about it and we don't know it. So what we should be taking care is about understanding that not going away from that, just knowing that that's happening knowing that there are regulations that there are acts that you have and has legal consequences and also that you sign contracts and when you sign a contract you are part of a legal negotiation, right? But maybe you sign it and you don't understand why this is written. Which is usually the case for most people, I guess. Yes, I think so. Why do you think it's so that this topic of legal and design feels so separated that there are so little crossovers between these two topics? It's true, they are separated. Why is that? Why haven't designers entered this field of legal design? First of all, I think it's not common to find things to combine like if you're a lawyer, just thinking about people, our colors. If you think about a lawyer, you think about black, white and so simple and plain. And if you think about design, you think about colors, pop-up, business. So it's just about the perspective, right? But everything has a legal perspective and also everything is designable. So how come two things that are so transversal to life are not combined? Exactly. And what do you think? What is your perspective? I think that there are two disciplines that normally in school, for example, are not combined. So if you are a student and you go to school as a designer and you never hear anything about legal, you are not going to feel that you can combine two of those. So first of all, it's about education. And then when you have a job as a designer, all the legal part is not going to be part of your job. It's going to be part of the lawyer. So everything is always separated. So what happened in my head is like, no, this should be connected. But this is because I did both legal, sorry, I installed. And then design. So I think that for me is more natural. But even though when I was beginning the double degree program, for me was like, goodbye, hello, design. But then in the middle of design school, I found this way to connect the both of them. So it is part of my nature and it is part of my story, but there is a discipline. And the discipline is legal design. And so designers and some lawyers are now trying to combine these two disciplines and are going to find a way to make them one. So if this is a discipline that combines law and design, have you found that there are some characteristic scales in order to be a good legal designer? Is there anything that you have to have as a special, again, scale that the service designer doesn't have, that the lawyer doesn't have, but you have to have somebody in the middle? I think that if you want to work as a legal designer, you don't have to be a lawyer. But it's important to have a lawyer close to you because you have to understand all this content on legal slang. So if you don't understand it, it's going to be really hard for you to design a new legal service or to design a new legal document. But I think that the first skill is curiosity. Like, you have to love these kind of topics and how we talked before. This is not like sexy, you know, like people don't say, legally so sexy I want to work with that, that doesn't happen. It happens to me because I studied for five years and I really liked it. But you need to like it because we will have to read. For example, I have here this book. This is a regulation here in Colombia. Yeah, people who are listening to the podcast, it's a fake book. And this is law here. If you are a lawyer, you have to read this and you have to understand it. And if you are a designer and you want to make this more approachable to people, you have to read it before designing. Which isn't very appealing. Yeah. So you have to have curiosity and discipline and you have to be open to work with other disciplines also because you're going to need lawyers in your team to work in this if you are not a lawyer. But if you did both like me, please say hi because I need to meet you. Also because if it's going to be easier, you have both in your mind. But still, I have lawyers in my team because I don't practice law. So even though I did that in school and I studied a lot with all the facts and disciplines inside law, I don't practice it. So I need somebody who is really like actualized, like know what's going on right now because law changes a lot. So that's why I need openness to work with other kind of disciplines. Let's dive into the second topic because I think we'll talk a little bit about what legal design actually looks like. So the second topic for today for this episode is trust. And do you have a question starter again? Okay, I'm going to choose why. And why do we not trust in lawyers? Please explain. I think that we don't trust in lawyers because they speak in their language, which is law language, which is legal slang. And also I think that we feel that lawyers do their job and design these laws or regulations and design these legal services. Having in mind that they are going to domain the content and they are going to domain the experience. And sometimes that happens. But what can happen also is that they don't know how to do it differently because when they went to school, they learned how to domain the content and have all this like agreement, specialty to talk and to really convince somebody else that they know all the content. So I feel that we don't trust lawyers because of that. But design is an amazing path or an amazing bridge to connect these lawyers with their clients and to make these services and these contents easier to understand. And I can learn that working with lawyers. Can you give an example? How does design help to build more trust in the legal stuff? In the legal slang in lawyers? How do you do that? Can you give some examples? Right now I'm working with this law firm here in Colombia. It is a really traditional one. They have worked with all these huge clients and they want to innovate. So they called me and they told me, Angelica, how can we make better services? How can we think outside the box all this innovation slang? And then I talked to them and I told them, can I see your contracts? Can I see your services? Can I see how you deliver your service to your clients? And even though I'm a lawyer, I don't understand everything that was written on their emails or in the contract. So I feel that even though they don't want to create this wall, they do it just because they don't know how to do it differently, right? So now I'm working with them in five projects. For example, one of them is ready to redesign all these legal documents in order to help their clients to understand it better and to make their process even more efficient, right? Because if the client reads the document and it is easier for them to understand it, the process is going to be easier and even shorter, so it's going to be more lean for everybody. But is it possible to redesign legal documents? Yeah. Isn't law just a law? Isn't it just a fact that you need a lot of paper and a lot of letters? Yes, of course we can do that. But if you don't know the law, you're going to think that you cannot do that because the law is the law and it says that it has to be black and white and so forth. But if you know the law, the law doesn't say, please be boring with your document and please create this document that nobody's going to read and then they have to sign it, so please do that. No, the law says if you're going to write down this kind of document, you should include this kind of content. But it doesn't say how. And that's how the sign appears because the sign is this tool to make how happen, right? So for example, here in this document, it says a lot about employment contracts, right? How should be the contract? And we had that in Aptica, a legal employment contract, this one, this was the original contract. So you see? Some people again who are listening to the podcast, check the video, it's a standard legal contract, as we all know it. So if you check this document next to the legal approach with this, it says everything that it has to say. So it is legal and creates obligation and you have to do everything that it says, okay? But what if I take that document and I show this document to a user who is not a lawyer and I ask that person to write down everything that he doesn't understand and what makes him feel like awkward and what we did here is that he was trying to put down like, I don't understand this, I don't understand. Please take out this. This is so important. So what we see here is that everything is not written for regular people, just for lawyers. So after this, you can say, but this is legal because it says in the law so you have to do that and I don't care if people don't understand it. No, you can go further and you can think outside the box and still be legal, still include the content that the law says, but try to do it different. So I have this final document who has been designed. So it has the same content, but with a different design approach. So it changes experience. So I'm thinking about what is the material, the design material that we can, as designers, work with in terms of making legal more understandable, easier to use. It's definitely not that, but is it just the wording? Is it just the way it looks? What are the design materials that we can work with? You can work with the design methodology. The first step should be, why do you need that document? Maybe what we could do is eliminate the document. So that would be the purpose. And then if we see that we actually meet the document, we have to take care about the content first. This is not about only how it looks. This is about only also what it says and how it says. If you think about this as a service, when you contract a new person in your team, you are going to deliver for him the service of being contracted to be part of the team, right? So you can design the service. So you design this new day of welcomeness and hello. And the contract is one of the touch points of the whole experience. So this is about service design, not only about legal design. And the contract is a touch point of that. So the first part is what kind of contract it is. So do we need to have a long-term contract? What is the relation that I want to create with this person? And if you see, I am talking now about types of contracts. So I need to know what type of contract it is to choose the best one for the relationship that I want to have with that person. And then I can check the content and say, okay, this is the kind of contract that I want to have with this person. And is this clear? Do I need this content? I can take this off. Maybe this is not that important, but it's in the front page. Maybe I can change the way that it speaks, the contract. Maybe I can give the contract a tone. Maybe the contract can talk to me. In this case, the contract talks. It says, welcome to your contract. It says it right here. Yeah, it's fine. So we can do that. And the law says nothing about it. So this is a plan. So we can fill it out with this sign. You create a context. You create a context for the legal stuff. Exactly. Yeah. We need to understand, first, if this really needs a contract, because maybe we can eliminate the contract. And then if we need a contract, that kind of contract. And then one kind of content. And then we design the graphic skills. But if you see, this is not only about graphic. This is just one point. I really like how you said that it's about thinking about what kind of relationship do you want to design, basically. What kind of relationship do you want to have with the other person? And that's something that you can definitely sort of work on as a designer. And also what you said about the actual content and how it looks, it was for me like, we can have a different house for art. Let's say the legal stuff is our lamp. We can have a house here in the middle of Utrecht. We can have a farm. We can have, I don't know, a cottage somewhere in the mountains. And it's still the same lamp, but the context is completely different. We experience the lamp in a different way. Anyway, I'm just making stuff up here. Let's move on into the third theme of this episode, which of course relates to the overall topic. And this is the topic of useful regulation. Yes. So I have this question. When will we have useful regulation as regular users? So what I'm saying here is we are talking about that legal is so like, how do you say it, like constant in your life, like how do you relate it with legal topics? And when I say that is because everything is regulated. Like we have this regulation in different kind of levels. And when these guys who write down regulation and do it, I don't know if they have in mind that the people that are going to apply this law are real people that are not lawyers, that they don't understand the law, right? So I think they don't. They don't have the final user of that law in their heads. So another approach of legal design is to help these guys to think about the final user and to design regulation that is really approachable and really tangible to the real context. And an example that we can use here is, for example, the regulation of data, the use of data. And why I'm choosing this topic, because right now in Colombia, we are starting a new regulation about this and it's really strict. What does it mean? If you are a service designer and you design this new restaurant and one of the components of the resolution is gather data about your users in order to design a better service the next time that this guy comes. But the regulation says that you cannot keep that data. But still you do it. So what's going on here is that the regulation has this like break, like they're not connected between what it says and what's the real context and what the context means. So I'm not saying here that the regulations will be so open and so free because that is important and I want to keep my data away from people that are bad. But still I don't know if when they design this regulation they really know that they are going to affect real people with real services and I don't know if the service designers or designers or businessmen know this law and when they design the services they don't have that in mind. So maybe this is really bad for implementation because when they have this dream that they're going to deliver this amazing service they don't know that the regulation is going to say no you cannot do that, please stop. So all your business model is going to break down. Have you found because I guess this is really common and a lot of people can relate to this but have you found ways that help us to bridge this gap? So how do we actually create a regulation that facilitates and helps instead of working against us? How do we create a model where that is common sense? I think this is not a model, this is about culture and about who are these guys. So for example I had the opportunity to work with this public entity in Peru. The name of the entity is Osip Del and their job is to regulate the communication companies like Claro and Movistar and Tecnica and what they do is to design all the lines and the guidelines that they have to have in mind to deliver their service. And they have this amazing culture related to innovation because I don't think it's about age because they are not too young it's just that they know now that they have a final user in front of them and their job is to protect this user not only for abuse but also in order to help them to understand what they are buying what is the context of the whole service and what are their rights and what are their obligations. So for example I went to work with them and they asked me to check their documents and how they write it down and everything and this was one of the documents that I worked with. So everything that is in red is something that the user didn't understand so they are going to be amused but this is bad because people are going to sign this document but they don't get like the 60% maybe 70% of the content and even though when I got these users to help me to do this I got another page and I had the time to do it with me but when you go to buy a cell phone you don't take two hours to read your contract you lose this, this and this and yes I want this cell phone right now and I want to take a selfie on this part so what we did there with them was to work with this entity with this document with real users and the lawyers that designed the guidelines the lawyers were part of the whole experience so the culture was so co-creational and so team building moved and it was amazing the lawyers at the end were so happy like they designed the new way this is a design made by a lawyer and at first this lawyer was like I'm not a designer I cannot write down anything sorry and I was like yes you can do that so they did something like this and also did this and they put like different ways to choose your contract so this contract of three pages now is this and this and the lawyers did it so it's not cultural like you have to invite lawyers to be part of the process this is not only about designers doing legal stuff this is about lawyers using design to make their services better and you said it's about culture and I guess I would be interested how do you get these legal people to participate in such a project in the first place because I can imagine that they don't see their own role in the effect that they have on the end users so why should they participate and that's a question how do you get them in those workshops I think that's a good question I think that lawyers are worried because before they were super important and super powerful but now with all these legal take approach and all these machines and artificial intelligence they are losing their jobs so now they want to reinvent themselves like they want to redesign themselves and these kind of tools can make them better lawyers so at first I'm going to be super honest they were like I have to go to this workshop because my company said so but my job was to teach them that this is going to be amazing that they are going to change all the perception of the legal aspects and then they said ok we can do this and I can show you their faces at the end like I did and actually we have prototypes with real users of the final document so at first I invite these users and I told them ok I want you to read this and write down what you don't understand this is the red, this is the green and then the lawyers were doing who invited these users and the users came to see their final documents and when they were looking these users understanding everything crisis and I'm a lawyer but still I'm a lawyer, super power I can do this, I'm a designer at least in my company I guess that's always the case with design when you show the proof when you show that it works when you see people, the end users that they are actually happy and helped with their solution the next time you don't have to do a lot of explaining but the first time it can be challenging yeah and also about the space if you think about what is the relation between a lawyer and his client, it's like I'm here in this huge chair that is so comfy and you are there and this is a huge table and you are going to read this document and I'm not going to explain anything and if you don't understand it well so this is the relation but here the user was next to him so it was so different he was in client-lawyer relation he was co-creation relation so we come back to service design which is part of the process you already gave so many answers and so many insights on this topic which is really interesting but I'm sure you also have your own questions still about this whole new discipline that is emerging is there something that you would like to ask us, the viewers, the listeners of the service design show I would like to ask you how many of you would like to start working with legal design because this is a new discipline but we need more people working in this we need more people talking about this and please do it I know at least a few people in the Netherlands who are already also on this path so let's hope they see this video and episode as well Angelica I want to thank you so much for introducing me to this topic which I wasn't aware of until this episode so thanks for taking the time and sharing your thoughts thank you, it has been amazing thank you my team, Sebastian this guy in my team who helped me a lot preparing for this and I hope to talk to you soon again about this or another topic thank you very much thanks Angelica so we're almost at the end of this episode if you are interested in legal design or maybe already practicing legal design leave a comment and let's see how big a legal design community actually is if you enjoyed this episode grab the link and make sure to share it with somebody who might benefit from it as well and if you'd like to learn how to explain service design in plain English check out the free course that I've got for you over here thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video