Episode 55: Strategies for Building Buy-In for Legal Design with Anna Posthumus Meyjes

Today, we meet with Anna Posthumus Meyes. She’s a Dutch legal designer running her own agency Aclara Legal Design. With Anna, we concentrate on the legal design market and how to create buy-in for legal design. Without buy-in, legal design will remain a rather small concept and it's potential to improve legal industry will go unrealized. We all know that getting buy-in can be a challenge for legal designers. Lawyers are trained to be risk-averse and skeptical of new ideas and we still face the challenge that organizations are not that familiar with the concepts of legal design. And even if they have heard of legal design, it might be difficult for clients to see the value in investing in design solutions. So how do we overcome these barriers? Anna has great news! During her years offering legal design services, she has seen the swift in the market and there definitely is a need for legal design. One strategy is to start small. Rather than trying to convince the entire legal industry, start with a pilot project to create interest and showcase the impact of design. And help the client to see the impact by creating KPI's that are easy to measure.  As our listeners know, in this podcast we are inspired by the becoming-of-stories people have about discovering design and its potential for law, so we also hear Anna's story and she tells us how she experienced the career change when becoming a legal designer and an entrepreneur at the same time. We also discuss whether legal designers experience similar competition and pressure as lawyers do in the legal industry.  Anna Posthumus Meyjes is a Legal Designer and founder of Aclara Legal Design consultancy. Anna brings creativity, design and a user-centered approach to law. Her focus is on information design and user-centricity in legal services.  Aclara Legal Design redesigns traditional, text-heavy legal communication and documentation to make them engaging, readable and memorable. Anna practiced law in private practice for 10 years before founding Aclara Legal Design.