Episode 40: Becoming Legal Designers with Aku Nikkola and Christine Inkinen

In this episode we meet with legal designers Aku Nikkola and Christine Inkinen from Dot. Legal, a legal design consultancy from Helsinki. Aku and Christine tell  us their stories how they decided to pursuit a career a little different from the traditional legal work and how they became legal designers. We talk about their latest venture, the first ever legal design course organized for law degree students at the University of Helsinki and what design can offer for legal studies. Aku and Christine are both recent graduates of law school and it is interesting to hear from them what seems to be missing from the traditional legal education. If we want to change the law better for real humans, we should focus on the education and make sure that future lawyers learn the needed skills already at law school.  Besides discussing what design can offer for legal studies, we talk about the legal design market. Aku and Christine share their views and experience in selling legal design projects and we discuss if supply meets the demand in the market at the moment.  Dot. Legal is an award-winning legal design consultancy from Helsinki. Dot. is known as a forerunner in all things legal and design. Aku Nikkola is a legal designer and a partner at Dot. Aku is a lawyer second and a front-end wizard first, a true visual perfectionist who understands and wields the power of fonts, colors, icons, and animations; always to the benefit of the end-user. Christine Inkinen (or Kiki, as we call her) is a legal designer and a partner at Dot. Kiki is a creative problem solver, who focuses on translating technical legalese into accessible and beneficial information for end-users – proving that the pen is still sharper than the sword.