Legal Design Summit Blog

LDS Blog #7. Speaker Testimonial Series: Tiago Guerreiro - When Design Meets Law: Bridging Creative Innovation and Legal Practice

We asked Tiago Guerreiro to share his Legal Design story, and discovered how a bold résumé statement led to a revolutionary approach to legal education and practice! In this ongoing series featuring Legal Design Summit 2025 Speaker Testimonials, we introduce you to inspiring stories that demonstrate Legal Design's transformative power across different sectors and cultures, spotlighting professionals who are reshaping how we think about law, design, and human experience.

Meet Tiago Guerreiro, who is the litigation lawyer,specializing in litigation and social economy. He founded his design company Equador in 2018 while taking his first steps as a lawyer at PLMJ. For years, he felt the tension between two worlds that seemed impossible to combine, until he discovered legal design at an innovation event! Now, he's on a mission to add "that pinch of salt to law," applying legal design tools to his daily practice while pioneering legal literacy projects for children. His belief is that education is the most powerful tool for positive social change, especially when introduced to those with a beginner's mindset.

Through three key questions, we explored our Legal Design Summit 2025 speakers' journeys, and their responses are truly inspiring! You'll find Tiago's thoughts below.

Tell us your legal design story - what brought you here?

It all started before I entered law school. I was already working on design projects, mostly as a way of expressing my creativity by exploring design tools. Over time, it became more professional, to the point where I eventually founded my design company, Equador, in 2018.

For three years, I ran Equador while taking my first steps as a litigation lawyer at PLMJ, which led me to question even more why everything about the legal world seemed so resistant to change. Back then, Equador had a Portuguese Faculty of Law as a client and, even from a marketing/communication perspective, it was sometimes difficult for them to innovate (but we managed!).

However, in terms of the legal work I was doing at the firm, it felt impossible at the time to combine both worlds—design and law.

A few years later, at an innovation event promoted by the firm, I discovered legal design and everything suddenly clicked!

Since then, I have been applying legal design tools and principles to my daily work, both in the legal literacy project I will discuss and in my practice as a lawyer focusing on litigation and the social economy.

What are you most looking forward to about the LDS?

To learn the new ways of how legal design can be implemented to create a positive impact. And the LDS program seems to “offer” quite a few!

What key message do you hope to convey? (a teaser on your presentation)

Education is the most powerful tool we have to bring about positive changes in our society, especially when introduced to those who still have a beginner’s mindset—children!

And if law is the science that regulates life in society, then our children (and we, ourselves) definitely need to be (well) educated about it!

LDS Blog #6: BrainFactory 2025 - Expanding the Playground for Legal Design

For years, the BrainFactory concept has been one of the most loved parts of the Legal Design Summit: an immersive three-day experience where a small group of around 40–45 participants worked side-by-side with top facilitators from around the world to tackle real-life legal challenges

Over the years, we’ve heard more than once: “BrainFactory changed my life.” That kind of feedback is both humbling and energising — a reminder of the power of bringing people together in a space that sparks creativity, courage, and collaboration.

This year we asked: how might we make BrainFactory accessible to more people without diminishing opportunities for individual connection, creativity, and shared learning? What resulted is a bold leap: tripling the number of attendees by welcoming 125 participants into the experience across 9 workshops.

By expanding the number and variety of workshops, our goal is to significantly increase the number of people who get to experience and lead BrainFactory. More participants mean more perspectives, more diversity, and more accessibility. We believe that’s where the magic happens.

From a small lab to a city-wide experience

Instead of three days in one location, BrainFactory will unfold in a single, dynamic day across Helsinki. Nine workshops, each led by a unique team of facilitators, will dive into different corners of legal design. From AI to sustainability to access to justice, participants can explore specialized themes or start from the basics if they’re just beginning their journey.

This shift isn’t just about efficiency, although it helps participants who might only be able to take one more day off work. It’s about creating more intersections: more voices, more experiences, more chances for people to meet collaborators they’d never otherwise cross paths.

Co-creation at its core

While the BrainFactory spirit has always been co-creative, we wanted to extend that opportunity to the facilitators themselves. Some workshop teams are made up of long-time friends and past collaborators, already attuned to each other’s ways of thinking. Others are brand-new combinations, meeting for the first time through this process. In both cases, the result is a vibrant space where people who share a deep passion for legal design — and have been working on it professionally for years — come together to create something unique. Along the way, they’re learning from each other, exchanging methods, and inspiring one another in real time.

We sought out facilitators who could bring substance from different areas of legal design, from different areas of the world, ensuring the program reflects the diversity and depth of the field today. It all comes together thanks to sponsors who make the workshops possible and bring their own expertise to the table. We are incredible grateful to our sponsors in this process.

Always learning and evolving

As always, BrainFactory is a work in progress. We welcome feedback from every participant, so that in the future, it can grow in directions we can’t even imagine yet.

LDS Blog #5: Speaker Testimonial Series: Outi Nokkonen - Reimagining Public Procurement

We asked Outi Nokkonen to share her Legal Design story, and uncovered fascinating insights about bringing creativity to traditionally rigid systems! In this ongoing series featuring Legal Design Summit 2025 Speaker Testimonials, we're thrilled to spotlight professionals who are reshaping how we think about law, design, and human experience.

Meet Outi Nokkonen, who is a Finnish service designer with over 12 years transforming public sector services through design thinking. Her mission is making public procurement more accessible, human, and less intimidating. With her background in social sciences and political science, she brings a unique societal lens to design work. Currently deepening her expertise by studying procurement and law, she's proving that regulation can enable innovation rather than block it. Her upcoming LDS presentation with Peegi Kaibald explores how design shifts not just processes, but the entire mindset of public officials.

Through three key questions, we explored our Legal Design Summit 2025 speakers' journeys, and their responses are truly inspiring! You'll find Outi's thoughts below.

Tell us your legal design story - what brought you here?

For me, legal design is a promising and much needed approach to making the public sector and especially public procurement more accessible, human and less intimidating.

I’ve spent the past 12 years working both inside and alongside the Finnish public sector, and throughout that time, my mission has been to make design thinking a natural part of developing public services and systems. In recent years, I’ve become increasingly focused on public procurement. It’s a space that’s often seen as too technical or too regulated for creativity, which is exactly why it needs legal design. There’s enormous potential to reimagine procurement as a tool for collaboration, clarity and meaningful impact.

What are you most looking forward to about the LDS?

I’m looking forward to discovering new ideas and perspectives. I hope to get inspired by what legal design could enable in the context of public procurement — and what new possibilities we might uncover.

What key message do you hope to convey? (a teaser on your presentation)

In collaboration with Peegi Kaibald and drawing from Estonia’s pioneering work in legal design, we will explore how even the most regulated parts of public administration (like public procurement) can be reimagined through design. Our aim is to show how design can shift not just processes and documents, but the mindset of public officials.

LDS Blog #4: Speaker Testimonial Series: Peegi Kaibald - How Legal Design is Transforming Citizen Experience in the Public Sector

We asked Peegi Kaibald to share her Legal Design story, and discovered inspiring examples of how legal design thinking is revolutionizing government services! In this ongoing series featuring Legal Design Summit 2025 Speaker Testimonials, we're thrilled to spotlight professionals who are reshaping how we think about law, design, and human experience.

Meet Peegi Kaibald, who is a service designer and business analyst who helps to transform Estonia's public sector by making legal systems more human-centered. Her passion is ensuring people never feel lost or excluded when navigating complex regulations. Leading legal design projects at the Estonian State Shared Service Centre, she's revolutionizing grant measures and digital transformation. Her work earned the prestigious Estonian Design Award in 2024! With master's degrees in service innovation and design, she's proving that design can make law accessible. Her upcoming LDS presentation with Outi Nokkonen will explore how design evolves from buzzword to genuine mindset for public officials. Through three key questions, we explored our Legal Design Summit 2025 speakers' journeys, and their responses are truly inspiring! You'll find Peegi's thoughts below.

Tell us your legal design story - what brought you here?

What I love about legal design is its power to help people navigate complex legal systems without feeling lost, excluded, small, or inadequate. For me, it’s all about making the legal system more human – so people can feel seen, cared for, and able to move through it without feeling helpless.

I’m glad I can give my own contribution to that as a service designer-business analyst in the Estonian public sector, where I lead legal projects focused on grant measure design, information design, process improvement, and digital transformation. My journey into legal design began over five years ago when I joined the newly established service design unit at the Estonian State Shared Service Centre – the institution responsible for managing the European Union funds in Estonia. At the time, we were just beginning to explore how design could bring meaningful impact to the complex and highly regulated world of grants. From then on, my interest in legal design deepened through my master’s thesis in Service Innovation and Design at Laurea University of Applied Sciences, where I explored the process of shaping our team’s mission and value proposition – an effort that opened up new ways for us to approach legal design in practice.

Working hands-on with grant regulations and public sector challenges have shown me how legal design can not only break down silos but genuinely make law more accessible – in both content and clarity. I’m proud that our legal design initiatives have also gained recognition and I hope that the Estonian Design Award my colleagues and I received in 2024 for our transformative legal design work inspires others to believe in and to adopt legal design practices as well.

What are you most looking forward to about the LDS?

I’m really excited to be part of the legal design community and to get inspired and to connect with peers from other organizations, countries, and continents who are tackling similar challenges. What I especially appreciate about the Summit is its interdisciplinary spirit as it brings together lawyers, designers, and other changemakers. I believe it is exactly this mix of perspectives and expertise that drives legal design forward.

What key message do you hope to convey? (a teaser on your presentation)

I’m delighted to join forces with Outi Nokkonen to explore how design can evolve from a buzzword into a genuine mindset and daily practice for public officials. Together, we’ll share experiences from Estonia and Finland to find out whether this challenge is a mission impossible or a breakthrough waiting to happen.

LDS Blog #3: Speaker Testimonial Series: Natalia Grant - How UX Research Naturally Evolved Into Creating Access to Justice

We asked Natalia Grant to share her Legal Design story, and her responses revealed incredible journeys of discovery and purpose! In this ongoing series featuring Legal Design Summit 2025 Speaker Testimonials, we're thrilled to spotlight professionals who are reshaping how we think about law, design, and human experience. Meet Natalia Grant, who is a Senior UX Researcher at Jaramillo Villamizar and an innovator who's spent over 20 years making complex experiences beautifully simple. Her journey from journalism to UX research led her to Legal Design: a perfect reconnection with her career roots in journalism and information architecture! Now she's transforming complex legal experiences into clear, user-centered solutions. With her MA in Applied Imagination, she's bridging cultures and making justice accessible. Her upcoming LDS presentation reveals how to unlock clarity by understanding user context beyond text and tech. Through three key questions, we explored our Legal Design Summit 2025 speakers' journeys, and their responses are truly inspiring! You’ll find Natalia’s thoughts below.

Tell us your legal design story - what brought you here?

“Last year, after two decades in UX, I was searching for deeper meaning in my career when I was contacted by Jaramillo Villamizar, a legal firm that was expanding its Legal Design practice. Thanks to them, I realized that as a UX Researcher, I was already involved in this field by observing people interacting with legal systems in multiple cultures, and that my role was sort of promoting change and justice for them. Finding Legal Design was reconnecting with my career roots: journalism and information architecture.”

What are you most looking forward to about the LDS?

“I’m passionate about communities, and I look forward to connecting with people and their stories, and secondly, to learning more about what is happening in the Legal Design World and how to add value as a professional and as a company. As a researcher, I’m curious about how lawyers work across different cultures and what similarities or differences there are compared to the USA and Latin America, so I will be observing and listening.”

What key message do you hope to convey? (a teaser on your presentation)

“In my talk, I expect to create awareness about the importance of understanding the user's context for designing better Legal Experiences. I’ll provide tips and tricks to run observational research, based on two cases: the closing ceremony of buying a house in Massachusetts and the reading analysis from a package insert of a pharmaceutical ecosystem. I think the best way to unlock clarity is by observing what could be “blurring” the user's understanding beyond the text or technology itself.”

LDS Blog #2: From Proposals to Program - Creating the Legal Design Summit 2025

Legal Design Summit program is live! In this blog we pull back the curtain and share how we created the program - from our approach to what we learned along the way.

How we built the program

First, thank you to the brilliant team: Akvilė, Danielle, Katie, Marielle, Mia, Sade and Serena. For their collective effort over the last six months. It was a pleasure to work with a group of committed volunteers who, each in their own way, brought energy, creativity and curiosity to the process. Say hello and a big thank you when you see them in Helsinki! Building on the momentum of a remarkable 2023 Summit, we set out to do something bold for the fifth LDS: create an ambitious, advanced and future-looking program. To get there, we collaborated across the LDS team, embedded design thinking into our methods, and co-created with our community. Step-by-step, here’s how we built the program:

1. Brainstorming workshop

We kicked things off with a workshop with the LDS team to explore what our audiences needed and brainstorm possible themes. We mapped the legal design landscape through three lenses - the past, present, and future - and explored how those themes met the needs of different audiences, for example academics, practitioners, and participants new to the scene. One interesting thing we highlighted was the opportunity to create a stronger feedback loop between academic research and how legal design is being applied in practice. In addition to being good fun and a bit of an icebreaker for a new team, the workshop also gave us clear direction for the types of proposals we wanted to attract, highlighting themes from AI governance to access to justice to re-designing democracies. The workshop also identified opportunities for new content - this blog being one of them!

2. Call for speakers

We launched a public call for speaking proposals at the end of April 2025. This was open for one month and required submission of a Google form. The form included a series of questions, from motivations for speaking to a short summary of the proposal itself. We received over 70 proposals! The overall quality of the proposal was extremely high and we were impressed with the depth and breadth of the ideas and concepts. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to submit a proposal.

3. Reviewing proposals

To ensure fairness and quality, we designed a collaborative and robust review process. Every proposal was reviewed independently by at least two team members, using pre-agreed criteria and a shared scoring framework. We prioritised proposals that aligned with themes identified in the workshop and presented new, interesting, and original ideas. We welcomed proposals that were critical of legal design, as we highlighted this as an important intervention for the movement to continue building momentum. We dismissed proposals of a commercial nature. With 22 sessions to fill, we created an exhaustive shortlist of the top performing proposals. It took several brainstorming sessions to discuss the ideas and boil the number of proposals down. Making final decisions was definitely the hardest part of the process. In some cases, we noticed several strong proposals orbiting the same theme, so decided to combine their ideas into joint sessions.

4. Designing the program and confirming speakers

Once we had our shortlist, we started shaping the full program. We clustered the final set of proposals to find subtle narratives and identify themes that complemented each other. This was critical as we wanted to get the pacing and flow just right - making sure attendees would have a meaningful and engaging arc across the two days. Equally, we ensured a healthy balance between keynote speeches (20 mins) and fireside chats (30 mins), as well as coffee and lunch breaks. We confirmed the final speaker list at the end of May. Where we grouped proposals together, we scheduled calls to facilitate introductions, explain our rationale for creating joint sessions, and discuss their session. One team member commented that: “Creating fireside chats was one of our favorite parts of the process and we loved seeing speakers embrace the LDS spirit. One highlight was a panel meeting for the first time and immediately using a Miro board to find the common threads between their proposals and working collaboratively to brainstorm their session.”

What we created

We think we’ve created an exciting, innovative and diverse program. There are some familiar faces and, of course, returning legends. However, the majority of the program includes new people and perspectives ready to challenge and expand what legal design is and can be. Here’s the unfiltered breakdown across the two days:

• Day 1 is pure legal design, with a focus on its role and value across the profession. We’ll look at how legal design is shaping policy making, transforming legal services and grappling with generative AI - the sector’s biggest disruptor.
• Day 2 is about impact, and what legal design can do for people and the planet. The future of law is as much about social and nature value as it is about technology innovation, so sessions touch on big systemic issues, including sustainability, justice and education.

We also created something new: The LDS Gallery

We received so many incredible proposals this year, but unfortunately couldn’t fit everyone on the shortlist into the program. So we’re launching a new platform. A new space to showcase the important and inspirational work that the legal design community is shaping around the world. The gallery will be a digital exhibition, initially launched with a select group of contributors, with the aim of exhibiting legal design projects, experiences and case studies. The response so far has been very positive. When confirmed, one contributor said: “I’m excited by this new feature and truly appreciate the opportunity to showcase my work in this innovative format.” Our ambition is that the Gallery becomes the Louvre of Legal Design, and look forward to sharing the first iteration with you soon.

Final reflections - what we learned

• This was less about building an event schedule and more about writing the next chapter in the legal design story
• The quality, ambition and range of perspectives across the ecosystem is genuinely incredible and inspiring
• Embedding design thinking into our approach was our most valuable tool

Thanks again to everyone involved - see you in Helsinki in September!

LDS Blog #1: The Legal Design Summit: What we stand for as a global movement

The Legal Design Summit began as a movement focused on the end-users of legal services. Thus, the initial focus of the event, founded in 2016, was on contract design, user-experience in various legal services, and the wider interlinks between technology and law.

While legal design is still about all of these things, over the years, the Summit and the associated movement and community have grown towards a more ambitious agenda. The aim is no longer simply making law more usable but redesigning the whole legal system. What started off as a user-centric revolution in law is today a globally significant non-governmental organization aiming for transborder solidarity, deliberative democracy, social innovation and practical justice outcomes.

To reflect this changing vision ahead of the 2025 event, it was time to clarify what the Summit stands for. As a community, the Legal Design Summit is committed to four core values: selflessness, inclusion, courage, and authenticity. In what follows, I will explain how each is reflected in our activities.

Selflessness

Selflessness means that we believe in collective action and support as the most important tools in achieving our shared goals. We see each other and the world with empathy and never put personal gain before the interests of the community.

The Summit, organized by volunteers and relying on self-funded speakers, is not about personal profit or monetary value, but about a value of a different kind: collective imagination for better futures. This is no longer limited to simply end-users or other human beings but encompasses non-human beings, the environment, and even the future of life on earth.

Inclusion

By being inclusive we strive to create a space where different perspectives and backgrounds come together, and where diversity is celebrated – both in organizers and speakers. While legal design is still dominated by lawyers from Western countries, both legal and non-legal professionals from all over the world are increasingly and importantly involved in the community.

By organizing the Summit free of charge and with a focus on globally relevant themes, we aim to foster an accessible, international and multicultural community where anyone can participate in shaping the future of law.

Courage

Courage means that reaching for the impossible is in our backbone. We are curious about the world and passionate about improving it by innovatively combining practical and academic knowledge. When faced with a problem to solve, we ask: how hard can it be?

This means that we do not steer away from wicked problems – be they functional or theoretical. Nor do we accept the status quo as it is. There is always room for improvement, and it is up to brave people to rise to the challenge.

Authenticity

Authenticity means that the Summit is dedicated to making a difference through creative, outside-the-box design thinking. We strive to make an impact by showing up as our authentic selves and by remaining honest and open about our core mission.

By welcoming anyone from any background into the community, we aim to expand possibilities for legal design across all areas of law and society. This means remaining open towards what legal design can be, as well as its limitations – while staying true to the common core of design-thinking.

The value of collective imagination in turbulent times

As our guiding values show, the Summit stands for an important message. The Summit is not about monetary value, even if it often translates into it – many fantastic careers have taken off in its wake. Instead, it is about scaling ideas for a better world. When a diverse group of open-minded people with different perspectives come together, the outcome is bound to be valuable. Yet the value of such an outcome cannot be expressed in monetary terms, as its primary aim is not to create profit. Instead, it creates a path for a world where well-being and social justice are a reality for more ‘users’ – both human and non-human.

One of my personal key learnings from being involved in the Summit for the past few years is that a group of dedicated and imaginative people working for the same end goal can achieve – if not anything, almost anything. As we look to the upcoming event and beyond, the Summit invites everyone to join this community towards a world that is more just by design.