Este podcast é da responsabilidade da PLMJ. Olá e bem-vindos ao webinar da PLMJ. Hoje o tema é Legal Design e a pergunta que colocamos é: e se redesenhássemos o direito? Para nos ajudar a responder, convidamos três especialistas nesta matéria que passarei a apresentar de seguida. Antes, dizer apenas que este webinar será também gravado para partilha na nossa plataforma de streaming e, uma vez que os nossos oradores não falam português, passarei agora para o inglês. So, let me start by welcoming our speakers, Angelica Flechas, Antti Inkinen and Marie Potels-Savio. Thank you very much for being here today. I will now introduce you to the audience. Starting with Angelica. She has a double degree in Law and Design, but started her career working only in design, having founded Éptica in 2014, the first service design agency in Colombia. Along the way, she found it necessary to apply her knowledge in law to her projects and ended up opening a new business division in Éptica, specialized in legal service design. Angelica is also a lecturer at the University of Los Andes in Colombia and ICAN University in Mexico. Recently, she has been focused on applying legal service design to fight the blind spots in the legal world, which we'll address later. Moving on to Antti. He has a degree in Law and started his career as a lawyer specialized in IP and branding, areas he lectured in later at University of Helsinki. In 2014, he founded Dottyr, a boutique law firm focused on technology law, intellectual property and cybersecurity. In 2015, at a Sand School event, he had a eureka moment for he had invented legal design and ended up founding Dottyr in 2020. Antti is also the founder of the Legal Design Summit, the biggest legal design event in the world, and has written and published "Legal Design Revolution", a book on legal design. Recently, he has been exploring the AI world, which we'll speak about too. And finally, Marie. She's the founder of Fair Patterns, the first software service to fight against dark patterns, and Hammurabi, an award-winning legal innovation studio. She is an international keynote speaker in human-centric law and legal innovation by design at the Computer Privacy and Data Protection Conference in Brussels, IAPP Global Privacy Summit in Washington, W at Privacy, Legal Design Summit in Helsinki, and Legal Geek in London. Before founding Hammurabi, she worked in private practice for 10 years in Europe at Freshfields and Allen & Overy, then moved in-house to become General Counsel EMEA of a US-listed group. She holds a Master's degree in Innovation by Design from the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle. She's also a member of the advisory board of the Serpentine Galleries Legal Lab and is involved in pro bono access initiatives. Marie teaches Innovation by Design at the Singapore Management University, Sciences Po and HASA. Angelica, Antti, Marie, once again, thank you very much for being here today. It's great to have you on stage. So there's a lot to discuss today, but let's start with the basics. What is legal design? And I'll start by you, Antti. You start your book, "Legal Design Revolution", by stating that the law is broken. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Thank you, Thiago, and thank you for the great question. Greetings from Spain. I'm residing in Spain at the moment here. Great introduction, but I'm a philosophy dropout before the law school, so maybe that's why I started the book by law is broken. According to very famous German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, all tools have some kind of purpose. All tools have a job. We use pen to write and legal documents to communicate the information and hammer to hammer nails. And when tools work, they become invisible. You can't see them. You don't think of a pen when you write with a pen, right? But the true nature of things is only revealed when something is broken. And if the hammer is broken, you start questioning, how does this hammer even work? If the pen is broken, you suddenly realize that there's ink going inside and it doesn't work, then it reveals its true nature. And I think that law is broken also. And if we think that law is broken, we can also start fixing it. I want you to look around. Nobody understands law. 3.000-word terms and conditions, like privacy policies that are out there. Marie is working with Fair Patterns, for example. A lot of things are broken at the moment, and when we realize this, we can start fixing things also. So that's what I meant, and I want to emphasize that it's not a negative attitude. It's a realistic attitude that law is broken and maybe we have the power to fix it if we really try hard. Now, it's not an easy task, but perhaps with collaborating with other people, we can manage to do that also and steer law a little bit into that human-centric direction where it could be maybe understandable or engaging, or maybe even fun. All adjectives that you wouldn't maybe use when you're talking about legal documents. So that's the idea behind law is broken. If we realize that the law is broken, we can start fixing it. And that's what we're perhaps trying to do as legal designers.

Okay. And let me hear from you now, Marie, how can legal design contribute to fixing the law?

Well, basically, as Antti said, the first step is realizing how deep is the gap between the law and its users. I completely subscribe to law being broken, and we can actually fix it through bridging that gap with a combination of, in our case, neurosciences, plain legal language, design in terms of user centricity, human centricity, and problem-solving, obviously. And then, of course, there's all the depth of graphic design, UX design, service design, strategy design.

So bringing another areas into the law instead of only being lawyers.

Yeah, just to be clear, I don't think that lawyers should become designers or vice versa.

Okay.

I think it's all about multidisciplinary collaboration, so that we see the law no longer, and legal documents no longer as an end in itself. What is a contract for? Is it really just to sit on a database once it is signed? Not really. If you look at the statistics, it's less than 0.01% of contracts in the world that are being litigated, and yet they are entirely drafted by lawyers, for lawyers or judges, but absolutely not to be the business tool that they should be in the first place. Not that it shouldn't prevent the risks as well. But what I'm saying is that fixing the law is about realizing what's the purpose of legal documents, what are they really for? And once you've found the purpose, then you can find the shape, the form that's going to be fit for that purpose. Does that make sense at all?

For me, yes. But just to be clear for the audience, how can legal design help doing it? How would you define legal design? What are the principles, the mindset? How does legal design changes the game in a way?

Is this question to me or Antti?

Yeah, it's to you.

It's to me. Well, first of all, the definition of legal design, I don't think that really matters, to be perfectly honest.

Okay.

Antti will have his own definition, Angelica will have her own definition. It doesn't really matter as long as-

But you mentioned user centricity, human centricity.

Exactly. As long as you shift the focus from the law for the law

Okay

... to the law for the users.

Okay.

And this shift in mindset, to be really focused on users is going to change everything. Because once you realize that it's not just for contract, it's also for compliance programs, it's also for even litigation. Who are the users? Judges, right?

Exactly, yeah.

If you think about judges as users of the written submissions that you provide, and if you realize that they can't realistically read more than 30 pages, so if you produce 200-

Yeah, true

... you know? So this user centricity is absolutely central, which means defining your users. So we're talking about persona, user profiles, user journeys, identifying their pain points, what it is that's itchy, that's taking too much time, that's irritating them. What is it that they don't understand? What's the missing information? This is critical. Oftentimes, people mistake legal design for a pretty summary. It's absolutely none of that. We don't make anything look good. Don't come to me to make your contract look pretty or sexy or whatever. That won't happen. And it's not a summary either.

Okay.

So the point is really about fixing the problems, fixing the pain points of the users.

Provide real solutions to real problems.

Yeah.

I get by that. Okay. So Angelica, tell me, how do you apply, being a designer, the design to the law? Is there a process to it?

Yeah, there is a process. As a designer, what you do at the beginning is to really understand which is the real problem, which Marie is just saying. So you have to go and really understand who is the user of the situation and who is the service provider. In this case, probably is a lawyer. And what I would like to highlight here is something that is really important to us, that as lawyers, we provide a service, and we don't think about that a lot. And if we have that in mind, we need to identify what kind of service are we providing and how is that service being provided? Which are the touch points that are part of that experience, and how is the complete experience from the beginning until the end? When we go and talk with the users, and we go talk with the providers, then we identify where is the problem and what kind of problem we have to deal with. Can be connected with the document, or maybe can be connected with the process, or maybe with the knowledge, or maybe with the system, or maybe with the regulation. So it's not only about documents, it's about any kind of touch point that is part of the process, or the system, or the service. And when we realize that, then we identify which is the opportunity to intervene here. And then we have creativity sessions to do something about this situation, this problem, and then we begin to work with prototypes. And we create the first solution, and then the second solution, and then the third solution until we have the right one. And we have to make some validations with the final user because we don't have the solution because we are part of the problem. So we need to go again To the user and see what is he feeling about the solution that we have on the table. And then we just do a pilot with this solution. And probably it's not perfect, and we have to keep working on that until the end.

Okay.

So it's systemic, all the time, working on. It's never perfect.

Okay, thank you. I think you also answered my last question, but just to confirm, user research is key in legal design. I think we all agree with that, right? Because we need to hear from the users, and that, I think, is probably the main difference comparing to traditional law, I would say, right? I think we agree on that.

Oh, yeah.

I would say so, and if I may continue to what Angélica said very nicely about the process of legal design. If you think of traditional legal processes, they're very linear. They go, client calls a lawyer, wants an agreement, let's say like a IP transfer agreement. Lawyer goes back to his cubicle and starts drafting it, sends it, invoices it. So it's very linear. It goes from A, B to C in a linear fashion. And I think that the legal design process is more like a loop. It loops over and over again.

Okay.

So we do something, then we test it with the clients or with the customers, and then we do another prototype. And again, we test it again and again. So it's like a circle, more like a loop that we're doing. And of course, if you need something fast, something easy and very fast, I think that the linear process is very good for that one. Actually, big law firms are very good at delivering something standard quite quickly, and invoicing also pretty generously on those things. But in some cases, the linear process is very good. But if you want to make big improvements, if you really want to be client-centric, if you want to make something extraordinarily good, then the linear process doesn't deliver those results. You have to make a prototype because usually the problems are so difficult to solve that you won't get it right the first time. The first prototype is not going to be very good. And then we start improving it. We'll show the prototype to actual clients or users. They will criticize it. They will say, "No, this is wrong, and this, I don't like this. I like this. This doesn't work." And with that information, we can do another one and another one. And this is also, Tiago, for maybe answering the question, where should you use legal design? It can be a little bit more time-consuming. It can be a little bit more expensive, not necessarily, but it can be, because it loops.

Okay.

Because we test our products.

There are more interactions with the client, right?

Yeah. Exactly. But also, it's a great way of delivering something of high value, something that is difficult to automate, something that you can't get straight from ChatGPT.

That's interesting.

That's my point, to continue with what Angélica said very nicely.

And that leads to another question that I want to ask you, is that can you provide me some examples of real life examples of the application of legal design that you have done in the past? Marie, maybe I'll start by you.

Oh, sure. Gladly.

You have something to show us?

Yeah, exactly. Let me show you. I think it's easier than tons of discussion. Can you see my screen okay?

Sure.

Yes.

Yeah, I'm just going to be in presenter mode. Okay. So basically, legal design, because it's a problem-solving methodology, it is applicable to all the areas of the law where you find those pain points. Which means that, of course, it could be contracts, but also processes, as Angélica said, and Antti as well. It could be litigation, by the way. We're heavily active in litigation design across the EU. It could be all the training, compliance, ESG reports, all the walls of text, basically, which no one wants to read. Digital transformation, of course. Data protection, actually, that should be the first field, probably, because it's all these privacy policies that no one wants to read. For example, we've built this. This is online, by the way. If you want to scan the QR code, you can see it live. Also to show that it's not just nice prototypes that never come to light. So this is a privacy policy that's not just for kids, by the way. It's for King, the video game player, of course. But it's for kids and their parents. It's meant to be inclusive. It's in plain language, with a reading age of 13 years old. And because we've worked a lot with the users, we did focus groups in the UK, we did user testing, measuring exactly what they understood, what they didn't, then it's actually built as if it were part of Candy Crush in the present case. The idea is not to say that privacy policies should be gamified, or that legal design is a gamification of contracts or policies. Absolutely not. The idea is that any legal document should provide a user experience that reflects the core product that the company itself is selling, or the core service. Does that make sense at all?

For me, yes. But in this case, you also wanted to keep the tone of voice, right?

Exactly. It's a matter of tone of voice. It's obviously all the amazing assets that were in the games, on a completely different graphic universe. It could be TNCs. Here at Dice, it's a ticketing platform. And here the problem to solve was actually that users did not realize that purchasing tickets, they wouldn't be able to cancel after 24 hours. It's a bit like plane tickets. You can't really change your mind. They didn't understand that before, and all the user research phase made that very clear, and that led us, instead of hiding that key information in fine print, which used to be the case before, we actually put it forward. It's on the first page, basically, because it's key to create that trust that will then become a competitive advantage, when people realize that you respect them, that you're fair to them. And that's also the power of design, digital fairness. I'm going to stop here.

Perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much. Angie, I think you have also an example to show us.

Yes, sure. So I can show you projects with two different perspectives. So let me share my screen. So in Aptica, we began as a service design company, but during our process, we realized that a lot of the problems with those services were connected with legal touchpoints. So that's how we realized that we have an opportunity with those kind of projects. And one of our main projects is this one that I'm going to introduce with you, and it was with a bank. They had this relevant product that was a stock commission contract. And what they had was this opportunity to really connect people with a huge amount of money, which was about $1 million in Colombia, which was a lot of money. And what they have was this amount of money to give to the bank, then they create the investment portfolio, and then they begin the investment, right? So what was the problem? The problem was that this took a lot of time to be signed, this contract. So this is the journey that took for the entire process to be done. And this is the amount of time that took for the process to be signed. And what we realized, understanding this process, was the commercial part of the company didn't have the tools to really explain the contract. So what we did was we had a conversation with all these stakeholders and realized that even the commercial stakeholders of the bank, they didn't even read those contracts, even though they were, for me, legal touchpoints as well, because they were the ones who were taking these contracts to have the conversation with the final client. So for me, it was really interesting because even though they had to read them, they didn't read it. So the time that took to sign these contracts were three months. So it is a lot regarding the kind of money that we were talking about. And this was the document. So as you can see, it's not a really nice one. And also, it doesn't say to you that this is a Colombian document or it's a financial document, or it's from Bancolombia, which was my client. So what we did was we had numbers related to this document, how many sections, pages, words, the amount of money, all of that. And then we did a lot of creative sessions to understand what was the problem. We have conversations with all these people. We ask the final client, "What do you get? What don't you get?" With highlights, also with colors. So can you tell me in red, what don't you understand? Can you tell me in green what you really like? Can you tell me in yellow what will be out of the document? And after that, we redesigned the document. So we have graphics, but we have different conversations with the document. We have mathematical conversation here to make it easier to understand what is going on with your money. And at the end-

Brand awareness as well, right?

Exactly. To really understand what was going on with that. And at the end, what is really relevant is how it changes the data here. And it changed from three months to three days to be signed that document. And this increased in 77% the sales of this product. And it was really interesting how the legal component wasn't an obstacle anymore. At least it was something that was pushing the product, and everybody in the company wanted to work with these lawyers now. They were like the rock stars of the field. Now the legal touchpoint was the driver of the business. So that was quite interesting.

Thanks. Angie, moving on to you now.

I think you're on mute, Angie.

You are on mute, Angie. You're on mute

Excellent. Good. I wanted to show you a boring case, just to show that legal design isn't always sexy or fun. This is a little bit older case, and maybe our thinking has developed from this one, and we've worked with pretty much everybody, but this was one of the first cases that really struck to me how legal design could actually help the delivery of legal services. So the Finland Arbitration Institute, very old-fashioned institute, contacted us and wanted to make their arbitration process more human-centric and maybe democratic in the sense that people would understand what's happening in arbitration. Arbitration institutes are competing for cases. Finnish Arbitration Institute competes heavily with the Swedish Arbitration Institute, for example, for cases. So we wanted to develop a solution that informs people and makes the potential users of these arbitration measures at ease with the complex arbitration process. As a lawyer, every time that case goes to arbitration, I know that it's a difficult case. The arbitration takes a relatively long time. It's expensive, and it doesn't happen every day. So that's why we wanted to make something just more understandable, more easy. And we did a lot of workshops with the users. We tried to find the pain points, everything like that. And we arrived, we had maybe 60 pages of heavy text. We did one visualization on top of that one. And it was kind of like an interactive map where you can zoom in and zoom out. And we've worked with a lot of clients who also want this kind of legal solutions. They want to know at a glance where they are, but they also, if they have the need, they want to dive in. So I want you to think of this analogy, something for the client that they know where they are, like a map, but then they can perhaps zoom in if they want to, layering the information in this fashion. So this was the case that changed how we thought about legal design. So the visualizations were not that fancy. The product wasn't that nice of a looking, but it really worked. It really communicated something complex in a very easy fashion.

It was easier to use, right?

Just easy to use, dead easy to use. It's too much to ask to make arbitration fun and funny. And it's not going to happen. But you can make it easy, or at least a little bit more democratic, a little bit more open for the users, and that's exactly what we did in this case.

Okay, perfect. Thank you very much. Okay, I'll now move on to specific areas where you have been exploring recently. And Angélica, I'll start by you and finding the blind spots in the legal world using legal service design. But I'll go to a thing first. You have been mentioning a lot touchpoints. What are touchpoints in legal design?

Okay. A touchpoint is something that makes real the service. So it's not only about legal design, but it's related to any kind of service. So a touchpoint is the document, the person, the objective, the space, the process. It's everything that makes tangible or intangible, but makes interactive the service that you have. So without a person, without the process, without the channel, without the space, you cannot have the interaction with the service. So you need to have the touchpoint, and you need to design or be aware that you have a touchpoint in front of you to make it possible. So when you work with services, you need to be aware of the touchpoints that are present or that are lacking, and you have to design. So that's a touchpoint.

Okay, understood. And tell me now something, regarding legal service design and the legal journey, what should we be aware of when designing that journey? And then considering the gender specificities, I know you have been working on that. Can you give us an example, talk about that a little?

Yeah, sure. I can give you an example, a personal example. So I'm going to share with you my personal story. So Tiago has told you a lot about me, but I'm a woman. I'm a mother of two dogs. I'm a lawyer and a designer. I'm the founder of my company, but I'm also divorced, and that happened last year, the last day of the year, and it was really hard. But it gave me a lot of inspiration to work in a new legal service, which was the beautiful process of getting divorced. So during that process, a question pop up to me, which was, "It is the same to getting divorced as a woman or as a man?" And the answer was it's not. And it came to me because I had to go through the process, so I ask a lot of people, men and women, how was to getting divorced as a man or as a woman. And during that-

I think we lost you for a bit, Angélica

In this project. And the two of us realized that it was quite interesting to work in this. So the question was, how do we design the divorce experience taking into account the gender blind spots? So, to make this possible, we have conversations with a lot of people, and we identified the complete journey from the beginning until the end of getting divorced. And we realized that there was a moment which was crucial, and it was the agreement. So how you can talk with that person who used to be your partner and is not your partner anymore, and you have to make a commitment, or you have to compromise yourself to know how is going to be your future, and sometimes not only your future, but the future of your children if you have some children with you and that person. And it was quite interesting, the conversation that we had. And then we realized that there is a regulation, in this case, a civil regulation, that is connected with getting divorced. Then there is the service of getting divorced that is connected with lawyers and the notaries and all this process. And there is gender in the middle, but we didn't have that a lot in our minds when we are delivering that service. So, talking to Tatiana specifically, and she had kids, so it was really hard for her going through this process. She told me this story, which was really interesting. And she said, "My lawyer told me that with Alejandro's infidelity, it was perfect for me to keep full custody of the girls. But was this what I wanted? Girls without a dad." And this was quite interesting because I used this as an inspiration to talk a lot with other women who had kids before. And they told me that a lot of their lawyers were using this as the strategy to keep the kids for them. And at the end, talking to Tatiana, she told me, "Actually, I don't want my kids without a dad. I want them to have a family as well. And I want them to have Alejandro in their lives." So that's how I realized maybe there is a blind spot, and we are thinking that maybe what we have here is something like this. We have normalized that when there is an unfaithful father, the mother does not want to share custody with him because this behavior has been seen historically. But in reality, each case must been seen in detail, and it's the job of the lawyers to know the true intentions of its clients and what's over the children interests. So I have begin to work with these kind of blind spots, and not only talk about with women, but also with men. And then I had conversations with, for example, Rodrigo, and he told me this story. "My lawyer told me that we could assign the lease to somebody else so that my ex-wife wouldn't have access to the apartment during the divorce process. But if I affect Raquel, that will affect my son, and I don't want that for our future." So again, we see this, lawyers talking with their clients. Let's do this with the assets. So working with that kind of approach, the man doesn't want to give any to the partner, a blind spot. So the blind spot here was this one. We have normalized that when men provide at home and the time comes for a divorce, they want to retain capital as a strategy to win because this process are seen as a confrontation. But in reality, this type of position damage the future healing of both parties, and it is illegal as well. So I have realized that we have the opportunity to work here with a method and to redesign the product, redesign the process, redesign the communication, and actually redesign the ecosystem. And that's how I have designed this beautiful project named TAI, to design the experience of getting divorced. So we have these lines. First is the opportunity to work with lawyers who know how to deal with you when you are going through this emotional process. Second is how to have a psychology, like guidance, and then going with the logistics because at that moment you don't even know where you're going to live. For example, in this case, this is my apartment, but during two months, I didn't know if this was going to be my apartment or not. So that's really hard, and when you are going through a divorce process, you need to have this kind of support. And some of the things that I have designed, some of the touch points, for example, is this guide of helping lawyers to find out blind spots. To realize if they are doing support, a legal support with blind spots, to stop doing that and begin to doing it without it. Also, I have designed this canvas to ask questions about the future their clients are dreaming about. So for example, ask, how do you want the other person to get involved in the future of your children? Or how do you imagine your life after the divorce? And use all the answers to create this last formula. Angelica is looking to, and financially she hopes to, she expects to live in and financially to resolve this. And having this, and maybe the result of the partner as well, create the final strategy to redesign the proper way to help this client. So with this, we have worked with different clients and, for example, Rodrigo says it will help to overcome the pain and navigate difficult conversations because it's really difficult to be divorced, but as lawyers, we have the opportunity to give them actually like a legal hug and not also giving them confrontation, which is what we used to do as lawyers. And at the end, you can connect gender service and the law regulation and work in service design as the bridge that connects the law and the gender needs of the final user. And I just want to thank my divorce for the perspective because it's given me the opportunity to work with this

Thanks a lot, Angélica. Really, thanks a lot. Marie, moving on to you now.

Can I just say that I love the legal hug? I mean, I love everything Angélica does, but the legal hug.

Thank you, Marie.

Thanks, Marie. So talking now about fair patterns. You have been actively promoting fair patterns. You have founded the podcast, "Fighting Dark Patterns," which is available on the streaming platforms.

Sure.

So the question is, what are dark patterns? Can you give us some examples?

Of course. So a dark pattern is quite simply an interface that deceives you or manipulates you to make you do something, either without realizing or simply against your interests. So just for all the listeners today, if you've been online since this morning on networks, or if you've bought something online in the past few days, I'm pretty sure that you've seen the big Accept All button, especially with Cyber Monday, Black Friday, whatever. The free trial is also an example, sadly classic. It's not free, it's not a trial, and it will be virtually impossible to unsubscribe. It's also all the interfaces where the design itself and the language tricks you into sharing ever more personal data without you realizing that you're sharing that much. Like find your friends, and then you activate the geolocation. Well, for sure, not just your friends are going to find you, but also all the data brokers of the planet. So these are dark patterns. You've all seen dark patterns. Now, maybe you didn't know the term, maybe you didn't know it had a name. But for sure, it's everywhere. It's on 97% of European websites, according to the European Commission.

97?

97%, according to the European Commission.

Okay.

It's a 2022 study. It's the same in the US, virtually. Japan, it's 90%, according to studies released a couple of weeks ago. It's endemic. It's basically a digital plague. It's everywhere.

Whoa. About that, one topic that you cover on your podcast that I found very interesting is the potential litigation arising from companies using dark patterns. With Amazon having been sued by the FTC this year for enrolling customers in its Prime program without their consent and making it difficult for them to cancel their subscriptions, the thing you were talking about just now. So with dark patterns being foreseen and prohibited in the Digital Service Act Directive, which will come into force next year, what will be the potential consequences for the European companies that do not adopt fair patterns?

Yeah. This is a very important point, actually. Let me share my screen because I think, as always, it's easier when you see the problem. So this is what I was talking about. Everything that you see online. Again, the free trial, the wall of text to accept the privacy notice, accept between brackets, of course. So this is what I was saying, basically. Now, coming to your point about litigation, let me be very clear on this. It's not just about the Digital Services Act that you're mentioning, Tiago. It's true that it's the novelty because the DSA actually came into force for the very large online platforms a couple of months ago and will enter into force in February of next year for all the other players. But basically, what listeners need to understand is that it's a combination of legislation that all prohibit dark patterns, either indirectly or directly.

Okay.

So, for example, if you take the very old Unfair Practices Directive, nothing new here. It dates back from, I don't even know, 10, 15 years ago, perhaps more. It already prohibits manipulation. Actually, there's an appendix to the directive which expressly mentions dark patterns as being prohibited. Now, of course, it's also, and this is critical, totally contrary to GDPR. Why? Simply because there's Article 5 of GDPR, which imposes fair processing of personal data. And of course, if you trick people, if you manipulate people to make them share more personal information, there's nothing fair. There's no informed consent, which is the standard under the GDPR. So in any event, dark patterns, when they apply to privacy interfaces, they are totally contrary to GDPR, and that's a 4% worldwide de novo fine.

So companies can be already held liable for using dark patterns?

Of course.

Okay.

And they are. Let me just go to this slide. We had fun because we're like that at Fair Patterns. We're a bunch of lawyers, neuroscientists, designers, and we made this exercise of just showing the fines applied already, only in the last two months. And we've got the usual suspects, of course, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, Alphabet. No surprise there. But there's Canal+, for example, in France, which is a smaller player. There's Dufresne in Canada. Epic Games, of course, it's a larger company. Indigo. All of that around the world. We're talking Canada, US, India, in the case of Indigo. I mean, it's really Endemic. And just to go back to the Digital Services Act, what's new with the DSA, and it's the same with the Digital Markets Act, by the way, which is the first express prohibition of dark patterns. What's new is that it says the term in the preamble and in the article, it explains what it is.

What it is. Yeah, exactly.

And it's subject to a 6% fine based on the worldwide turnover, so even higher than GDPR. And then let's not forget competition law. This is my first experience. I spent 15 years doing competition law. Any dominant company applying dark patterns currently is clearly breaching Article 102, meaning abuse of dominance.

Great.

And that's subject to a 10% fine based on worldwide turnover. And if you look at beyond the examples that I've just shown, if you look at the US, which has a different system in terms of applicable law, obviously, it's based on the FTC Act, especially Section 5. Well, over the past 18 months only, we've seen a very increasing number of litigation cases, but also increase in the amount that are at stakes. So for example, they applied something that's already quite significant to Vonage, $100 million. Then it was Tube attacks for $141 million. Then there's this very famous now settlement by Epic Games for all the dark patterns that used to be enshrined on Fortnite. And we're talking about altogether nearly half a billion dollars.

That's a lot.

And it's only the beginning because, as I'm sure you've seen, the FTC sued Amazon in June of this year for what is perhaps the most giant dark pattern in the world, which is Prime, the supposedly free trial, free delivery. So all of that really pleas in favor of not just looking at the problem, but really finding a solution, which is what we've been doing by creating fair patterns. The idea and the tool is actually AI-powered interfaces to empower users to make informed and free choices. And basically the way it works, and I'll stop there, it's automatically detecting dark patterns on sites, apps, voice assistants, whichever interfaces. It fixes the dark patterns with the fair patterns, and then you have a number of add-ons, whether it's fair T&Cs, fair privacy policies, e-learning. I'll stop there because that's not the main topic. But clearly, when you apply user centricity and human centricity to interfaces, you always have to wonder, what is the outcome for the users?

Yeah.

Is it really to the benefit of the users? If we're just thinking that digital market economy is for a couple, a handful of very large groups to make a fortune worldwide while tricking and trapping everyone else, I'm not sure there's much progress in that. Now, it's not doomed to be this way. That's my main point. It's not something that comes inevitably with digital. It's not at all like that. It's completely avoidable, and regulators have understood it because now it's prohibited, so it will have to change. But it's really about understanding that trust and fairness, digital fairness, is a much safer bet and a much better bet, actually, even in terms of-

And a competitive advantage as well, right?

Exactly. It's more profitable to build loyalty with your customers. We can actually show that fair patterns are more profitable than dark ones.

Okay, perfect. Thank you very much.

Pleasure.

I'll invite everyone to listen to the podcast because Marie discusses these topics there.

I'm going to share it in the chat.

Perfect. Thank you. Antti, moving on to you now. So AI has been a hot topic in the legal world this year, with many lawyers fearing that it will replace their jobs. You have been actively exploring this new world, but even prior to that, in your book, again, you wrote the following, which I found very interesting. "But who do we have to blame for the fact that our work is so easy to automate in the first place? Legal design is about collaboration and empathy, elements that are very difficult to automate." So let me ask you, how might legal design take advantage of this powerful new tool and change the way we provide our services without losing our jobs, of course?

Look, I posted a LinkedIn post in the chat. Maybe you can have a look at it. It's a two-minute video-

Okay

... of me capturing an NDA template screenshot, importing it to an AI tool, running an analysis of the document, rewriting a clause into a better format, then displaying those things in a table format. And then I do some visualizations on top of that one. So in, what, three minutes, I have analysis, rewritten clause, and some icons that I can use for visualizations. Right? This is how powerful these tools are. They're insanely powerful. But this begs the question: is it now any better than the original NDA? Or does it make any sense to send the NDA? I think that within these tools, we get immense value of being quicker, more efficient, but also at the same time, maybe we should discuss and think if most NDAs make sense at all. Instead of using AI to write them quickly and go through them quickly, maybe we should ditch the idea of sending NDAs in the first place. All lawyers know that NDAs are bullshit, so why do we keep doing the same thing over and over, but with just faster and more powerful tools? In my opinion, legal design is high-level legal work. It's a combination, it's a melting of minds of several people, whether it's lawyer, designer, or tech people, or an economist, or somebody else. And that kind of work, which is very high level, it's terribly difficult to automate. And I think that kind of collaboration might save our profession also. We know about law, but if we just focus on the mundane, the simple tasks, something that pretty much everybody can do, and what AI can do also, we might be in trouble at some point.

Okay.

So I would wish that this kind of multidisciplinary idea of working with law would bring our service to a higher level. So that's what I want from lawyers. I want us to raise the bar of what is to provide legal services. The bar is too low at the moment. If the AI can do it for us, then the bar is just set too low.

And about that, let me ask you, should we change the way we provide services to the extent they become experiences? Because you cannot replace an experience.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea, and if it's just off the shelf, if it's something very easy to do, if we set the bar very low, then the AI can probably replicate it. And maybe I'll just, to recap this one, I'll share the screen real quick. Maybe you can see this one.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. I'll share the whole screen. I'll put it there. Maybe you can see the meme of Alex Su, one of our colleagues, saying that lawyers always go like, "Yeah, there's no way AI is going to replace us. The work what we do is very complex, requires expert judgment." And then what we do is we copy-paste stuff from ChatGPT, right? So that's not the way to think of our legal services. We need to raise the bar, and if you think of all the examples that we saw today, the newly designed divorce process, or the work that Marie is doing, or the client projects that we showed you, that's high-level legal work. That's something that we can still invoice quite a lot from our clients because that's bespoke, that's high level, that's very impactful. You can craft it into a nice story. It's not like off-the-shelf contract that you can get from any place. It's tested with their actual clients, so it makes a nice story also for these companies, and people are willing to buy or purchase stories and experiences also. And if the experience is just getting a PDF of 10 pages without anything, a lot of people aren't willing to pay for that kind of just risk management and just written words that could be imported from ChatGPT. So this is what I want to say to you, that we need to raise the bar of legal services in order to keep ourselves relevant.

And in some use, collaboration, tailor-made work, and user research for that, basically, right?

Exactly. We'll start from that one, and then we'll start expanding into other areas. But it's important to notice that we are not alone. Lawyers are not the only person trying to solve difficult problems. If you collaborate with tech people or with engineers or with graphic designers and whatnot, you'll realize that there are a lot of different kind of businesses that are trying to solve very complex problems also. So maybe we can learn from those people. We can't be arrogant and think that, okay, law is just for lawyers. We know everything about law. If we just listen to these people, they are very smart people, and they can help to keep law and at the same time, lawyers, very relevant. I think that we have a bright future ahead. Lawyers are like cockroaches. We are difficult to kill. I think that lawyers are going to exist in the future for sure. But also, we need to evolve. The profession has to evolve, and we have to evolve also. And evolving and evolution is very humane also. It's the most human thing to do. We need to replace ourselves, replace the work that we are doing with a higher quality work, and with that way, we can also stay relevant and happy and successful, right?

Well, thank you very much, Antti. Well, I think this is it. This was a very rich conversation, and I'm very glad that we have started this legal design journey in Portugal with you. Thanks again, Marie Angélique and Antti. Este podcast é da responsabilidade da PLMJ