Reflections from the Legal Design Summit, Helsinki 2025
At the 2025 Legal Design Summit in Helsinki, HiiL joined hundreds of innovators exploring how justice can be reshaped for today’s world. For us, the value of the Summit lay not only in the scale of participation but in the direction of the conversations: a collective move beyond purely technological fixes toward solutions grounded in people’s lived realities.
The Summit gathered more than 50 speakers and 10 BrainFactory workshops, where artificial intelligence was a frequent reference point but never the whole story. What resonated most were three approaches with direct relevance for the future of justice innovation: people-centred justice, trauma-informed design, and more-than-human perspectives. Together, they signal a broader horizon for legal design, one that reframes outcomes around dignity and accessibility, acknowledges the impact of trauma, and extends responsibility beyond human concerns alone.
People-centred justice
A consistent theme was the need to reframe how we measure justice. Traditional indicators—cases closed, laws passed, hours billed—rarely reflect whether people’s problems are actually resolved. People-centred justice (PCJ) focuses instead on outcomes that matter directly to individuals and communities: dignity, affordability, accessibility, and effectiveness.
In a BrainFactory workshop we hosted as HiiL with partners including OECD and the Thailand Institute of Justice, participants explored how PCJ has shifted from aspiration to evidence-based practice. Examples from Serbia, Thailand, and Niger illustrated how the vast majority of disputes are managed outside formal systems—by families, neighbours, religious leaders, and community leaders. Strengthening these everyday pathways requires reliable data, thoughtful design, and, in some contexts, careful use of AI. Above all, it demands genuine co-creation with the people whose problems justice systems are meant to address.
Trauma-informed design
Another vital thread was the importance of trauma-informed approaches. As Jeremie Quiohilag emphasised, survivors of gender-based violence are too often exposed to further harm when justice systems prioritise procedural requirements over safety and recovery. Trauma-informed design asks a different set of questions: how can processes protect dignity, minimise harm, and support healing? It recognises that systems need not be flawless to be effective, provided they are “perfect where it counts.” This approach resonates with HiiL’s commitment to designing justice solutions which move beyond abstract principles to shape concrete experiences for individuals in moments of acute vulnerability.
More-than-human perspectives
The Summit also underscored the need to expand legal imagination beyond human-centred frameworks. Nina Toivonen challenged participants to consider designs that extend recognition and voice to nature and land, as a foundation for livelihoods, identity, and justice. Precedents already exist. In New Zealand, Mount Taranaki and the Whanganui River have been recognised as legal persons, reflecting Māori worldviews in which landscapes are understood as kin, not just territory, but a source of belonging and rights. This recognition reframes environmental protection by positioning nature not as a resource to be managed but as a stakeholder with rights of its own, a perspective that resonates strongly in contexts where land rights are contested or denied.
Such perspectives gain urgency in the context of the climate crisis and global struggles over land rights. They raise challenging but necessary questions: what if dispossession of land were treated as a legal wrong in the same way as environmental harm? What if communities and ecosystems could together claim redress for damage to their integrity? For legal design, these questions signal an expanded responsibility, one that acknowledges both the interconnectedness of people with land and of all life with its environment.
When design becomes evidence
A further illustration of design’s potential comes from Karma Dabaghi’s work in Lebanon, where architectural reconstructions were used as legal evidence. These visual representations made visible aspects of events that words and documents could not capture. This case highlights how legal design extends beyond clarity and accessibility: it can broaden the very toolkit of justice, offering new methods to establish accountability and uncover truth. In Dabaghi’s framing, such work also points toward the idea of anticipatory forensics, using design not only to reconstruct the past, but to anticipate risks and prevent catastrophic harm before it occurs.
Using AI with intention
AI was not absent from the Summit. As Christian Djeffal argued, it should be seen neither as ally nor adversary but as a tool. Outcomes depend less on the technology itself than on the ability of humans to frame the right questions. He likened this role to Michelangelo seeing the statue within a block of marble: the vision must come from people, while the tool helps reveal and refine it. He called this an act of creative leadership. In law and justice, that means starting with the outcomes we want, fairness, accessibility, dignity, and then guiding AI to help achieve them. Used this way, AI is not just a productivity tool but part of a collaborative design process, one that can widen our imagination of what justice could look like.
Looking ahead
The 2025 Legal Design Summit made clear that the future of justice will not be defined by technology alone. Instead, it will be shaped by approaches that centre people, acknowledge trauma, and recognise the interdependence of humans with the natural world. Closing the justice gap will require coalitions that stretch well beyond courts and legal professionals—bringing together technologists, policymakers, funders, community leaders, and those most directly affected by injustice. Progress should be measured not by the number of pilots launched or tools deployed, but by whether people facing eviction, violence, land disputes, or environmental harm see real improvements in their lives.
At its best, legal design embeds justice within everyday realities, anticipates risks before they cause harm, and reimagines accountability in ways that extend dignity and agency to all, people, communities, and the environments they depend on. This is the vision HiiL is committed to advancing.
