2021 Highlights: Practical Law Thought Leaders on Climate Change and Product Design
With 2021 winding down, Legal Current is looking back at the milestones and key accomplishments from the Legal Professionals business of Thomson Reuters. Today we highlight Practical Law colleagues who shared their legal expertise and insights in thought-leadership pieces.
Becky Clissmann, environmental law editor at Practical Law, shared how lawyers can help fight climate change. Clissmann serves on the steering group for The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP), which sees every legal contract as an opportunity to contribute positive solutions to climate change, rather than perpetuating business-as-usual scenarios.
With the U.N.’s COP26 summit shining a spotlight on the global climate crisis, Clissmann shared how lawyers are uniquely positioned to help in The Global Legal Post and Legal Futures.
She explained in The Global Legal Post: “Lawyers write contracts that influence nearly every major decision made by businesses, communities and other organizations. Currently, most legal agreements lock-in the existing high-carbon ways of doing business. If an agreement is silent on its climate impacts that means the parties will continue to operate using existing models that do not take account of climate change. The good news is that those contracts also have the power to put the parties on a path to meet their net-zero targets. And those changes can be accomplished much quicker than the time it would take to introduce new laws to regulate those sectors. This accelerates the impact of that action, reducing emissions today and reducing emissions towards net zero earlier than might otherwise be the case.”
Clissmann’s colleague, Erica Kitaev, senior director, Product Management, Thomson Reuters shared an insider’s perspective on another hot topic: designing products for knowledge workers.
Kitaev applies her background as a former partner in a large law firm, with expertise in data privacy and litigation, to help lead product design for Practical Law. Product Led Alliance featured Kitaev’s insights on why designing products for knowledge workers should be driven by domain expertise, deep customer empathy, technical knowledge, and a well-defined feedback loop.
As Kitaev explained: “Designing new products for knowledge workers can be as rewarding as it is challenging. When starting a new project, it boils simply down to this—begin with the customers’ problems or goals, bring genuine empathy into the process, and deploy the best technology that will make users faster, more accurate, and more efficient.”
Whether it’s product development or making a social impact, Thomson Reuters is honored to share colleagues’ expertise and perspectives to help support and advance the legal industry.
