Bio
Stefania is an all-rounder, with one foot in academia and one in business. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Vaasa, Department of Business Law (Vaasa, Finland), and has earned her doctoral degree from Aalto University (Espoo, Finland). Stefania also runs her one-woman consultancy PasseraDesign, where she helps her clients transform their contracts and policies into user-friendly, effective tools that work for business. With over ten years of experience in the field, her work ranges over information design, service design, human-computer interaction, proactive and preventive law, and legal innovation.
She is a co-founder of the Legal Design Alliance and a co-author of its Legal Design Manifesto. She is also the creator of Legal Design Jam, the first workshop format aimed at innovating legal documents and prototyping hands-on. She has been the first (and so far only) designer awarded Fellow status by World Commerce & Contract for her innovative work on contract design and simplification.
Stefania has considerable experience as a keynote speaker, facilitator, lecturer, and trainer. She has lectured at prestigious institutions such as Stanford University, Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession, KU Leuven, UC Louvain, European University Institute, ESADE Business and Law School, California Western School of Law, and Domus Academy.
Contribution to Legal Tech
Stefania frequently publishes scholarship at the intersection of law, design, and technology. Her empirical dissertation on how visualizations can enhance user comprehension and experience of contracts (and foster better business relationships) is a seminal work in the field of legal design. Her most recent articles investigate the role of design patterns in contracts and privacy notices, as well as theoretical and practical approaches to bring closer human-centered design and legal technology and create contracts that are both human and machine-readable.
Stefania is a passionate advocate for making the complexity of law and technology accessible, intuitive, and human-centered. She collaborates with World Commerce & Contracting on various initiatives focused on contract simplification and standardization, which were shortlisted for the FT Intelligent Business Awards 2019. She is the co-creator (with Helena Haapio) and curator of the WorldCC Contract Design Pattern Library, an ever-growing collection of contract design patterns – effective, repeatable solutions to commonly occurring usability and understandability problems in contracts. She is also a member of the WorldCC Contracting Standards steering group, an initiative that leverages mass contract analytics to distill standard, balanced, and streamlined contract templates and clauses.
