Comic Book Contracts: bringing the fine print to life with Professor Camilla Baasch Andersen

Professor Camilla Basch Andersen is a professor of law at the University of Western Australia and the founder of Comic Book Contracts which is revolutionising how we engage with big business and become more clear on the behaviours, expectations and services we are signing up to. 

Do you meticulously read and understand the fine print in every one of the contracts that you sign?  Have you maybe clicked the ‘Yes’ button and inadvertently agreed to give away your first born child?! They do say the devil is in the detail!   

 Contracts are a part of everyday life and possibly more common that you are aware of … from buying a bus ticket, subscribing to free wifi, shopping online and of course the obvious ones like buying a house or travel insurance.   Imagine if contracts were really easy to understand, more accessible to the average person, and maybe even fun! 

Duration: 45 minutes.

Links:

Website: Comic Book Contracts
LinkedIn: Professor Camilla Baach Andersen  
Aurecon
Proactive Think Tank
Bankwest
WA Individualised Services
Alternative Contracting

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Thank you!

·      Sincere thanks to Jay (Justin) Hill for his expert sound mastering and patience! Jay, together with the incredible Eva Chye, have inspired me through their passion project If In

Transcript

Sonia Nolan: 0:05

Do you meticulously read and understand the fine print in every one of the contracts that you sign? Have you maybe clicked the "Yes" button and inadvertently agreed to give away your firstborn child. They do say the devil is in detail. Contracts are a part of everyday life and possibly more common than you are aware of, from buying a bus ticket, subscribing to free Wi Fi, shopping online, and of course the obvious ones like buying a house or travel insurance. Imagine if contracts were really easy to understand, if they were more accessible to the average person, and maybe even fun. Well, that's exactly what My Warm Table guest this week is pioneering here in Perth. Professor Camilla Baasch Andersen is a professor of law at the University of Western Australia, and the founder of Comic Book Contracts, which is revolutionising how we engage with big business and become more clear on the behaviours, expectations and service we're signing up to. Professor Camilla Baasch Andersen, welcome to My Warm Table.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 1:09

Thank you, Sonia, it's great to be able to talk to you about this.

Sonia Nolan: 1:12

I'm excited about Comic Book Contracts, because I remember meeting you over breakfast with a mutual friend a couple of years ago, and I had never heard of the concept of Comic Book Contracts, and you had me enthralled over our scrambled eggs that morning, thinking and talking about what it is that you do. So first, let's just take a step back and tell me a little bit about yourself.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 1:31

Well, I'm, I'm Danish from Copenhagen, I always front end with that, because it might explain why I'm a bit quirky and very obsessed with design and making things better and innovation.

Sonia Nolan: 1:41

We've got a lot to thank the Danes for, a lot.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 1:43

It's true. Furniture, beer, butter, cheese.

Sonia Nolan: 1:46

So many things in our Comic Book Contract. So keep going.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 1:49

I'm an academic here at UWA. I've been here for just over nine years. And I have a career of about 25 years behind me in international commercial law and black letter law and in traditional legal research and teaching, which I'm very grateful for. But about six years ago, it became very apparent to me through lots of different separately targeted sources, that the law really needed to change. And a very good colleague of mine in engineering was venting his frustrations about a very specific problem that he was having. Because his students weren't reading their NDAs as we call them in law, nondisclosure agreements.

Sonia Nolan: 2:26

We've all seen an NDA.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 2:27

Like the one you've just made. No wait.

Sonia Nolan: 2:30

Yeah, shh.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 2:32

He was very frustrated because students weren't reading them. They weren't understanding them. And there was a real risk that his excellent project called the UWA Makers was going to get shut down because students were talking about the relationships they were having when they were interning with industry. And the university was incredibly worried.

Sonia Nolan: 2:46

Because they needed that confidentiality of what they were doing in a recreational environment.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 2:51

And the students didn't understand it.

Sonia Nolan: 2:52

And didn't your inbox explode the next day? They were just signing, you know, briefs of paper that they weren't reading. So after a good old rant, I exasperatedly shouted at him "Well, what do you want Adrian, a comic book?" And he was like, "yeah, they might actually read that." And so we did. We met up again, and we decided to go ahead and do it. Because Adrian said the one thing that would make me not be afraid of this. He said, "Well, it's not like I'm ever going to actually sue my students and nor is the university, we just need to drive their behaviour to change their understanding of what it is they're agreeing to when they sign an NDA." So we did we use pixton comics initially, shoestring budget, it wasn't a big thing, Sonia, it was just something I did for a

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 3:28

Absolutely. The next day, I had more than friend as a favour to solve his problem. But then the press got 600 emails from people, a lot of artists, including some of the hold of it. So at the time, I was involved heavily and I still am with the ProActive Scandinavian ThinkTank, which is ones that we work with still today offering to work on the led by Helena Haapio, I showed her what we'd done just for fun, because I knew that as a legal innovator she'd find it really exciting. She told Robert de Roy in South Africa, who was at the time working on illiterate contracts for fruit pickers and domestic workers, using images in contracts to try and ensure a greater understanding of the employment relationship and very few words, I strongly recommend that people who are interested have a look at his website on creativecontracts.com. What we then did was, Robert joined, I did a joint interview for the ABC law reports, because they got wind of it. And I still don't know how. And it was a really fun interview, my first sort of real microphone like the one I see before me, and I didn't think anything of it. I kept saying, look, it's just a one off. It's not a real research project. It's just something that we did for fun. And I'm not expecting it to lead anywhere but, dot dot dot...a lot of people listen to the ABC. project for free if I would just take it further and explore it more and I was a bit stumped by all this. I actually had to hire a research assistant to politely decline a million emails of people wanting to help on the project because there is no project but very soon afterwards there were because one of the emails was from the then head of innovation at Aurecon, John McGuire, an absolute visionary and a gorgeous person to work with. He came into my office with a chequebook saying "how much do you want to work with me on this" and that never ever happens in my profession, Sonia. I'm an academic, people don't knock on my door and offer me money for research projects, especially not in commercial law. It never ever happened.

Sonia Nolan: 5:16

Innovative just in that respect.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 5:18

Any project and research that will get them lining up at your door and knocking to please take my money...

Sonia Nolan: 5:24

It's crazy.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 5:26

Totally crazy. But he he knew what he wanted. And he what he wanted to do was innovate the legal surroundings of the company that he'd been hired to innovate in so many different ways. And it was an absolute privilege to work on that contract the Aurecon Employment Contract, which you can now see because the the privacy on that has run out. So it's the first version of that contract is now available on my website at comicbookcontracts.com. And it was more than just a Comic Book Contract because it also incorporated little electronic links for all the onboarding training. So any new employee would get this comic with all the values and the values of themselves, little tests they can do, little information snippets about all the things that they need to do for onboarding for their new employment relationship, the whole process will take between half an hour to 45 minutes. And then it was all done, and it would all be stored in the Human Resources website in Aurecon. And to this day, they're still using it, more than that they rolled it out across seven different jurisdictions, in lots of different languages. And it is now the only way you can get hired at Aurecon is to go through this electronic comic portal. And they were given a lot of prizes for the innovation. And so were we as the research team behind it. And from then on, everything just skyrocketed.

Sonia Nolan: 6:37

Wow. And also just on the Aurecon example, it was even more than just legal contracts. It actually drove culture change, didn't it? And this is coming back to what you were saying earlier, Camilla in that contracts are there about behaviour, about actually acknowledging and articulating the behaviour that is expected by both parties to the contract.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 7:00

I think that's the enlightened way to see a contract. But unfortunately, a lot of lawyers won't necessarily see it that way. They see contracts as a punitive, a structure, to allow punishment if someone doesn't perform their behaviour. So the focus isn't so much on illustrating the necessary prerequisite behaviour, but rather, on what stick to hit people with if things go wrong, which is not the best proactive mindset in trying to avoid disputes. So focusing on the behavioural drivers and the relationship. That's part of what we now call Relational Contract Theory, in law, a Nobel Prize was given to Holmstrom and Hart, for thinking of this in the first place, improving the economic sensibility and focusing on the relationship, reducing disputes, and minimising some of those volumes of contracts, and just focusing on the relational framework structure and the behavioural drivers after we started our project, so that happened a few years into our project, and we are now able to point to that and say, "Look, we're definitely doing something right, because this is what we are also doing."

Sonia Nolan: 8:00

Yeah, and they won a Nobel Prize for it.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 8:02

I'm waiting for my Nobel Prize, Sonia, when is it coming?

Sonia Nolan: 8:05

And you'd like it in comic book form, please.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 8:07

Yes, please.

Sonia Nolan: 8:09

So what you do with your comic book contracts, Camilla, is you're making something really complex, or often complex, into something that is simply understood.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 8:20

Absolutely. So I like to think of when we were first working with our first sponsor Aurecon, we were given a couple of their values to work with and play with and put into the contract. And one of my absolute favourite was playful with serious intent. And I really latched on to that mentality. And that's really what we tried to do. We tried to create playful instruments that people will actually read, and I'll get back to that in a second.

Sonia Nolan: 8:42

Yeah, that's really important. But what do you mean by playful? Like, what are you - how are you playing in this space?

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 8:47

So it depends on the spirit of the contract for most employment contracts on all the projects that we worked on, both commercially and through my husband's company, who he started because he was so frustrated with all the little companies we had to turn away because they couldn't afford a big research project at the university. So he started alternative contracting, and I've been collaborating with my team to work there as well. So both commercially, and through research projects, we've now created dozens of different kinds of contracts and thousands and thousands of these, if you're in WA, you probably would have noticed Bankwests terms and conditions, billboards, back of buses, radio ads, TV ads, it was really very humbling to see your work, bam.

Sonia Nolan: 9:28

And they've made a concerted effort to really simplify what they do.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 9:32

They did. And it was very much part of their branding, to do the whole less BS and put their money where their mouths were, and follow through with these visual terms and conditions, which I'm sure they don't mind me saying, proved to be the most successful advertising campaign that they've done in decades. So really proving what we already knew that industry is very, very keen on a change and innovation in law to me it more understandable, to humanise it. And there's another dimension to this. And that is, of course, that legal tech is coming. It's here. Legal tech can do so much of the work that we lawyers do when we practice. So it's

Sonia Nolan: 10:07

The appeal that Comic Book Contracts has is it's actually a great opportunity for us to stop doing the boring grunt work, and focus on humanising law. And this is just simplifying very complex issues and getting to the real nub of one way in which we can do that, provide images and playful comics that sort of latch on to the spirit of that relationship, what people need to understand at that moment for that whatever that spirit needs to be, but getting it right, that's sort of the tricky bit, we're very strongly advocating bespoke particular contract. It's also looking at a whole different imagery in all the contracts we create to make sure that we're not creating an additional layer of legalese images. That's the type of client who's going to be able to access the law. So that last thing we want. We want something that's created for the clients or the sponsors, and their clients, their users, the is exciting to me. So, you know, yes, there's going to be people who actually read this. So we do a lot of focus group testing to make sure that we get the imaging right. And it's very neurodiverse people who are going to be able to access the important to me that we do this.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 10:58

And it makes it very tricky sometimes law, whereas they weren't able to, you'll have and you do have to ensure that the images have got it right when when you're people with a non English speaking background, or even illiteracy. Different cultural backgrounds and children and thinking about the variety of different human psychological people with disabilities. So you've got so many different profiles and cultural profiles and normative assumptions that people from different walks of life and different life experiences and different needs, who are able to access a you're going to have to try and address with these images. And contract on an equal footing to everybody else. sometimes, we have to change them for different cultural

Sonia Nolan: 12:06

So it's likely that you have a contract or you have groups.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 12:07

It's very similar. Just like you would have to change your legal language from one market to a piece of communication. And I know in my work in communications, you know, often we've had to translate the same piece of information into different languages for different markets, so it's a little bit similar. another, you'd have to change the illustration that goes with it. And one of my favourite examples is the maternity leave clauses in some of our employment contracts, some of them use a stalk. But when Aurecon rolled that out, in jurisdictions where the stalk doesn't mean anything in relation to maternity, some of the feedback they got was "why is the bird abducting my baby?" Like "Yeah, maybe change that image. That's why focus group testing is so important.

Sonia Nolan: 12:51

So we need the cabbage patch.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 12:54

Or a rainbow or just a pregnant woman.

Sonia Nolan: 12:58

Why not? Let's go crazy and actually promote it as it is.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 13:02

But the pregnant woman, of course, raises all other kinds of questions, because then what skin colour? What ethnicity? What kind of clothes should be wearing? Should she wearing a headscarf? What, what culture are we talking about? So that's why we use anthropomorphism so much.

Sonia Nolan: 13:14

Tell me what that is, so just explain that word

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 13:15

Anthropomorphism is just sizing is taking something this is an inanimate object like your microphone here in front of me, and giving it little eyes and a mouth and turning it into something that's animated and alive to give it some character and personality. And then maybe having it explain to my laptop how these technologies should function in the context of a specific contract that you want to interact with. So we use that a lot. We also use animals as avatars. One of the most exciting projects we're working on at the moment is for Mission Australia, we're using a kangaroo, a koala, and a platypus. And they're adorable. And this is a Australia wide contract for mental health care for children. And because it's for children, it's going to come out in two different formats. One is going to be colourized, quite simplistically and stylishly for the older kids. And one is not going to be colourized at all, just a couple of accent colours and it'll come with a little box of crayons.

Sonia Nolan: 13:21

Lovely so they can colour it themselves.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 13:57

Absolutely,your first colouring in contract go. It sounds a bit silly. But given that the main driver and this change for them, our main key performance indicator, if you will, was ensuring that the children were part of the process and consent. The children's consent may not legally mean anything. But it means a lot for the process and for the behavioural drivers that especially the parents and carers need to take on board in explaining everything to the children. So this contract now actually has a box for the children to sign because it doesn't matter that it has no legal value. It has a lot of emotional value for that relationship in that contract. And it has a lot of indicative value to the carers, but it also has a box for the carers to sign that they promise that they've done their best to explain to their children what this is, and what it means and what they can expect. To which, again, I'm not sure how that can be enforced, but it definitely has a legal value to it. But it doesn't actually matter. This is what the lawyers need to get their heads around, that sometimes clauses in contracts that have no legal value are still important for that contract. Because it's more than just law. It's a framework and instruction.

Sonia Nolan: 15:24

So you've got a team of people that you work with don't you?

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 15:26

I do, it's huge now.

Sonia Nolan: 15:29

Because I was reading about it, Camilla, and you've got psychologists who work with you, you're clearly obviously got graphic designers and artists that work with you. Yes, illustraters, and, but that psychological aspect of it is, I think, really important and coming back to that, you know, behaviour that you're wanting. So it's really understanding how people are going to think about this and how they're going to respond. And what do we need to do to make sure that this illustration is very clear in what it is that it means?

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 15:59

Yes. I mean, we're never going to please everyone, there's always going to be somebody who doesn't like a particular image, or who feels a bit triggered by the context of a particular colour even. But it's really interesting psychologically, how people respond to different shapes, colours, silhouettes, contexts, but the very least we can do, accepting that we can't make everyone happy, is create images that don't communicate something false. Ao 2017, when we had the privilege before COVID. Remember when we used to travel?

Sonia Nolan: 16:28

What a world. That world, I remember that.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 16:30

Well, we had the privilege of hosting the Global 2017 Comic Book Contract conference, the first of its kind, the next three were duly cancelled due to the pandemic. When that ran off in 2017, Robert French, current chancellor of the university and the former Chief of Justice, he very kindly rocked up and said that these contracts are of course binding as long as they can be properly understood. And it's there that the clincher lies. So we've been designing a lot of workshops and interpretive tool sets for the profession for the Bar Association and for the law firms to try and get their heads around how to do this in a way that actually does what it's meant to do. And the research projects that we've done so far are focused on three sort of main - sorry, I'm just going to launch into the boring research bit now.

Sonia Nolan: 17:11

No, no, no, we need to know what's behind this.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 17:14

So we've talked about in the research team measuring the impact of these and we've done that with longitudinal psychometric studies through the school of psychology, as well as the School of Business, and as well through lots of different- so neurology, impact tests. And what we've done is boiled it down to three main categories comprehension, engagement, and what we call perception. Perception has gone completely wild. It was originally something that I put in there because I was totally paranoid. I thought, "Oh, my God, people are gonna find this so patronising they're going to hate it." So I put a little perception testing thing into all the questions to make sure that people had an opportunity to say that they didn't like it. And they hated that idea. And, and they felt patronised and it hadn't made them feel-

Sonia Nolan: 17:56

But you really thought you were gonna get some really negative feedback over the perception?

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 18:00

I did. Because I got a lot of in person feedback when the when the whole project kicked off. I mean, I had a heckler at a conference, call me, a "vigilante who was dumbing down the law," to which I could only say, "how can it be worse than not reading it at all?"

Sonia Nolan: 18:16

Exactly.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 18:16

And we'll get back to that. So we've got comprehension, engagement, perception, perception, it sits in a little bit in the category itself, because it was originally my paranoia, but it's now taken off because it's now leading the marketing branch of the study, because it turns out the transparent law is a hell of a marketing tool, which was proved to us. So my good friend and colleague, Sharon Purchase, who's the Head of Marketing here at UWA, she and I are collaborating on a separate limb of this project. So it kind of runs in silos right now. When we're looking at that, turns out that if people can understand the rules, that sells.

Sonia Nolan: 18:47

Well, it makes people feel more comfortable that they know what they're getting themselves into?

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 18:51

Of course, it does, and it should.

Sonia Nolan: 18:52

And it should, as it should, exactly.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 18:55

Because it should be about that relationship. I mean, I firmly believe that.

Sonia Nolan: 18:58

So it's also an agency, like, you know, you feel empowered, when you actually know what you're getting yourself into, and you feel you can trust. I mean, that's another element of perception is is trust, you feel like like, I think I can trust them, because I know what they're actually asking of me. Whereas these, these other, you know, the competitor, actually don't know what they want.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 19:16

Yeah the fine print. There's really unfortunate structures where you read through pages and pages of terms. And then at the end, it says, "Oh, by the way we can change these terms unilaterally at any point in time."

Sonia Nolan: 19:25

Without interpretation.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 19:26

Oh, really, how am I supposed to trust that? Whereas in our contracts, if you have to have a clause like that, we put it right up front, we say "these are the terms as they are now, unfortunately, we might have sometimes have to change them. We don't do this lightly. We only do that because of legal, or regulatory changes or drastic market changes. And we will always let you know." But if you put it up front and explain why people are a lot more tolerant than if you stick down a fine print at the bottom of the page."And by the way, none of this may not apply." So it's yeah, it's all about the psychology of conveying the understanding and those behavioural drivers on both sides of the fence.

Sonia Nolan: 19:59

Perception was one element. And then you said engagement was another element.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 20:02

And comprehension. So comprehension is obviously driven by engagement. It's one of our primary focus in the research studies. But let's deal with engagement first, because that is about whether or not people read their contracts. Now, anyone listening? Be honest, do you actually read your contracts?

Sonia Nolan: 20:23

Well, I'm gonna be honest here and say that I will always open the terms and conditions here. When it says"Click here for terms and conditions."

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 20:30

Then you'll scroll down to the bottom, pretending you've read them.

Sonia Nolan: 20:31

I'll scroll down. I'll have a little read, yeah it is a pretence because I certainly don't read every single word, but I will make the effort of opening the link, having a look around and then closing the link, clicking yes or agree. And and it's done. But the devil is in the detail, isn't it? Tell me about the bonus that's in the detail,

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 20:54

So the bonus, or the disadvantages.

Sonia Nolan: 20:57

But tell me about the bonus. Well, wasn't there an organisation some years ago that actually wrote some, some crazy things in those terms and conditions just to see if people were reading them.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 21:07

But that's become a bit of a hobby of mine, Sonia, to collect these crazy contract clauses. In our industry of contract innovation, and we call them Herod clauses, because the very first of its kind was a clause in a Wi Fi contract that said that if you accepted the terms and conditions of free Wi Fi, you had to give away your firstborn.

Sonia Nolan: 21:24

So that's the thing, King Herod, giving away your first born. That's just hilarious.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 21:30

As anyone who knows a little bit law will tell you, that clause probably isn't legal, giving away your children is not really something that you're capable of

Sonia Nolan: 21:38

Oh there's a whole heap of human rights issues doing. amongst that.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 21:42

It's not really part of your autonomy to give away your kids. Even if sometimes you might want to.

Sonia Nolan: 21:47

But you're not going to do that through a legal contract that you didn't - accidentally didn't read.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 21:51

No, even if you want to. Yeah.

Sonia Nolan: 21:53

Okay, so there's the Herod clauses.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 21:54

There's the Herod clauses. Another favourite of mine was at festivals, to get some of the services at a festival company for all the customers who buy into music festival and stuff. There is a clause that says if you find the toilets in a less than desirable condition, you have an obligation to clean them in exchange for the services that we give you for free.

Sonia Nolan: 22:11

Is that so?

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 22:12

Yes, that's so now that one is intriguing, because a lot of legal systems that I'm aware of that would just be considered an obligation in consideration of the free services, and probably enforceable unless you would argue that it was snuck in into a contract that everyone knows no one reads.

Sonia Nolan: 22:26

How interesting. Well, I guess everyone's going to drop their standards and say,"No, that toilet was perfectly acceptable."

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 22:32

And there's a limit to what you can do it that stance, Sonia, when was the last time you attended a music festival?

Sonia Nolan: 22:36

No. There's a reason why I don't attend music festivals, and that's one of them.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 22:41

There you go. So best advice, if you accept the free Wi Fi and some of the free services at music festivals bring rubber gloves, and some bleach just in case.

Sonia Nolan: 22:50

But there was a good one, we got something out of it.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 22:54

There was a good one and that one was actually part of a Bone Fide research project, just like the Herod clause in the first one. This one was really interesting, because hundreds of contracts were sent out with a clause hidden in the middle that says if you read this, click this link and put in your details, and you will get 25 US dollars.

Sonia Nolan: 23:11

So you got a check in the mail.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 23:13

Absolutely. I don't have the exact digit in my head, but it was less than 1%. So less than 1% of people who contracted under the terms and conditions they may profess to have read, wanted money to have done so and the research project concluded, what we already know is that people are drowning in microtransactions, and contracts and terms and conditions, and they are not going to read them. And it's worse than that. I mean, there are law firms that are swamped, usually in-house lawyers actually not law firms. But they are swamped with so many different sales contracts and so many standard terms and conditions in their transactions, that they do not have time to read their own contracts. And when the lawyers don't have time to read their contracts, we have far beyond the illiteracy problem that Robert is so beautifully addressing in South Africa, or the legal literacy issue that we're trying to address with some of our projects. We're well into the territory of contracts, having completely lost the plot. And since we had that lovely breakfast, where I wowed you.

Sonia Nolan: 24:16

You did wow me.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 24:18

I love the way you put that. But since then, we've had the opportunity to work on so many other contracts because of the small business that my husband started up. So if you go to alternativecontracting.biz, what you'll see is some of his very simple contracts for small traders, because they don't need pages and pages. They just want basic expectations with basic information. One of my absolute favourites is the Dave the Handyman contract that he's got up there on his website, because it's just one page with "Hi, I'm Dave, this, these are my values. These are my expectations. And these are the payment terms. If there are surprises," and there's a little picture of a dinosaur bone being dug out of the garden. "Any surprises on the project, we might incur some extra costs but I'm hoping that doesn't happen, and you have an obligation to keep the site safe and pay me within 14 days and all this. And I have a warranty system. If you're if you're reasonably unhappy with what I've done, then I'll come back and fix it for free. And here's here's my account details and payment stuff." And then the quotes on the other side for whatever job it is.

Sonia Nolan: 25:15

Beautiful.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 25:16

So simple. And in its purest form, that's all a contract needs to be because all the complicated stuff is usually dealt with in law anyway. So it doesn't need to be in the contract.

Sonia Nolan: 25:25

So what does it look like? It's like an infographic is that a fair description? Or it's like, it is like a page out of a comic book. With sort of speech bubbles coming out.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 25:31

The Dave the Handyman one looks a little bit like one of those airlines safety things, but with colour and a cute comic. Because it's just a one pager. So it's very, it's very simple to read. Some of them are a lot more complicated. I think one of the most colourful ones is the Bankwest one because it's really vibrant. And I would just remind any prospective clients out there that if you want a Comic Book Contract, we're very happy to help you and sponsor a research project. But the Bankwest one took nearly three years. And it cost a huge amount of money with many different illustrators working on it. But yeah, they're not quick, depending on what you expect. So the Dave the Handyman one took less than two weeks from start to finish, cost under $2,000 to Yeah, absolutely. There's a lovely do. Because there was no underlying contract, there were just the simple values and expectations. And the illustrations are fairly straightforward. But if you want something a lot more immersive, with digital links, with training, and all the different things that help the contract become much more rich and a little bit more complex, but also perhaps more engaging, than it is very difficult to get it right. And the avatars can be very difficult to develop. So the avatars is the word that we use for the representations for the client and the business themselves. So the visual, sometimes anthropomorphic representations of light bulbs, little interaction and some relatively bad jokes as well or animals or chairs, and sometimes just people caricatures of people based on photographs, because then you remove the third wall and have the small business owner talk- like if I was to do one for you, for instance, for your podcast, I would simply ask for a photograph. And then I would have like a third wall removed where you're talking to your prospective clients. Because that way, we don't have to illustrate them. And we don't have to make decisions about what your clients look like. What skin colour, body type, gender, forget that, it's not relevant. Instead, let's just focus on you as a service provider and have you talk through the third wall. We've learned a lot from that particular format. But there are other ways, you can have people talking to each other like on the Bankwest comics, you can have people- that we designed along the way.

Sonia Nolan: 27:33

Some dad jokes thrown in there.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 27:35

Oh yeah, one of my favourites is on the easy transactions accounts. Where the customer character says, "So how do I prove that I'm a real person" and the Bank goes "you are a real person, right?" To a comic, so it's very meta.

Sonia Nolan: 27:49

Yeah that's hilarious.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 27:49

He goes, "haha, I hope so." And like, he's a comic. So it's all very meta. Very philosophical.

Sonia Nolan: 27:56

So you talk about things taking time and costing some money. But the flip side of that is the economic efficiency, you've actually found when an organisation actually launches the comic book cartoons and uses that as part of their day to day, there's actually an enormous efficiency for them.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 28:14

Enormous. So you mentioned the cultural change in an organisation before and that has been really overwhelming. So a number of companies that we've worked with, to help them with their visual contracts and to get a more visual platform, have now come to expect that everything is visualised and illustrated and made friendly and with the right spirit and easy to read, to the point where Aurecon a shared with me a few years ago that they had their financial reports done, they had very few illustrations in them and no comics so they were sent back, because it just wasn't the standard of communication that the company expects anymore, they will ask you to simplify it, to be colourised, and just to be more user friendly, so that everyone could understand them, then they would approve that financial report with the same content, but in a completely different format, because that is now the communication style of that very innovative company. And he's done them so well. I mean, their market share is just exponentially grown since they've chosen to change that tact. I have a senior research officer on the project now who's not a lawyer. She's a law and economics expert from economics. And she is beyond a shadow of a doubt proving the economic impact of this, because we have had a complete dispute elimination in every single area that we have rolled these contracts out. Now we genuinely thought a year and a half ago, when we finally got acid clearance to roll it out through banking, that that would be the end of that perfect track record and would finally get something tested in court. Because you know, banks disputes "hah, very funny," but there's been nothing. So you're actually investing in better relationships, fewer disputes, and black numbers at the end of the day instead of red numbers. So I just wanted to get back to that. Not that I think money is everything. But I think it's perhaps, to many, a more persuasive argument for why this is something they should be pursuing.

Sonia Nolan: 29:56

Most definitely. No, you make a very valid point there.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 30:00

Yeah, money, it matters.

Sonia Nolan: 30:01

Money matters, it does.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 30:02

Although, the hippie dippie stuff about the loving relationship is great, but I love it. It's good to be able to hit the platform for both.

Sonia Nolan: 30:09

Well, and you have, and you have.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 30:11

I have, and that's what makes my life so gratifying at the moment. I mean, I spending 20+ years writing research that you're pretty sure no one ever reads to doing something which really changes the way things are done. It's incredibly gratifying.

Sonia Nolan: 30:27

One of the other parts of this is that you've opened up a whole new opportunity for illustrators, graphic artists.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 30:34

Yeah, we actually get asked to talk at the Graphic Comic Book Conference. It's really cool. I never thought that would happen.

Sonia Nolan: 30:40

Were you at Comic Con?

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 30:41

So there's a there's an academic branch of Comic Con there, called the PCAF, which is done at the same time, which is like the academic side, and I was asked to come and talk to the illustrators about this new opportunity for graphic illustrators, and they actually had us back twice. So it's mind blowing to think that you're starting a whole new niche for illustrators. But to be fair, that day, when I got inundated with emails seven years ago nearly, after the ABC interview, there were so many graphic artists who were writing to me, including Louis Sylvester, who we worked closely with for so many years, but he's been trying to convince lawyers to let him illustrate stuff for decades, and nobody's listened to him. So lots of people have had the very obvious thought that if lawyers have problems communicating, why on earth don't me use images? Like every single other profession in the world has figured out how to do. Lawyers, yeah, we take our time. So it's something like the Columbus Egg, you know the story of the Columbus Egg?

Sonia Nolan: 31:37

No, tell me the story of the Columbus Egg.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 31:39

Well, apparently, in a bar somewhere before setting sail a barman is trying to get an egg to stand upright, but it keeps tipping over. Columbus looks at it. He takes it he taps the bottom of the shell lightly so it breaks, but without breaking the inner hymen. And then it's flat and it stands up and the barman is furious, he's like "I could have- I could have done that." And Columbus says "yeah, but you didn't think of it."

Sonia Nolan: 31:59

Yes. That's exactly right. You need to do not just think.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 32:06

Right time, right place very much. So myself and Robert de Roy, the first two people to create these contracts, and for very, very different reasons. I mean, Robert de Roy, bless his cotton socks, he now got a huge grant from The Hague Institute of Legal Innovation, because of the Access to Justice that his work represents. And we've latched a little bit on to that. One of our second big sponsors were the WAIS. WA Individual Services, which offers in home support for disabled people. And we were able to produce a contract for hiring domestic workers in the home, that was entirely visual, one of the most difficult projects we've ever worked on, because getting the avatars right for a variety of different disabilities, including mental and physical, so tricky. And in an industry where WAIS could only advise, the contract couldn't be prescriptive, but it had to be more of a performer template. So very difficult to get it right. But I think we've managed, touch wood, because it's been rolled out for a few years now. And we get nothing but positive responses to the point where rumour is that legislation wants to change and use some of the images in the visual legislation. So we'll see where that goes, it's really exciting.

Sonia Nolan: 33:12

Oh, fingers crossed, that is exciting. And it comes back to that concept of, picture tells a thousand words.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 33:18

It does and then that is a little bit intimidating, because that goes back to the fact that you've got to get the pictures right. And that's why we're so afraid of anything that's not bespoke imagery. So we have a couple of standard procedures and approaches, we use puzzle pieces a lot to show good fits and, and to get the idea set of something that needs to accommodate something else. And we use some recurring concepts, but we always try to ensure that the spirit of the drawings, the colour schemes, and look, we're now working very closely with marketing sections in some of our biggest sponsors to try to make sure that we stay within the boundaries of what they have defined as the psychologically correct image for their, for their brand. And this is all very important. But it's also important if you don't have a branding division, if you're a smaller company, but you want to get it right, the colours can be very important.

Sonia Nolan: 34:06

Very emotive, and it comes back to that interdisciplinary approach that you will set you're doing. So we've got a-

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 34:13

That's huge.

Sonia Nolan: 34:13

It's huge. So we've got an interdisciplinary approach where you're you're bringing together experts from lots of different modes and experiences and professions all together to create these Comic Book Contracts. You're changing behaviour through these contracts, because you're actually highlighting what the behaviour is that's expected from both the organisation and its client.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 34:32

We spend a lot of time risk assessing with the clients of sponsors to make sure that we get that right. And we also roll that out with, if they have dispute resolution professionals, we sort of test the assumption of what needs to be addressed. And we actually often end up putting things into the contract that wasn't there before. We eliminate tonnes of what I consider to be unnecessary legal verbiage. But we also incorporate specific behavioural drivers if they turn out to, in our risk assessment testing, to actually be significant to change behaviours. A couple of really good examples like filling in timesheets. Most employment contracts don't stress the significance of filling in timesheets in time. So fresh recruits, just out of grad school, when they join an institution, they won't understand how important it is you can't build the client till you've given me the timesheet, so you won't get paid until you fill in the timesheets. Fill in your timesheets. Lawyers know that, engineers know that, consultants know that, but only through knowing it, by living it. But now that we're putting it into some of our employment contracts, because it was pretty obvious that that was a real problem for HR managers and trainers. Now that behaviour is reinforced with its own little panel and the significance of doing this and how important that is, the problems have greatly diminished.

Sonia Nolan: 35:47

And again, it's communication isn't. And bringing those- well, I guess finding what the pain points are for an organisation and then making them playful. In a way...

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 35:58

With serious intent.

Sonia Nolan: 35:59

With serious intent. Yeah, exactly. Right. Camilla, tell me a bit more about your road to do this, because this is really normal for you like-

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 36:11

Well it's become normal.

Sonia Nolan: 36:12

It's become normal, but also the way that you visualise and think and even with your experience as a mother, you know, the whole idea of a visual stimulus and a visual understanding is something that's actually very close to your heart as well.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 36:24

Yeah. And I'm glad that you asked me that question. It's a variety of different individually targeted things that sort of came together at just the right time when Adrian was exasperated at his engineering students lack of understanding of an NDA. There's my involvement in the ProActive Scandinavian Law Movement, most definitely. And then of course, there's there's my passionate love for comics. I grew up on comic books, we moved everywhere when I was a child, we lived in tonnes of different countries. My father was an international banker. And I just remember unpacking these comics as a priority wherever we got to a new home and just poring over them, in Danish, of course, some of them fairly well translated from the Belgian or English or French. But I read so much Tintin and Asterix, I just have a genuine love for the for the medium without being able to draw.

Sonia Nolan: 37:13

I was just gonna ask you, whether you draw.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 37:15

No. I dab with watercolours and oils, but I don't draw. But I don't have to, because the multidisciplinarity of this means that I just have to be able to talk about what the behavioural drivers are, and that the visualisers, the illustrators come up with good ideas. And then I think there's being Danish, and wanting to do things that are designed, more clever, think working smart instead of hard and trying to think of better ways to do things, I think it's part of it. I don't know, maybe I'm just glorifying my background. But I think it's there.

Sonia Nolan: 37:42

No but I think there is - it is there. And I think there's also- I'm sensing a lot more of a movement of this human centred design and the idea that we need to redesign services that are actually going to make a difference. So not just in law, but even in the way that you know, you've got your counter at your shop, you know, you need to think of that. It's just everything and I think we're becoming more and more attuned to that as a society. And you can see the little differences it's making.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 38:12

Oh, I've got so many stories I want to share with you just based on my observation. One of them is a new project that we started last year, myself, J Kim Wright, who is the mother of Conscious Contracting the US, Lisa Tui, who runs the Legal Design Institute at Newcastle in NSW, and the wonderful Emily Oban, who's a legal design academic in London. The four of us started a project called Lawyers as Designers where we're currently asking for submissions from all over the world for legal design solutions, and not just illustrations and law. But everything, including one of the submissions that I've been trying to chase down here is the design of the state administrative tribunal here in Perth. It's absolutely brilliant. It's highly inspired by some of the South African courtrooms, to be less adversarial, to be put on a flat space, everyone sits around a round table, it's more negotiation than litigation style in terms of how disputes are managed. And the architecture of the room is specifically done to support that. That is what I think is, you know, good design in law. It's not just about illustrations, it's about whatever it is.

Sonia Nolan: 39:18

That's going to facilitate an outcome that's going to be desirable for everybody.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 39:23

Exactly. But it's better designed solutions.

Sonia Nolan: 39:29

I do want to come back to...

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 39:31

Yes, my Columbus Egg moment.

Sonia Nolan: 39:33

Your Columbus Egg moment.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 39:34

As a mother, I want to create better, more nurturing environments for lots of things. And I think it bears mentioning that I've got two amazing children 18 and 12. They are now and they're both autistic on the spectrum. My son arguably a bit more heavily than my daughter, but maybe not because girls just mask it better.

Sonia Nolan: 39:52

They do.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 39:52

Such an interesting neurological fact. And, yeah, we're beginning to readdress that assumption. But one of the things that we learned when my son quite clearly needed more help than my daughter was demonstrating she needed at a much younger age, we did a lot of training and how to do social stories, how to sit him down, and manage his expectations with visuals on little panels, with like little stick figures that would express to him what was happening and what he needed to do. And then repeat it a few different times and wipe the slate clean and start over again, and maybe have him participate in the drawing to show that he'd understood. And that process is different from the comic book process we go through, yet has some very startling similarities in boiling things down to the most simple expectations.

Sonia Nolan: 40:39

Where do you see the future going with Comic Book Contract? Have you got your crystal ball, what's going to happen?

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 40:45

Well, so my husband's actually training right now, to work on animation. So an actual live contract, because one of the things that we're very grateful for is the, the arrival of legal tech has meant that many of the contracts we can work on exist only in electronic form, which means, A, as a researcher, I can actually monitor how people engage with them, whether they actually spent the time to read them, or whether they quickly scroll down to the bottom and click 'I agree.'

Sonia Nolan: 41:11

Like I admitted doing.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 41:13

Like everybody bloody does.

Sonia Nolan: 41:14

And I clearly missed out on the $25 click here.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 41:17

Well, if you were ever presented with it. But we can actually monitor that, how long are people actually spending engaging with their contract? And then we can test them. How well have they actually understood it? A Stefania Passera in Finland has done a lot of excellent work on contract comprehension, and how images unlock both the left and the right part of the brain for easier memorization of concepts and easier absorption of information. So we know this. But what's really cool about legal tech as well, is that because it doesn't have to be in paper format, the contract can be in any format you like, we've had a lot of interest in virtual contracts through headsets, especially for onboarding. So imagine if you're working on an oil rig, and you're taking up employment, and you need to use safety training as part of your onboarding. Imagine if you could put on a virtual headset and walk around the platform. As you were looking and observing all the hazards, as part of your onboarding, training. How cool is that?

Sonia Nolan: 42:09

Very cool.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 42:11

And we were looking at little animated strips, where you can look at things like nondisclosure agreements, and what is it that's important to us, and what is it that we want you to do, not to do, with a little animated film. And then at the end, say, I saw the film and I understand this, click.

Sonia Nolan: 42:26

I just love the creativity there.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 42:27

There's nothing we can't do.

Sonia Nolan: 42:28

There isn't and it just shows you how intertwined, like you've just described the brain reaction, you know, just sort of like you know, igniting the brain to engage in what you're trying to do, and unleashing a creative approach to something that traditionally has been pretty dry and staid, sorry.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 42:48

No, no, don't apologise. When you're not wrong, you're not wrong.

Sonia Nolan: 42:51

So you know, I just think the marriage of creativity and legal necessity, it's just a really positive thing, it's - you're on a winner.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 43:01

The speed with which this is being appreciated here in Australia has been incredibly overwhelming. People just love it.

Sonia Nolan: 43:08

And you're leading the way, Professor Camilla Baasch Andersen, I am just being blown away by what you...

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 43:15

You're making me blush.

Sonia Nolan: 43:18

Well deserved blushing too, Camilla, you've just brought something really quite special to normal people, and unlocked an area of law that we're all bound to. But a way that we can now actually feel quite empowered because of the transparency and the fun that you've brought to it. So wishing you every success in wherever Comic Book Contracts goes, I'm going to look out for them in all different businesses. And I wish you well, and thank you so much for your time and telling us about this around My Warm Table today.

Camilla Baasch Andersen: 43:50

Thank you so much. It's been an absolute joy. And can I just add that I also hope that this makes my profession saner, we have a massive issue with mental health and law because of the hours that are working because of the dryness and the lack of humanity in some of the services that we provide. If we can do something to make law more human, it's not just good for the normal people, as you say, but it's also good for the profession. We will have a lot more happy lawyers out there, which is also worth pursuing.

Sonia Nolan: 44:20

You've been listening to My Warm Table with Sonia Nolan. In Italian, a Tavola Calda, is a warm and welcoming table where you can share big ideas, friendship, laughter and life. So much happens around the kitchen table, and I wanted to amplify it here in this podcast. My aim is to feed your mind and soul through smart conversations with heart. No topic is off limits, but good table manners rule. I hope you'll join us each week as we set the table for my extraordinary guests who will let you feast on their deep knowledge, life experiences and wise insights. Let's keep the conversation flowing, please subscribe to the My Warm Table podcast, and share it with your friends and networks. Perhaps if they're new to podcasting, take a moment to show them how to download and subscribe so they don't miss an episode either. I'd also love you to join our community on Facebook. You'll find the group at My Warm Table podcast. Your support is very much appreciated. So that together we can eat, think and be merry.