About Hannele Korhonen

I’m a business hippie from the happiest country in the world, Finland, where sisu runs deeper than strategy and sauna solves most things. I’m into Pearl Jam on repeat, fresh flowers on a Tuesday, and bringing more love and peace to the world. 

I have always been the wrong kind of lawyer. It took me a long time to understand that was the whole point. I didn’t leave — I went deeper into it and found something legal practice didn’t have words for yet.

THE BEGINNING Late 1990s · Law school, Helsinki

I was twenty-two when I first understood I was the wrong kind of lawyer.

I wrote a paper on anarchism — a legal system without states. My opponent laughed dismissively when commenting on it. What do you mean, no state? The professor said nothing. 

I felt the shame immediately. And then, underneath it, disbelief: if these questions aren't welcome here, at the university where new knowledge is supposed to be born, where am I welcome?

I stayed anyway. I worked harder, and kept asking the questions. But slowly I found myself distancing from the school, from what it represented, from the profession, and — most sadly — from my future colleagues.

It took me almost two decades to understand I wasn't alone.

THE YEARS INSIDE Early 2000s · Corporate law

For more than a decade, I was exactly what the legal profession wanted me to be.

Witty, assertive, independent, ambitious. The one who shows up on a Sunday evening or during summer vacation if the deal requires it. Fast to learn, fearless to go into new territory, reliable to the bone. Consider it done and checked three times just in case.

I moved deliberately through every corner of legal practice I could find. Tech, banking, M&A, compliance, private practice, contract drafting and negotiations around the world. I was curious and hungry. I wanted to understand the profession from every angle. I handled big projects and serious responsibility right out of school. Secretly always hoping that the next job would fix the law for me. 

But there was a gap between why I entered the profession and what the work had become. Somewhere along the way I stopped recognizing myself in it.

The pivot wasn't elegant. I left in the midst of a personal crisis: divorced, burned out, depleted, with no clear plan. I just knew that staying would cost me more than leaving.

VILLA LEX - The first reinvention 2012

The Morning Run 2015

I was on maternity leave with my seven-month-old when the idea arrived on a morning run complete, fully formed, as if it had always been there waiting.

A DIY legal service for entrepreneurs. Modular templates, automated, with a clear process and an easy-to-understand guide. I had been building toward it for years without knowing it; the standardised processes, the intake questionnaires, the plain language guides. I just hadn't known to call it anything yet. I didn't know legal tech existed. I didn't know there was an entire universe of people already working on this.

I hired a developer to hard code it for me. €10,000 was a fortune on maternity leave with money tight and no certainty it would work. I was a little embarrassed to say it out loud, honestly. Afraid people would think I was crazy.

But I wanted my vision. More time with my baby. And the ability to serve my clients reliably, at the same time.

I launched in September 2015. It worked.

BUILDING, PIONEERING, LEARNING 2016-2019

From there it became a steep and joyful learning curve. I co-founded Contract Mill in 2016, a global legal SaaS startup automating document creation to improve access to justice. 

In 2017 I attended the Legal Design Summit in Helsinki and heard Margaret Hagan speak. The room was full of lawyers nodding. And I felt something shift: this thing I've been doing actually has a name. My faith in law, the legal space, and my colleagues started to heal. I wasn’t the only misfit.

In 2019 I went all in on legal design. I trained in service design and adult pedagogy, and discovered something law school never taught me: a way of working that starts with the human being, not the problem. That centers empathy, experimentation, and the willingness to not know the answer before you begin.

Lawyers Design School 2020-

In 2020 I founded Lawyers Design School, a global learning-first legal design platform, and helped lawyers and teams around the world find more human-centered ways of working. It was and continues to be deeply meaningful work. It planted seeds I'm still harvesting. In 2024, my work at Lawyers Design School was shortlisted for the Innovation Trailblazer Award in the Legal Innovation Awards by Legal Week International.

But it was also yet another beginning. The closer I got to the question of how lawyers think and know, the more I realized the real question was deeper: what counts as knowledge in the first place? Intuition had been my most important tool both as a lawyer and a designer, but something I couldn’t say out loud.

A Guide 2024-

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I started doing the thing I'd been doing all along — ever since the days of Villa Lex and the businesses after that, working with entrepreneurs and teams. But finally by name. Guidance.

Being a guide, for me, is not about giving people a framework to follow. It's about helping them see what they already know but not yet see, and trust it. My job is to see it first and hold the space for the self-discovery.

I work with multiple ways of knowing simultaneously. Proven frameworks and intuitive intelligence. Strategic thinking and somatic wisdom. Design tools and symbolic language. Because none of them alone is enough.

I build islands of doing nothing into my weeks. Rest is productive. Space is strategic. Your best thinking doesn't come from grinding harder — and I practice what I teach.

Moving from the know-it-all expert to something more vulnerably human carries grief and letting go. I know this from the inside. That's why I can hold it with you.

The Research - Going deeper 2025 -

That question — what counts as knowledge in the first place? — led me to doctoral research at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Art and Design.

I am studying what I call super intuition: a form of knowing that goes beyond individual rational thought into something collective, relational, and embodied. It draws on philosophy of consciousness, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the design ontological turn.

This research is an ontological challenge. Not just to how lawyers work, but to how law itself constructs reality.

It is personal and experiential as much as it is academic. It emerged from my own experience of knowing things I couldn't prove — and from a longing to understand what that knowing actually is, and what it might make possible in law, in organisations, and in how we live together.

Seeing & Healing

Alongside the academic work, I follow other threads of knowing that Western professional culture doesn't always have room for.

I am in a program learning to read the quantum field, the energetic reality the modern quantum physics already knows but that hasn’t yet entered mainstream practice. 

I completed a formal astrology training and use birth charts as a tool for exploring calling, identity, and the deeper patterns of a life. Not as prediction, but as a symbolic language for things that are hard to access any other way. A map of what you came here to do.

I am learning to work with embodied methods — singing bowls, yin yoga — to access body wisdom. For myself, and to help other brain-focused professionals find their way back into their bodies.

I sing with ILMA Vocal Ensemble, which sings in unconventional urban spaces and explores the intersection of voice, community, and social change. Singing is also part of my doctoral methodology. Voice, collective sound, and deep listening are ways of knowing that the body understands before the mind catches up.

These aren't separate from my professional work. They are the same inquiry, in different registers.

The Behind-The-Scenes

I live in Helsinki with my partner Kim, our family, and Tiuhti the cat queen who has strict routines and strong opinions about not changing anything. Oh, the irony! 

I work globally in English and in Finnish. I am at home in both languages and both cultures, the directness and the depth that Finnish thinking brings, and the reach that English opens up.

My five core values are joy, collaboration, closeness, authenticity, and continuous learning. They are the actual operating principles of how I work and how I live.

My deeper why: a world of social justice and peace. That hasn't changed. The path toward it just keeps getting more interesting.

CREDENTIALS

Master of Laws, University of Helsinki BSc in Economics, University of Jyväskylä Diploma in Service Design, Aalto University EE Vocational Teacher Training, Haaga-Helia Doctoral Researcher, University of Lapland (in progress)

Founder, Lawyers Design School (2020–) 25+ years in law · 14+ years as entrepreneur Coached hundreds of lawyers and legal teams globally

Still asking the uncomfortable questions. Still wearing pink slippers when nobody’s watching.