Legal Operations

Legal Tech

Awareness & Communication

Multidisciplinary

Legal Design

Access to justice (A2J)

Civic Tech

Innovation

Education

Art

Plain Langage

_Definition

In 2014, Margaret Hagan used the term Legal Design to give a name and theorize the set of design practices applied in the Legal field. Today, when we talk about Legal Design, we are talking about all the projects and initiatives at the crossroads of the Design and Law disciplines (as we can talk about Medical Design for instance).

As a reminder, Design formalizes services and products by questioning individuals about how they experience their environment (spaces, things, websites, posters…). On the other hand, Legal rules the relationships between entities and people (laws, contracts, terms). The convergence between these two disciplines invites legal services or products designers to place legal services users at the center of their thinking and to question their legal experience (perception, interactions, actions, feelings, interpretations…), the aim is to adapt and rethink legal services or product for those who use them. Therefore, Legal Design gives rise to new processes, interfaces, or visualization for examples.

Law wants to define the responsibilities and to protect, so, many “end users” wants to limit their experience of law to the minimum because if we live this experience, that means that we get involve into a problem. The current experience of the law has certain characteristics such as the perception of the subject as boring or complex, the lack of understanding of technical terms, the habit of accepting something without reading it (the T&Cs scroll for example), the fear of doing something wrong, etc... This should create a real mutual understanding (on the legal professionals and designers sides) of the added-value of involving designers in legal delivery to respond to common issues as accessibility, intelligibility, trust, or transparency for example. From the collaboration between Designers and Legal professionals, but also engineers, developers, project managers and so on, new uses and experiences of law emerge to meet the current stakes.

The main goal of Legal Design is to restore the Law to its true strategic and its performative functions in society.

_Issues

Issue 1 : Legal information Design Law, beyond words ? Think about the Legal mediation.

Designing Legal information means thinking about its content and format for its users to reach them and meet their need(s). There are still too many legal contents that aren’t designed, at first, for their users, for those who read and use them. They are blocks of technical and jargonous texts which fail in their real function, beyond only protecting the legal professional in a court in case of litigation. Legal Design is thus to be equipped with a new panel of expressions means (diagrams, infographics, plain language…) to make law understandable and accessible. But it is above all to establish user-centric methodologies (tests, interviews, prototyping…) to design a content, a format and a life cycle (distribution, communication, archiving) that will be adapted to users and their behaviors. Therefore, Legal Design can’t be reduced to a simple visual input, it’s a whole strategy to implement.

''Legal Design is often referred as mostly the visual part of it. But in fact it's a change in the way we communicate and practice law.''
Lieke Beelen - Founder of Visual Contract.

read more Issue 2 : Access to Justice Restore the Law to its function.
read more Issue 3 : Innovate sustainably Destabilize and experiment new practices.
read more Issue 4 : Implement legal design Learn legal design step by step.
read more Issue 5 : Perception of law professionals Lawyers are not blockers of projects from their ivory towers.
read more Issue 6 : Deals with a multiplicity of outcomes Create the unknown / Fall in love with the problem.