What is Legal Design?
It can be extremely difficult for an ordinary person to understand the law. Even professionals of the legal industry, (you and us too) will agree that it is occasionally difficult for us to figure out “Law”. Naturally, in a world which is highly regulated and clutched in hands of law, the loopholes involved in the legal area can throw us off-guard.
That is where we need Legal Design. Okay, think about all those diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps, drawings, diagrams, and infographics. When you see them, do they ease your mind? Do you think even in law, they may help you in legal research, innovation, and solutions? They definitely do, by producing results that are more effective if you consider the perspective of the use. How? Because now you use a user-centric approach by empathising with the user and gathering input at each stage of your prototype.
Design meets the law when it encourages straightforward design strategies to make the legal sector transparent and understandable to the average person. Additionally, the techniques of Legal Design aid in developing user-centric solutions and helping to remove confusing legal jargon and professional (clients, lawyers, students, the layman, society, and its systems, and institutions).
This guide will help you understand this fine collaboration between law and design. LET'S GO!
What is legal design?
Margaret Hagan defined Legal Design as - “The application of human-centred design to the world of law, to make legal systems and services more human-centred, usable, and satisfying.”
For simple understanding, you apply design thinking to the law. You rewrite the current legal frameworks, documents, and services to make it more empathetic and user-focused. The legal design takes into account how the general public views the law and how it might be improved to better serve their requirements. This is different from viewing law through the eyes of a lawyer.
It uses three key types of resources: procedure, mindsets, and mechanics. Plus, it establishes important new benchmarks for how the legal industry will function. We must question whether the services we provide are usable, valuable, and interesting.
Why do we need Legal design in law?
Legal designs seek to help both ordinary people and law practitioners, create the improved front end and back end for the legal field and work toward both long-term change and gradual short-term gains.
Legal design is a necessity when discussing consumer contracts and policies. In essence, a startling quantity of legal paperwork that parties must agree upon are challenging to read and comprehend. Most of the time, not even lawyers regularly read such legal paperwork.
Organizations and businesses must create legal documents, therefore they do, not because they desire to. Not because these agreements enable consumers to properly comprehend their obligations and rights. Simply because the law requires that these documents be provided to clients, lawyers create them.
What if we entirely shift our viewpoint and try to picture contracts and policies as being a crucial component of the experience that businesses aim to provide to their clients? Of course, it should be a pleasant and interesting experience.
Users' rights and obligations can be communicated to them in a clear, transparent, and understandable manner thanks to the legal design. More than that, the total user experience will include reading legal paperwork, which no one enjoys, not even lawyers.
But there is much more to legal design than that. It involves superior organisation and product design as well as the clear and unambiguous presentation of information.
Legal designers ensure that things are created to be long-lasting and for the same moral and ethical standards are taken of. A compliance review is not performed by legal designers once the product has been designed. They collaborate with the development team to come up with practical solutions. And last but not least, neither consumers nor regulators will object to that.
How does legal design work
In a wonderful analogy, Margaret Hagan compares legal design to having a new pair of glasses to see the world. The new glasses focus on clients instead of lawyers or the processes we operate under.
With the help of the glasses, we ask ourselves how we might provide legal services in the most convenient, fulfilling, and engaging manner possible. In order to choose the optimum course of action, we first analyse our processes, systems, and mental models.
Making beautiful documents is not the goal of legal design - Drilling down to our customers' most fundamental needs, and then building solutions, customer experiences, and processes that match those demands
We create information for clients - Each customer has unique wants, and each has a preferred method of informational delivery. Customers, like us, desire respect, to feel that the law gives them authority, and to communicate with peers who can offer options, alternatives, and recommendations without using legalese or putting up obstacles that safeguard old law.
Legal information can be reimagined using a structure, language, and images that are understandable to people.
Where Lawyers once claimed that traditional mail was still the only option, now they can provide information to their customers in a variety of methods, including through digital products, video, audio, graphics, schematics, and flowcharts.
Examples of Legal design
Visual Design - The most obvious application of legal design is in visual form. It refers to changing information presented to consumers in a way that most appeals to them. A good illustration of this is in contracts and other legal papers.
The majority of contracts are complicated in wording and packed with tons of legal jargon. Because of this, the end users of the contracts, the consumers or the lawyers, have a difficult time connecting with and comprehending the documents they are given. These issues are:
Excessive jargon A contract is not always signed by a lawyer. However, the majority of contracts are written in legal terminology, which only lawyers can understand.
Important details get lost - Large text blocks and extensive documents make up contracts. This makes it challenging for clients and even lawyers in a contract to comprehend the crucial information in a contract.
Contracts don't engage people. Poor contract design makes it difficult to remain involved in the contract because of the way it appears.
Legal designing encourages people to develop contracts with the layperson in mind rather than with attorneys and judges in mind. Contracts can be made more interesting and consumable by incorporating graphics, videos, and other infographics. Instead of hiding it in bundles of text, another design-centric approach is to place all of the crucial information at the front of the contract.
Process Design - Another area of legal design that may be used to enhance the lawyer-experiences and even people who collaborate with them is process design. Applying legal design concepts to legal processes can help to target workflow inefficiencies and offer user-centric, logical fixes. The method employed to allow commercial teams to self-serve on legal questions and documents is one example of this. In a manual system, whenever a commercial team has a legal inquiry or needs assistance writing or revising a contract, they will get in touch with the legal team. There are various issues attached to it:
The legal System is overburdened with low-grade chores - Every time a lawyer spends time addressing a straightforward issue or reviewing a straightforward contract, they are diverted from higher-value work. As your business expands and the volume of inquiries rises, this issue will only get worse.
Delay in responses - Commercial teams may have to wait a while for a response or for their contract to be approved due to the hectic schedules of legal teams. Their development on crucial initiatives may be slowed as a result.
Inconsistency - Legal department assistance is typically requested on an as-needed basis. However, this implies that making requests and giving responses are inconsistent. Teams from the law and business may find this to be confusing.
It is quite clear that the process is difficult for both the users (legal and commercial teams), isn’t it? Brainstorming solutions to these issues is the next step in the legal design thinking process. Making an interactive legal playbook for use by commercial teams is one solution. All of the responses to the most typical queries posed to the company's lawyers can be found in this playbook. It can be determined that teams should confer with this before calling legal if they have any legal inquiries.
Happier customers
Clients will esteem attorneys who put themselves in their position, consider their needs, and provide them with something of genuine value. The client relationship is improved by practising legal design. Gaining the trust, empathy, and understanding of your clients by actively listening to them, interacting with them, and working together to create customised solutions.
Ease in Compliance and understanding of the Law
Users will feel more assured of their rights and obligations if they are given a legal product that is more comprehensible and interesting (such as a contract). More compliance, fewer disputes, and quicker negotiations are all possible outcomes of this improved participation and understanding of the law. We can begin to create a judicial system in which people can participate more actively.
Encourage innovation and value creation
Your team, organisation, and client network all have members who have great insights and suggestions for how you may do better. People, when given a chance or a platform to think creatively, are able to unlock their ideas and potential within organisations thanks to the legal design. It will help you in finding more opportunities and will increase productivity and even income. These could be modifications to current services or entirely new methods of doing things. This might be a game-changer for in-house legal teams, enabling them to transform from a hindrance or an expense to their company into facilitators, innovators, and value producers.
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