INTRODUCTION
Those in the legal information sector are well-practised at making difficult, complicated information and processes more understandable – it's the profession's superpower! It might be a law student grappling with whether a particular provision has been amended or an academic who doesn't know where to look for an obscure article. It might be a desperate trainee who can't get their head around what steps should be taken in order to satisfy a partner research request. Law librarians take steps to pinpoint the issue, break it down into neat steps and guide the individual through it. They will adjust their method of doing this to the person with the request – gauging how much experience they have, how stressed they are and indeed whether they are likely to want the ‘wham bam’ speedy route to an answer or are focused on gaining the knowledge to do it independently next time.
The concept of legal design is not a million steps from this.
In this article I hope to give some insights into the exciting discipline of legal design – what it is, who uses it and how they use it. I'll detail my route into the field and tell you about some of those who have inspired me along the way. I will reference the collection I co-edited, Design in Legal Education (2022),Footnote 1 as lots of the leading voices in the discipline feature here. I will also give pointers on how you might learn more or indeed where you might take steps to use legal design in your own activities.
WHO AM I?
Some context first. Why should you listen to me? Some of the ‘old guard’ may remember me from many years ago; I was an academic law librarian at City, University of London from 2000 until 2014. I was a trainee before this at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. I was a member of BIALL and served on a number of its committees during my time. One of my proudest moments is still (!) being named Law Librarian of the Year in 2012. In 2014, however, I made the permanent transition from libraries to academia.
THE START OF IT ALL: LAWBORE
Back in 2002, I unleashed a new web resource on the world, Lawbore.Footnote 2 In those days, it was simply a directory of recommended resources, created to help my students, who just didn't know what they could trust online. This was only two years after Westlaw and Lexis became available online in a sense we now are used to (not via a command line interface).
Lawbore
In the years that followed, Lawbore was transformed every year or two, to incorporate new functionality, a greater emphasis on community building and unique content creation. My focus was very much on creating something for UK law students and ensuring that the site was engaging, visually pleasing and made finding law fun. The emphasis was on increasing access to the law, making it less intimidating and more usable. I added a sub-site over time, Learnmore,Footnote 3 a collection of multimedia resources for legal skills: articles, videos, talking slideshows and some resources which were one-of-kind at the time.
Learnmore
Later, more focus shifted to increasing students’ connectedness to the university, the wider legal community and to London. The City HubFootnote 4 was added, and then later Future LawyerFootnote 5 joined, with news stories, interviews with alumni, event reviews and student stories. An Events CalendarFootnote 6 followed – ensuring our users can see what's going on at City and beyond.
At the time, I just did what I felt would engage my students: anyone with some spare time on their hands (or trouble sleeping!) can read the various pieces I wrote on Lawbore's development during that early period.Footnote 7 But I knew that if I wanted to hit home, I needed to make content look engaging, and that the resources needed to be diverse. My approach was to use a variety of mediums, and straightforward direct language; and to ensure that any development was firmly grounded in the needs of my users. At the time I had no clue that this set of priorities, this ‘hunch’ I had on what would make the site successful, was based on an actual discipline. But it was! Or it would become one …
Future Lawyer
WHAT IS LEGAL DESIGN?
Legal design refers to the use of design methods, tools and processes when applied to the legal sector. The aim of legal design is to make the law (in whatever form) more understandable, accessible, and usable. The ‘law’ is wide-ranging in its nature and so this could mean legal documents, but it could also mean a legal service or process. So, the methodology could be applied to designing a policy or some terms and conditions, but it could also be applied to vast firmwide challenges around how to retain talent, or how to re-envisage the client relationship.
Dr Colette R Brunschwig is credited with first linking design with the legal world via her PhD research on the visualisation of legal norms. Her first study was published in 2001,Footnote 8 with further development in 2014.Footnote 9 Around this time Margaret Hagan at Stanford University began her important work in the field, bringing together those from a range of disciplines (design, law, engineering) to look at how effective design methods could be in a legal context. This developed into the influential Stanford Legal Design Lab. Others to note in these early days are contract design legends, Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera. Legal design became more widely known with the first ‘Legal Design Summit’, which was held in Helsinki in 2017 (attended by yours truly).
We'll look a bit later on how it is done, but for now here are a few of its features.
HUMAN-CENTRED (OR USER-CENTRED) DESIGN + EMPATHY
Absolutely key for those working within the discipline, is that the users (of that specific document, service or process) are all-important and it is their experience which should drive any solution. They should always be at the centre of the design process. Hagan (2018)Footnote 10 describes its aims:
“It aims to generate promising new interventions that can address wicked, complex problems. It begins with a profound focus on the people whom a product, service, or system is trying to serve. It uses this understanding to inform quick, agile creation and testing of new things to serve these stakeholders. It posits that the best way to evaluate existing offerings and to create new, better ones is to focus on the needs, values, and aspirations of the people who are the target audience of the offering.”
Empathy can be seen as at the core of this process. This isn't unique to law, of course. User-centred design has been in operation for many decades and many other industries have fully embraced its methods. Law has been slower off the mark, but this should be expected in an industry where ‘lawyer as expert’ has been the accepted norm forever.
DESIGN IS SEEN AS A PROCESS
Design-thinking involves identifying a problem, brainstorming possible solutions, prototyping some of these and selecting the most successful for further development and testing. This all comes after the user-needs aspect we mention above – empathy is pivotal to design.
It is challenging to stick to this, as we often have preconceptions about what ‘the problem’ is, as well as what ‘the solution’ might be, which can taint the process and outcome if not recognised quickly. Margaret Hagan talks of how design “…is a discipline centred around HOW. How to make things – communications, products, services, systems – in a way that will mean they are successful in solving human problems, addressing human needs.”Footnote 11 We'll look more at the process with a legal lens later in the article.
WHAT IS IT NOT?
Design in this context is not about making something look prettier or shinier. With the rise in legal design as a discipline, there are a surplus of firms shouting from the rooftops about the launch of their much ‘improved’ guide / policy / terms and conditions documents (“created using legal design!”), when all they have done is throw lots of colour and icons at them. Legal design is not a superficial process, it is about ensuring that the design of whatever legal thing it is, gets the user to connect, to understand what is being presented to them. It has to meet their needs.
WHAT CAN DESIGN DO FOR LAW?
Let's consider legal documents. Most feature a variety of elements that hinder the understanding of the user: complex language, limited use of headings, large blocks of text, smallish font, a prevalence of legalese / complex terminology and a lack of consideration of the role of white space within a document.
From a consumer point of view, it is the norm that we make agreements without reading the paperwork. Whether it is a mobile phone contract, or terms and conditions for a new service you are subscribing to, we just do not have time or sometimes the mental capacity to plough through 10 plus pages of dense columned text. It's not just a ‘small print’ issue anymore, often all of it seems like it is in small print! There is usually no effort made by companies to flag up the key information, or to give explainers for more complex aspects of the agreement.
In a business-to-business context, we can look at this from two different angles; firstly, that although the lawyers are usually the ones to make any agreements, it is others within a business that actually need to understand it, adhere to it and implement any changes. This means there is a disconnect. Visual contracts have made in-roads into this, and we'll look at these a little further into the article.
The second angle concerns the lawyers themselves. Here, this is not an issue of understanding the relevant law and its rights and obligations, but one of building bridges and easing negotiations. Lawyers are risk-averse, and of course the traditional view of a contract is that it covers every possible eventuality and protects against any risk. All parties to a contract will fight hard to get the protection they feel is necessary and this will often be represented by verbose, complex content. What solutions does design have the potential to offer in these prickly situations then? By committing to seeing the legal document (a contract for example) as a document for transformation, not for confrontation, the various ‘sides’ can work collaboratively to improve efficiency.Footnote 12 With this kind of proactive / preventive orientation we can build ‘legal protection or clarity’Footnote 13 by working collaboratively from the start, and have a greater chance of ensuring problems do not arise.
Trust is a major benefit of using design here. If the user of a document or service sees time has been taken, and resources committed to helping them with their understanding, they are likely to be appreciative of the transparency.
But it is not all about documents though; understanding rights, gaining the power of agency, seeing how the law applies to you, gaining the right tools to make a good decision, means that the importance of legal design goes far deeper. Alignment has been made between the health and legal worlds. Haapio (2021)Footnote 14 notes that ‘as with physical, mental and social health, people cannot achieve their fullest (legal) health potential unless they are able to take control of those things which determine their legal health’.
Finally, it offers the chance of real change for the legal profession. New pathways for careers in the law, new skillsets and competencies and more collaborative teams who are open to innovation and more client-focused.
WHERE IS IT BEING USED?
In legal practice
Many law firms are seeing legal design as a part of their innovation work, in many cases giving new recruits the chance to learn the basics as part of their training. Some law firms have an in-house legal design specialist team (Simmons & Simmons were the first global law firm to have thisFootnote 15).
It is, however, more common for legal design practitioners to work independently as consultants or from within a specialist agency. There are many of these out there: AmurabiFootnote 16 in France, AclaraFootnote 17 in the Netherlands and Astrid Kohlmeier in Germany just being some of those that start with A! DotFootnote 18 from Finland was one of the first consultancies to appear. Many of their websites offer showcases of their work, so it is an excellent starting point for those interested in the discipline to get inspired. Privacy policies, influencer agreements, pension decision letters, antitrust guidance, user-centric NDAs for startups, patient consent forms are all there to peruse.
In public legal education
The legal design approach can be seen across a wide array of different contexts when it comes to the third sector or public legal education. Seeing so many who are unable to afford legal representation is a big motivating factor for practitioners to use design to make a difference. Here are a few projects I'm involved in to illustrate the range of ways in which legal design is being deployed:
Reproductive Rights as Socio-Economic Rights in Nepal: using legal design to improve access to justice
Nepal is one of the leading jurisdictions in Asia with regard to the constitutionalisation of reproductive rights (abortion, contraception, maternal health, surrogacy, sterilisation and in certain cases a right to education). The expansive interpretation of these rights can be seen in a series of leading Supreme Court Judicial decisions.Footnote 19 However, despite this impressive array of socio-economic rights, implementation remains uneven and often ineffective. This project uses legal design to empower marginalised groups in the hopes of fostering a better implementation of socio-economic reproductive rights. Work so far includes comic explainers of the key cases, and user personas to use as a basis for our work and as influencing tools.Footnote 20 See page 25, Figures 4, 5 and 6.
Design the Law Nepal Uterus prolapse case explainer. Project team: Emily Allbon, Sabrina Germain, Mara Malagodi. Artist: Kripa Joshi.
Leducate Class Materials
Educational charity Leducate promotes a comprehensive understanding of everyday legal rights among secondary school-aged students in England and Wales, running teaching sessions on everything from employment to debt, from consumer rights to human rights. Its classes are engaging and inspirational but the textual materials it gave students to work from in class were less engaging. I worked to redesign the consent and relationships class materials.Footnote 21 See Figures 7, 8 and 9.
Figures 7, 8 and 9 are from a Consent and Relationships learning pack. Emily Allbon. Artist: Adam Doughty
Liberty
Working with civil liberties organisation Liberty, we are looking at three key advice areas (stop and search, police complaints and immigration) from its website to see if and how the design strategies for each should differ.Footnote 22
In courtrooms
Legal design is being used widely in this sphere, particularly in how to improve the experience of going to court for users. Grainne McKeever and Lucy Royal-Dawson (2022) use human centred design within the second phase of their long-running and important project on litigants in person in Northern Ireland. They are taking a co-production approach in order to create support materials for litigants in person attending court hearings,Footnote 23 including a whole range of stakeholders within their design group.
Work in this sphere is, however, far more extended in the US and Canada; Hagan (2018) has a significant body of work relating to the courts, proposing that a human-centred approach is an ideal tool for reforming the court system, particularly in relation to increasing accessibility for those without lawyers.Footnote 24 The work of Salter and Thompson (2017)Footnote 25 pivots around reforms to public civil justice dispute resolution processes in British Columbia, all done from a user-centric orientation in order to ‘put the public first.’
In universities
Rising numbers of universities are offering students a chance to learn legal design skills as part of their programme, though very few currently in the UK; Kent Law School launched a module for LLM students in 2023. Stanford University in the US is the most developed, offering courses to students but also working on projects with a range of partners: government agencies, courts, legal aid groups and law firms amongst them, to re-imagine how their services are provided. The NuLawLab at Northeastern University, also in the US (motto: We envision a world where everyone is empowered to use the law) offers programmes and projects to its students, joining them up with community partners to transform “legal education, the legal profession and the delivery of legal services”.Footnote 26 Australia's University of Newcastle also offers a Legal Innovation and Design module.Footnote 27
WHO HAS BENEFITED MOST FROM LEGAL DESIGN?
Unsurprisingly, contracts are the area where we see most advances. There has been a significant amount of academic research and some really impactful projects in the field. Of course, simplifying text and using plain English can make a difference to the user experience and their levels of understanding, but the addition of visual features can change things yet again. Levin and Mayer (2003) stated in the context of student learning at least, pictures accompanying text, make the learning more concentrated, concise / compact, concrete, coherent, comprehensible, correspondent and codable (memorable!).Footnote 28 The subsequent research around visual contracts has certainly shown this is true for other user groups too.
Visual contracts
Leading pioneers in visual contracts are Stefania Passera and Helena Haapio. Haapio (a lawyer) exploring the inclusion of visual imagery to make the meaning of contractual terms clearer back in 2012,Footnote 29 and Passera, (an experienced information designer) wrote her doctoral thesis on how visualisations can enhance the usability and user experience of contracts.Footnote 30 Individually and together, they have a huge body of academic work on contract design (as collaborators going back to 2011), but they are also holders of official roles with World Commerce & Contracting. Together, they created the Contract Design Pattern library,Footnote 31 which offers a bank of solutions to common contract usability problems.
One of the exciting projects in this area was a piece of work done for the multinational company, Shell. They felt frustrated by the time they spent building up relationships, only to feel the hard-won ‘harmony’ was then jeopardised by the contract negotiation process; they had concerns that there was a risk of ‘dismantl[ing] that relationship brick by brick’.Footnote 32
Designers used visuals to bring alive dense aspects of one of their contracts, which concerned marine lubricants. In the ‘delivery diagram’ section of the Design Pattern LibraryFootnote 33 you can see a snapshot of this; the image showing the delivery of the lubricant to the ship – and colours used to indicate who is responsible for the risk at each stage of that delivery.
Comic contracts
An extension of visual contracts is the comic contract; this uses pictures throughout, and it isn't an explainer of the contract but a legally binding contract. The comic as a whole is the contract. Here we see the parties to the contract represented as characters and terms might be in writing, or they might be represented by pictures, but they have meaning, as terms in the contract.Footnote 34
The world's first comic contract was designed to empower seasonal workers employed as fruit-pickers in South Africa, many of whom had low literacy levels and spoke many different languages.Footnote 35 This was ground-breaking at the time and paved the way for this vehicle to be used more extensively.
Global infrastructure company Aurecon took the bold step of having its employment contract transformed into a comic contractFootnote 36 as part of a research project with Camilla Baasch Andersen and her team at the University of Western Australia. The process involved simplification of content but inclusions too; as Camilla says, it was also about “humanising and addressing real needs”.Footnote 37 The effectiveness of the new employment contract was measured according to three aspects: comprehension, engagement and perception. All of these resulted in very positive data, most strikingly within the perception aspect. Andersen reported that the perception of the company was markedly more favourable, in light of them “making the effort to design a more friendly format”.Footnote 38
HOW IS IT DONE?
When people think about legal design, it is often with the end-product in mind: the comprehensive process map, the clear structured policy, the guidance to filling out a government form and the simple or intuitive app to report racism. However, the actual vehicle(s) chosen only comes after a great deal of user and field research, focused brainstorming, and then many different iterations of ‘rough and ready’ prototyping twinned with testing, preferably with the users the resource is intended to assist.
The phases of the design process vary but the Double Diamond,Footnote 39 created by the Design Council in 2003 offered a standardised vision of the process with four steps. Margaret Hagan at the Stanford Legal Design Lab adapted this and uses a five-stage framework.Footnote 40
In the early phases, you will be drawing on divergent and convergent thinking, and deploy a diverse range of different tools. You'll probably know that Post-it notes are an indispensable piece of kit! You'll be doing desk research or research via interviews or in workshops, putting together journey maps and empathy maps whilst you get to understand the users and refine your problem statement.
WHAT MIGHT YOU DO WITH LEGAL DESIGN?
The pivotal function of legal design is to make complex legal things (concepts, documents, processes, systems) easier to understand, and that presents librarians with boundless possibilities. It is something you already do in many parts of the service you offer.
Whilst reading this article you may have found lots of ideas popping into your head about elements of your work which could be ripe for the application of some legal design methodologies.
These might be in relation to agreements you ask your users to sign, it might be putting together a guide to finding a tricky source, it might be looking again at your training materials to see where changes can be made. It might be a quick and dirty summary of your services, for new users. For those working in an academic setting, can you pinpoint a way of showing new students the bigger picture of research – the different stages and sources involved?
Those of you in a practice setting, are there ways in which you can support trainees better? Are the materials you produce for the different teams and practice areas still meeting their aims? Do you take the same approach for all teams, and is there perhaps mileage in treating them differently?
However, end product aside, the process of design deployed into a legal information / library context could evoke new and interesting insights into your users, whether they be students, judges or lawyers in practice. Design tools such as empathy maps, personas and journey maps can really help you understand more about why users aren't using a particular service you offer, or why so many struggle to do a certain task, or why a certain product is under-used. The insight gained here is to be as prized as much as the product you might eventually develop.
Not all law firms have in-house teams who specialise in legal design; you may find this is an area in which you could begin to develop some expertise – starting small and seeing if you can make an impact. For those who do have an in-house firm design team – are there ways in which you can support them?
On a more practical note, you might wish to add a new section to your library collection!
HOW CAN I LEARN MORE?
A good starting point is (sorry, brazen plug alert!) Design in Legal Education (2022),Footnote 41 which I co-edited with Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris from the University of Kent. We include lots of snapshots of legal design in action here. The book websiteFootnote 42 has a number of extra resources on it too, including a conversation between the editors. For something less academic, Astrid Kohlmeier and Meera Klemola's The Legal Design Book (2021) is a solid introductory option, with some interesting case studies.
There are several good online resources to consider also: the Legal Design PodcastFootnote 43 and the Legal Design IRLFootnote 44 videos on YouTube. Have a look at tl;dr,Footnote 45 the less textual legal gallery, where I showcase examples of legal design from myself and others. See Figures 10 and 11.
tl;dr the less textual legal gallery
tl;dr: the less textual legal gallery
Margaret Hagan's blogFootnote 46 and the site for the Legal Design LabFootnote 47 are both resources to get lost in. Those of you interested in contracts would be advised to look at the WorldCC Design Pattern LibraryFootnote 48 for inspiration on techniques too.
