Legal Design: Introduction

Legal Design is on the rise in the legal profession worldwide.

In this short introduction, we will cover the following:

• what is legal design,
• design thinking as a stepping stone for any legal designer,
• how to apply legal design in practice,
• what to do when you are not a designer and totally cannot draw, a
• more resources and tips.

It’s a quick intro to get you oriented and maybe get you more interested in legal design.

1. What is legal design?

Legal design is the combination of law and design, i.e. the use of design as a means to consciously use and perceive legal information.

In other words, it is the application of human-centred design to the world of law to make legal systems and services more human-centred, usable and satisfying (Margaret Hagan, Law by Design).

I personally interpret this to mean that legal design is an approach to delivering legal services in such a way that the user (client) gets everything they need to achieve their goal, understands everything easily and moreover has a good experience from all of it.

As a legal designer, instead of a really comfortable chair, you design, say, a court filing that someone will want to read.

However, it’s not about throwing every document into a flowchart or just scraping the information in a fundamental way (or, as Marie Potel-Saville of legal design agency Amurabi, says, dumbing down legal documents).

It’s about transforming the whole service delivery process so that everything is contained and communicated in just the right way to achieve this in the most user-friendly way.

That’s why legal design builds on the design thinking method to help us engage the user and work with their needs. Only in this way can we can provide legal services not for lawyers, but for whoever we plan to inform or influence with them.

But legal design is not just design thinking. Design thinking is just one of the methods on which legal design is built. Rather, design thinking is a general direction, a stepping stone, which we then supplement in prototyping by using, for example, human-centric design, participatory design, information dissemination theory, behavioural studies, neuroergonomics and, in fact, anything that helps us get to our goal.

2. Design Thinking

Design thinking is a set of different techniques that we use to get from user need to a final product, using basically educated trial and error.

It is a cycle of:

• ideation and prototyping
• trying to reflect the needs and desires of our user to the greatest possible extent and at the same time
• active communication with the user regarding their needs and our proposed solutions and challenges.

In general, you can start studying design thinking with the following:

• course Design Thinking for Innovation on coursera,
• one of the (wonderful and often free) workshops by Google, in Czech Republic within the New Generation of Founders

3. How to start with legal design using design thinking?

Step 1: Empathy

At the beginning is the user, the addressee. Think about who you are preparing your output for – who will actually work with the document in practice? Imagine them as a person, feel free to give them a name, imagine them in the context of their normal life.

• What is the problem the user is solving, what is the desired end state? The problem is “I need to buy a car”, but that cannot be solved by saying that it will be a contract of sale under Civil Code section 2079 et seq.
• What are their feelings about the status quo? If filling out a visa application fills the user with anxiety and you are not familiar with the form, you should know.
• What is the user’s level of understanding of the law? I write a document differently for the sales department of a multinational corporation and differently for an online legal advice service.
• What is the user’s level of language proficiency? Medical documentation should be in English at a 6th grade level so that it can be understood by the majority of the population. Law should take a similar approach.
• How does the user receive information by default? A child is more likely to appreciate a video on TikTok than an eBook about their virtual rights.
• What are the barriers to receiving information? For example, many users do not own a computer, so everything has to be optimized for mobile phones, which are far more affordable.

However, the best way to find the answer to these questions is to ask your user directly or observe how they have managed so far. In design thinking terms, this inquiry happens in the context of an empathetic conversation. But before you conduct it, you’d better study well how to conduct such a conversation (start here, for example) – after all, you’re dealing with the feelings of someone in a rather vulnerable position.

Step 2: Challenge

The next step is to better formulate your challenge. This is the wording of the challenge, a mandate of sorts.

It is good to formulate it using the phrase “How might we…“, which gives you enough space to move, change, refine the challenge throughout the process.

The challenge should be just broad enough so that on the one hand it’s not too narrow, but at the same time it doesn’t go over your head.

Step 3: Brainstorm

In relation to your challenge, first brainstorm how you could meet it.

Try all possible approaches, paint, stick stickers, destroy flowcharts, whatever works.

The important thing is to record everything, even the craziest things (if they could try McSpaghetti at McDonald’s, you might suggest making a prenuptial agreement a comic book).

Step 4: Prototype

Next, your goal is to pick one of the ideas and create a prototype in the cheapest and fastest method possible. The important thing is not to fiddle with it too much, but rather to come up with just enough of a working mock-up/capture to test it.

Want to make an app? Make sketches.

Want to see if a spreadsheet would explain it better? Create it in Word and fill it out lorem ipsum.

My favorite story is how Margaret Hagan’s students in the Legal Design Lab tested to see if orientation in a courthouse could be solved by a robot-door at the entrance. Instead of building an entire robot, one of the students took a box on his head and acted it out as a short sketch.

Step 5: Feedback

Ask for feedback. All the time. Collect data qualitatively and quantitatively, ask users and colleagues. Have your prototype ripped apart, because that’s the only way to know if you’ve hit the nail on the head or if you’re completely off.

Step 6: And again!

Feedback is a nice thing, but it’s absolutely useless without follow-up action.

So in step number six, take it and start over.

• Your prototype didn’t win users over? Improve it or discard it and try something else.
• Did the user appreciate only some part of it? Develop it further.

Simply put, the goal is to repeat this cycle until it starts to make sense to you and you’ve created something solid that can realistically help the user, thus fulfilling your challenge (step 2).

3. Practical examples of legal design

In practice, legal design is anything that purposefully and consciously brings the law closer to and communicates it to the end user based on their own preferences.

Realistically it can turn out to be any the following:

• An overview of procedural rights as an infographic,
• a map of the arbitration process in individual steps (Studio Dot),
• a contract in the form of a comic strip (Creative Contracts),
• a timeline in your court filing (Amurabi),
• procedural map for paying traffic fines (Legal Design Lab),
• the creation of FAQs (MPS),
• Chatbot,
• Better navigation in the courthouse with clear indication of where the plaintiff/defendant is sitting (a personal wish of mine in my first year of clerkship),
• a game for minors explaining their rights on the internet (Amurabi),
• and much more.

Troubleshooting: I can’t do photoshop

A lot of people are afraid of legal design because they feel they can never create something visually beautiful. But legal design isn’t just about pretty documents.

Sure, a lot of materials are supported by professional graphic design, but you can innovate without it:

• start by writing simpler sentences (use my free checklists for good plain language drafting),
• stop writing paragraphs in emails and use bullet points instead,
• minus ten points for self-quoting paragraphs, twenty for each Latin word,
• try Word SmartArt for easy hierarchies and flowcharts.
• try canva, a totally simple freemium online editor where you just drag and drop images from left to right,
• make a power point infographic using basic patterns,
• if you’re in a larger company, try using your in-house graphics, if not, consider finding room in your budget for them.

Final Provisions

Legal design is a brilliant mindset for anyone who wants to take their legal game to the next level, while making the best of the needs of those they help.

Design thinking is one of its many aids to help you realise what you should/could create for users.

How to start with legal design? Just do – and if you are in a law firm setting, you can explore how to do it here.

If you find it half as cool as I do, feel free to get in touch, I’d love to talk about legal design anytime. Or leave me your email below. And in the meantime, feel free to join the online community! 👀

-Attorney@Code