Hello World! Let’s start with the Basics…What is Legal Design?

So, what are we doing here? How did I end up on the site of a firm focused on Legal Design? What is Legal Design anyways? Isn\’t it just fluff?

I recently came across a blog where a starry-eyed US attorney described Legal Design as a process through which she would use her creative side in the application of law. At this point, you\’re likely thinking, \”see, this example proves it is fluff!\”. But, that is not Legal Design. Application of and working within the law already involves creativity – there\’s creativity in formulating a client\’s position, theatrics involved in advocating for them and the play of words in drafting. But, simply enhancing those skills is not Legal Design. Legal Design is about bringing together two different professions (Lawyers and Designers) in the pursuit of a positive user experience and access to justice.

Lawyers are trained to be logical, analytical thinkers and solve their clients\’ problems by applying the facts to the law. Designers, on the other end of the spectrum, are wildly creative and use that creativity to develop visual constructs. Design Thinking is a methodology – it is a multi-staged process that employs Empathy, Defining, Ideation, Prototyping, and Testing. Service Design is about applying elements of the Design Thinking process to immaterial products, or services. Legal Design is a marriage of all of these concepts. Designers are not lawyers, no matter how analytical. Lawyers are not designers, no matter how creative or innovative they are.

These concepts are further complicated because there is no one-size-fits-all definition of Legal Design. If we can agree that Legal Design is about improving the user-experience and access to the Justice System, the next logical question is how? Here are examples of Legal Design in practice:

1. Document and Policy Design – The layout and the use of plain language writing when drafting user documents and contracts.
2. Service Design – The re-design of something for efficiency. An example of this is how to deliver a better service to a Client. Think of this like the \”Starbucks\” of the law.
3. Business Design – Unlocking Client value. This can be done in multiple ways, through the organization, structure, or by altering a practice to benefit the client.           

Legal Design can be any of these things, but it all requires following Design Thinking methodology, experimentation and testing the outcome to measure the tangible value through analytics.

Human-centered and user-centered design dominates many other industries, so why not the Legal Industry? Legal Design has value in any domain that interprets laws and regulations. If there is an end-user of the law or the regulation, there should be Legal Design. Afterall, those laws and regulations were not drafted for lawyers and compliance professionals alone. They were drafted to govern the activities of the everyday person and Legal Design seeks to make a rich and traditional system more accessible and that isn\’t \”fluff\”.