Legal Design – How it will change Legal Tradition?

Legal Design | Law by Design | Visual Law - What's it?

The term “Legal Design” is a relatively new field of work that’s slowly but surely taking the legal sector by storm. But most of you will now ask – What exactly is this “Legal Design”? Well, let’s dive right in, and discover for ourselves…

Legal Design is a concept that was born in the Law Laboratory of Stanford University in the United States. It can be defined precisely as – “Legal Design is a methodology that allows prioritization of legal information and makes it more accessible and comprehensible through a visual reading grid”.

 Legal Design does not replace or obliterate existing legal laws, cases, texts, and documents. If anything, it facilitates their reading and highlights the most important points. You can easily return to the full, original text, thanks to implementation of interactive tools and devices.

What exactly are the visual tools used in Legal Design?

As we all know legal text is indecipherable to most of us, who are not in the legal domain. Most legal documents look like Greek and Latin to the common man. Well, not anymore!

To solve this very purpose of making complicated “legal jargon” easily understandable and digestible, all methods are allowed in legal design. There are no strict rules for anything, and you can have as many solutions as there are configurations. It all becomes fluid and easily comprehensible.

For instance, as a law firm, you can use Infographics, booklets, pamphlets, videos… why, even comic strips! That’s the amount of freedom you get in Legal Design. Using these tools gives your law firm excellent adaptability and finetunes it exactly as per the expectations of your clients. The sheer variety of tones, storytelling approaches (like say, explaining legal stuff in educational, playful, even humorous ways), and processes automatically make legal design a tool with an infinite potential, that still has not been completely explored.

Additionally, you can even add interactivity to your visual tools to bring in various degrees of reading or classifying complex legal information. Thus, complicated legal information and jargon no longer remains just a dour, static medium but instead becomes a completely interactive PDF, a website, or even an app! The usage of legal design is slowly becoming a game-changer for all types of companies, legal or non-legal.

Advantages of Legal Design

Legal Design is all about delivering law differently – according to the needs of the people a law or legislation is intended to serve – in a manner that’s more engaging, easier to understand, as well as more accessible for a larger population. The advantages of adopting legal design to the legal sector are manifold. Some of them are –

• Design-Thinking – As the term itself suggests, the field of legal design is where we apply the concept of “design-thinking” to the law. In other words, here we merge legal expertise with a design thinking approach by incorporating visualization, plain spoken language, simplicity, and smart use of technology. Adopting this approach gives us the bandwidth to substantially improve every aspect of the legal domain –from legal contracts, policies, and legal advice, right down to the workflows and complex organizational structures that lawyers usually operate in.
• User-centric – In layman terms, Legal Design means “making law user friendly”. The term “user” in the legal sector can be, for instance, somebody needing legal representation or else someone who wants to design a contract to formalize an agreement. These “users” can also be lawyers who just want to operate as efficiently and as effectively as they can while at the same time, delivering the best possible outcomes for their clients.
• “Humanifying” law – The very nature of Legal Design forces us to engage, empathize and sympathize with the “users” who use any form of legal services. It compels us to understand their needs and requirements, and then, design solutions around those specific requirements, thus creating tailored or customized legal solutions that actually work.
• Challenges existing Status Quos – The field of Legal Design is a very creative field where we actually dare to imagine what the future of law and the legal sector will actually look like. It intrinsically challenges the existing “conventional” and “handed down from centuries” ways of doing things. It shakes up “old school” thoughts and methodologies and challenges all existing processes.

To conclude, it can be safely said that Legal Design is a completely new and fresh approach to problem solving and innovation. It forces us to think creatively and come up with unheard-of products and services in the legal sector.

Legal Design has become a very valuable tool today to make legal information more acceptable and relevant in a society where all of us are increasingly pressed for time. As already mentioned above, Legal Design is not a replacement for current legal texts and documents. On the contrary, it is a methodology that creates a tool that complements the law and makes it easier to comprehend for the common man.