Legal Design and the Future of Law
Through its human-centered approach and its suitability to technological platforms, legal design efficiently responds to a changing world.
Legal design is a growing practice at the crossroads of design thinking, technology innovation, and legal empowerment.
By: Fatima Bazzi, Staff Member
The legal system’s opacity and the law’s inaccessibility to non-legal professionals are recurrent themes of concern in virtually every contemporary society. The legal system’s inaccessibility is regularly denounced as a serious impediment to the enforceability of equal justice for all.
This inaccessibility is polymorphous: it can take the form of insufficient funding for legal aid providers, lack of assistance to pro se litigants, the high cost of legal action, lack of awareness of civil rights and legal procedures, and difficulties accessing courthouses and police stations, among numerous other forms.
Even if all these issues were to be resolved, most citizens would still see the legal system as alien and would experience difficulties in accessing the justice system and assessing their legal rights. Why? Too often, the text of the law is intrinsically opaque. Legal jargon is difficult to understand and is sometimes unreadable to non-legal professionals. Legal terminology is often pejoratively referred to as “legalese” and contrasted with plain English. From a lay reader’s standpoint, the legal language can be perceived as a second language encumbered with idiosyncrasies, Latin idioms, and a rigid phraseology based on rules of formal logic.
On top of this inherent problem of complexity, citizens have to endure the modern phenomenon of “legislative inflation.” Also called “normative excess,” legislative inflation is the multiplication of legal norms and is considered one of the main reasons that contemporary public administrations malfunction.
Hence, two major factors make the law inaccessible: the inherent complexity of legal concepts and legislative inflation. To address these issues, we should look beyond the legal field and observe how similar issues have been resolved elsewhere. What we learn is that almost every time an academic field has been burdened by conceptual complexity or the proliferation of data, some kind of data visualization culture emerges and is applied to that field.
This is true of fields as distinct as statistics, architectural studies, computer science, and even journalism. All these fields have, to some degree, incorporated data visualization tools, producing charts, diagrams, tables, or graphs to better communicate information.
As a category, these efforts to visualize data are part of what is referred to as information design. Information design aims at clarifying communication by “presenting information in a way that makes it most accessible and easily understood by users.”
Legal design is information design applied to the legal field; in other words, it is a set of techniques that improve legal communication through the use of visual tools such as diagrams, charts, graphics, tables, or other illustrations.
Legal design is also more than that: it encompasses the design thinking approach as well. Legal design invites legal professionals to focus on the needs of the recipient of legal information while designing legal instruments or legal services, whether the recipient is a user, a business partner, or another legal professional. At the core of legal design lies the idea of developing processes that implement data visualization for the ultimate purpose of strengthening the relationship between the lawyer and her client.
Surprisingly, it was not until the last decade that legal design began to emerge and draw legal professionals’ attention. It is unclear who first formulated the concept of legal design, but the Stanford Legal Design Lab is certainly a pioneer in the field. Despite legal design’s relatively recent emergence, it is rising quickly and globally. For instance, the first international legal design summit was launched in 2016 in Helsinki and is attracting a larger audience in each subsequent year.
The legal design craze can be explained by legal design’s potential for addressing some of the global changes that affect the legal profession, such as the impact of technology on legal practice. Because of the internet, citizens have access to a large segment of legal information without the intermediary of a professional. The daily practice of lawyers has also changed since most legal work, including legal research, has moved online.
The technology issue can also be tied to another source of concern for lawyers: the rising competition from non-legal professionals. Indeed, one of the reasons for the rise of non-law firm competitors is the ability of these firms to “concentrate more on technology integration with clients.”
Globalization has also increased the problems of data management in the legal field. A large proportion of lawyers navigate documentation across many jurisdictions and have to cope with local, national, regional, and international regulations. The result is a proliferation of legal data that is not only a problem for users but is also a challenge to law firms in terms of data management and data processing.
To the issue of technology integration, along with the issues of data management, accessibility to law, and the rising non-law firm competitors, legal design can offer lasting solutions.
The implementation of legal design puts the user at the center of the solution because it focuses on how to better represent and communicate legal information to the user. Visualizing legal information makes it clearer and more engaging; it thus enhances the final products and services created by lawyers. It also helps demystify the aforementioned legal jargon which creates a relational barrier between the legal professional and the client. All of this enhances access to the legal system and to the law.
Because legal design relies heavily on visual representation, it is tech-friendly: for example, an image is much more easily communicated through digitized tools than by traditional linear legal text. Tech platforms, combined with the rapidity of internet transmission, thus become powerful vectors of communication of legally designed information and services. The alliance of legal design and tech tools seems natural and can only support better access to the law in a user-friendly way.
Finally, legal design, through its design thinking approach, tackles the challenges stemming from the constant changes in the needs of lawyers’ clients, an issue that is of increasing importance in our globalized world. Because the client is the starting point instead of the endpoint of legal design, legal professionals engaged in this practice have to monitor closely the evolution of their clients’ needs in order to be able to design solutions that are always suitable to their clients. This posture should help lawyers better position themselves in a competitive market.
Despite its modern accents, legal design simply builds off the age-old adage: a picture is worth a thousand words. Lawyers would do well to remember that, and legal design is here to help.
Fatima Bazzi is an LL.M. student at Columbia Law School and a Staff member of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. She graduated from both Panthéon-Sorbonne and Panthéon-Assas Law Schools (Paris, France) with a degree in Business Law. She co-founded the first association of legal design in France while she was a fourth-year law student in 2016.