Legal design is a practice-oriented approach aimed to create efficient legal communication via verified text and design tools. Design thinking helps the lawyers to make documents not only correct but easy to understand. Due to its advantages, the approach becomes popular in business practice.
Briefly
Legal design approach strengthens communication in business. Document is a part of the interaction between parties, both b2b and b2c. In terms of precise interaction documents should be clear. Comprehensible content and plain language demonstrate explicit intention. In contrast, ornate and complicated text triggers the user’s anxiety.
Secondly, legal design denotes inclusion and availability. Too long and complicated documents confuse clients and trigger miscommunication. People facing dyslexia, eye diseases and language barriers cannot fully perceive the document. According to the legal design agency *Amurabi*, levels of user comprehension rises by 60% when perceiving the transformed document compared to the original.
Reasons to use
Primarily legal design is used to interact with non-lawyers due to its availability. The legal content is adapted for the target audience by means of the text improvement and design solutions. The approach is applied all over the world, companies focused on legal design are located in the USA, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Russia and other countries. Mostly, legal design is implied in creative industries due to the necessity to speak the same language with the users. For instance, Pinterest’s Terms of Service are as aesthetic as the Pinterest picture boards. In the best cases legal design highlights innovative features of the company, as Apple’s Privacy Policy.
It took me a long time to gather my thoughts to write this article. My name is Mirza Chiragov, I am the CEO of the “Dejured” LLC and I dream that we (lawyers) will become clearer to clients...
Why you need legal design?
Legal design is a practice-oriented approach aimed to create efficient legal communication via verified text and design tools. Design thinking helps the lawyers to make documents not only correct but easy to...
The approach was named as legal design by Dr. Colette R. Brunschwig in 2001. In her dissertation "Visualization of Legal Norms — Legal Design", the ways to visualize legal norms were explored.