Law is not solely about litigation, contracts or lengthy court judgements anymore. The industry of law has evolved over the years and become receptive to more innovative and unconventional roles that can make it more efficient and approachable to the end consumer.
One such emerging sub-field is the field of ‘legal design’, formed with the amalgamation of law and design thinking. While the concept isn’t new, its applicability sure is. In this post, we probe into the concept of legal design and break down what legal design really is and where/how it is actually applicable.
Contents
What is Legal Design?
Legal design is a method of creating a more customer-centric and creative way of delivering legal information and services. The process involves using different design techniques to innovate how a lawyer, law firm, or company extends legal products, services and advice to their clients.
Legal design allows lawyers to serve their clients better through more creative and personalised legal solutions. The focus is on creating solutions that are customer-centric and more receptive to the client’s requirements.
The design thinking aspect helps lawyers reimagine how the services they provide are actually going to be used or consumed by their clients. Applying the principles of legal design, lawyers can inculcate practices that go beyond the traditional drafting and reframe complicated processes to suit the client’s needs, usage, and expectations.
The holy union of design, law and technology is critical in more than one way. The three fields work on solving the most critical problems for their users individually as well as collectively.
The result is more customised and expeditious information delivery to clients who do not wish to indulge in legal jargons and palaver.
Lawyers who adopt the mindset of legal designers can combine their legal prowess with innovation to improve what they offer. They can do this as legal design also supplements their research, allowing them to extend accurate services without deflecting from the client’s requirements.
Cornerstones of Legal Design
The basic elements that make legal design a revolutionary springboard for innovation in law are:
Client-Centric Process
As a user-centric process, legal designing emphasises putting lawyers into the shoes of their clients. By doing this, they can view their processes, services and documents from a layperson’s perspective. The process helps as the lawyers are now also able to decode what the client can and cannot understand. This way, they can recreate their offerings in a way that is more satisfactory and understandable.
Diversity of Solutions
Design is nothing without diverse and creative elements. The same goes for legal designers as they also need to create disparate legal solutions as per the unique requirements of their clients. For this, they need to harness their expertise, past experiences and wit to intermingle the elements of design with the law without changing the essence of the legal process.
Render, Revise, Repeat
Designers understand that a client will definitely want changes in the prototype multiple times before the end result comes even an inch close to finalisation. Similarly, legal designers also need to remember that the victory lies in creating, revising and repeating the cycle until the client approves the legal offering once and for all.
Why is Legal Design Needed
The integration of design ideologies into the legal profession is a result of various elements that push for the legal industry to change with the times. With a tectonic shift in technology and the birth of ‘legal technology’, lawyers also need to change the way they deliver services to their clients.
Here are some of the reasons why legal designing is the call of the hour for lawyers:
Faster Decision Making
Clients now look for services that can help them make decisions faster and more accurately. The arduous 100-page judgments and never-ending contracts are becoming undesirable. What lawyers need is to compress this information into more comprehensible charts, infographics and guides. This condensed information can help clients and in-house legal teams to make accelerated business decisions on the basis of the legal information.
Higher Client Satisfaction
Retaining clients directly depends on how satisfactorily the lawyer is able to serve them. By coming up with complex answers and long-drawn-out contracts, lawyers may end up driving their customers away. Contrarily, legal design at its core is a client-centric process. Lawyers need to incorporate design to create clearer and more summarised legal solutions.
Cost Efficiency with Legal Design
Drafting lengthy documents means exhausting those precious billable hours. This means that the process is not only costly for the client but also costs lawyers by taking up more time. Legal design fine-tunes this process by reducing the time it takes for lawyers to deliver their services.
Better Legal Products and Services
To attract new clients, be it a legal company, law firm or lawyer, needs new ideas and develop more viable legal products and services. Legal designers identify the areas of service where new offerings can be created. They can create more tailor-fit legal products for customers that may or may not be fuelled by technology.
In short, legal designing allows lawyers to find more creative solutions for their client’s problems. It also allows them to interact with their clients more compellingly and engagingly. Further, it is a new career path for lawyers that do not wish to bind themselves down to courtrooms and law firms.
Areas of Legal Designing
Now that we’ve understood what legal designing is, let’s dive into the areas where lawyers can apply it to make their offerings more customer-focused.
Visual Legal Design
Lawyers can use visual graphic tools to present legal information to their audience in a more understandable way. This kind of design thinking focuses on how the information is delivered and looks. It centres around the aesthetic value and message of the information to ensure that the audience receives it well. For instance, the use of diagrams and presentations for explaining legal concepts and legal marketing.
Product Design
This branch of design includes developing tools and legal products to help lawyers, companies and individual clients accomplish their tasks more efficiently. Product design also focuses on creating solutions that can lead to better problem resolution. It includes developing practice management tools for lawyers, digital platforms for the masses to access legal services, smart contract tools for enterprises, etc.
Legal Service Design
This segment of design and innovation involves designing services that enhance the user’s experience. It also focuses on retaining the client’s attention to the services and attracting a new client base. For instance, client support services for lawyers, checklist-based privacy terms, etc.
Organisation Design
This branch emphasises developing legal solutions that can help legal teams collaborate better. Lawyer practice management software is a great example of this. It focuses on simplifying legal practice for lawyers, allowing them to optimise their internal processes and synchronise their goals. Organisation design can also include the creation of new internal policies and manuals for training new team members.
System Design
While legal design can work wonders even when applied unevenly by legal professionals, the real change can happen only with a more concrete and universal change. System design focuses on just that. it prioritises the creation of new processes for courts, law colleges and the entire legal system as a whole.
In Summary
The majority perceives lawyers to be resilient to change and innovation. On the contrary, lawyers are some of the most intellectually inquisitive professionals. They can come up with highly efficacious arguments and solutions with out of the box thinking. However, legal matters move at a lightning speed, leaving lawyers with little time to be creative.
The solution lies in the problem – designing better legal solutions to go the extra mile without losing time. As a user-centred practice, legal design is thus, the tool to communicate relevant legal information, processes and solutions effectively. Fostering this creativity in law can work wonders, the only necessity is for the legal fraternity to open itself to change.
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