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Legal Design: New Opportunities for the Legal Information Sector?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2024

Emily Allbon
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Abstract

This article by Emily Allbon introduces readers to the discipline of legal design, offering an insight into its application, its methodology, and the contexts in which it appears. There is coverage of why legal design is so pivotal for ensuring access to the law and an exploration of where it is being used: in legal practice, in academia, in public legal education and in the courts. There is also a close look at one element; that of visual contracts, and some consideration of where the legal information profession might position itself.

Keywords

legal designlegal language
Type
Main Features
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 2024 , pp. 21 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians

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References

Footnotes

1 Allbon, Emily and Perry-Kessaris, Amanda Design in Legal Education. (Routledge, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Lawbore <https://lawbore.net/>

3 Learnmore <https://learnmore.lawbore.net/>

4 City Hub <https://city.lawbore.net/>

5 Future Lawyer <https://blog.lawbore.net/>

6 Events Calendar <https://events.lawbore.net/>

7 Allbon, Emily. ‘IT'S ALIVE! The birth of Lawbore and the Indispensability of the Law Librarian’. (2005) 5:4 LIM 211–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allbon, Emily. ‘From black and white to colour: Educating and engaging the screen addicts of 2011’. (2011) LIM 226–232CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allbon, Emily & Kaur, Sanmeet. ‘Legal skills: ensuring ‘appy students’ (2012) LIM 266–272CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allbon, Emily. ‘Too cool for (law) school? Using technology to engage students in legal skills’ (2013) 4:1 EJLTGoogle Scholar; Allbon, Emily. ‘Infiltrate and conquer: showing the world what librarians can do’ (2015) 15:4 LIM 218–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar;

8 Brunschwig C (2001) ‘Visualisierung von rechtsnormen’ in Fögen, et al. (eds) Legal Design, Zürcher Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte. Zurich: Schulthess Juristische Medien, vol. 45, p.1ff.

9 Brunschwig C (2014) ‘On visual law: Visual legal communication practices and their scholarly exploration’ in Schweihofer et al. (eds) Zeichen und Zauber des Rechts: Festschrift für Friedrich Lachmayer. Erich Bern, Switzerland: Editions Weblaw, pp.899–933

10 Hagan, Margaret. ‘A human-centred design approach to access to justice: generating new prototypes and hypotheses for intervention to make courts user-friendly’. (2018) 6:2 Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality. 202Google Scholar

11 Margaret Hagan, Law by Design <https://lawbydesign.co/legal-design/>

12 For more on the value of applying legal design to B2B contracts see: Passera, Stefania, Allbon, Emily & Haapio, Helena. ‘Contract transformation: merging drafting and design to meet the needs of human readers’ in Corrales Compagnucci, Marcelo, Haapio, Helena and Fenwick, Mark. Research Handbook on Contract Design. Elgar, 2022. 92–112

13 Ibid, 56

14 Haapio, Helena, Barton, Thomas D and Corrales Compagnucci, Marcelo. ‘Legal design for the common good: proactive legal care by design’ in Corrales Compagnucci, Marcelo, Haapio, Helena, Hagan, Margaret and Doherty, Michael in Legal Design: Integrating Business, Design and Legal Thinking with Technology, Elgar, 2021. 67

15 Pagano, Erika. ‘How legal design is shaping satisfaction, standards and substance in legal practice’ in Allbon, Emily & Perry-Kessaris, Amanda, Design in Legal Education. Routledge, 2022. 218–228CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Amurabi <https://amurabi.eu/en/>

17 Aclara <www.aclaradesign.nl/>

18 Dot <www.dot.legal/>

19 These include the ground-breaking Lakshmi Dhikta and Prakash Mani Sharma cases.

20 You can see the personas and 1 case explainer under ‘Resources’ on the Design the Law Nepal website, <https://nepal.lawbore.net/>

21 Leducate Consent Project, <https://tldr.legal/resource/the-leducate-project.html>

22 You can read an account of one of our workshops on this: Allbon, Emily and Warner, Rachel. ‘Taking our co-design workshop online’ in Allbon, Emily & Perry-Kessaris, Amanda. Design in Legal Education. Routledge, 2022

23 McKeever, Grainne and Royal-Dawson, Lucy. ‘Using human-centred design to break down barriers to legal participation’ in Allbon, Emily. & Perry-Kessaris, Amanda. Design in Legal Education. Routledge, 2022. 135–150

24 Hagan, Margaret. ‘A human-centred design approach to access to justice: generating new prototypes and hypotheses for intervention to make courts user-friendly’. (2018) 6:2 Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality. 199–239

25 Salter, Shannon and Thompson, Darin. ‘Public-Centred Civil Justice Redesign: A Case Study of the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal’ (2016–2017) Vol 3 McGill Journal of Dispute Resolution

26 NuLawLab Mission, <www.nulawlab.org/mission-history>

27 Toohey, Lisa, Moore, Monique and Rayment, Sara. ‘Teaching innovation in the age of technology: Educating lawyers for digital disruption using visually-orientated legal design principles’ in Allbon, Emily. & Perry-Kessaris, Amanda. Design in Legal Education. Routledge, 2022. 81–96

28 Levin, Joel R and Mayer, Richard E. ‘Understanding illustrations in text’ in Britton, Bruce K, Woodward, Arthur and Brinkley, Marilyn (eds) Learning from Textbooks. Routledge, 1993. 95–113Google Scholar

29 Haapio, Berger-Walliser H, Walliser, et al. (2012) ‘Time for a visual turn in contracting?’ Journal of Contract Management 49–57

30 Passera, Stefania. (2017), Beyond the wall of contract text – Visualizing contracts to foster understanding and collaboration within and across organizations. [Doctoral Thesis]. Aalto University School of Science.

31 WorldCC Design Pattern Library, <https://contract-design.worldcc.com/>

32 Love, Bruce. ‘Can contracts use pictures instead of words?’ (Financial Times, 23 October 2019), <www.ft.com/content/032ddcb0-e6b1-11e9-b8e0-026e07cbe5b4>

33 ‘Delivery diagram’ in the WorldCC Contract Design Pattern Library, <https://contract-design.worldcc.com/delivery-dia?>

34 Baasch Andersen, Camilla and de Rooy, Robert. ‘Employment agreements in comic book form – what a difference cartoons make…’ in Corrales Compagnucci, Marcelo, Haapio, Helena & Fenwick, Mark. Research Handbook on Contract Design. Elgar, 2022. 330

35 You can see the South African comic contract created for Clemengold at Creative Contracts, <https://creative-contracts.com/>

36 The Aurecon employment contract can be viewed in full at Comic Book Contracts <www.comicbookcontracts.com/aurecon-contract>

37 n34, 337

38 n34, 343

39 Design Council, The Double Diamond, <www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-resources/the-double-diamond/>

40 Hagan, Margaret. Law by design <https://lawbydesign.co/design-process/#1>

41 Allbon, Emily. & Perry-Kessaris, Amanda. Design in Legal Education. Routledge, 2022CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Design in Legal Education website, <https://designinlegaleducation.net/book-home.html>

43 Legal Design Podcast, <https://legaldesignpodcast.com/>

44 Lawyer's Design School, Legal Design IRL, https://www.youtube.com/@lawyersdesignschool

45 Tl;dr <https://tldr.legal/home.html>

46 Hagan, Margaret. Open Law Lab <www.openlawlab.com/>

47 Stanford Legal Design Lab <www.legaltechdesign.com/>

48 WorldCC Design Pattern Library <https://contract-design.worldcc.com/>

49 Allbon, Emily and Perry-Kessaris, Amanda. Design in Legal Education. Routledge, 2022

50 BAILII <www.bailii.org/>

51 Allbon, Emily and Sanmeet Kaur Dua, Elliott & Quinn's English Legal System. 21st ed. Pearson, 2020; Allbon, Emily and Sanmeet Kaur Dua. The Insider's Guide to Legal Skills. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2023; Allbon, Emily. Legal Research: a practitioner's handbook. 3rd ed. Wildy Simmonds & Hill Publishing, 2019