Legal design services
Most legal documents are written by lawyers, for lawyers. This usually means a solid wall of text using language written to obscure, rather than clarify. While lawyers can understand it (usually), the magic incantations of traditional legalese makes the process take longer as they don’t make it easy to find or understand the messaging in the document.
Legal design tackles this head-on, by:
User research to understand the needs of the target audience.
Structuring the text to make it easy for readers to find the content they need.
Rewriting the text so non-lawyers (customers, business owners, decision-makers) understand what they’re signing up for
Using visual design to support navigation and help communicate timelines.
But is it still legally valid? Having worked with many lawyers on legal design projects, absolutely!
User research
The point of user research is to understand the needs of the target audience so that we can design around their needs. Not doing user research doesn’t mean we’re working blind; it just means that we’re relying on our baseline understanding of how to design effectively for people: things like accessibility, cognitive loading (i.e. ‘how much information are we throwing at people’?) and navigation. Let’s be clear: not every project benefits from detailed user research. Signs that a project will benefit include documents:
with multiple audiences, such as contracts with parts aimed at different groups
where the readers’ priorities are unclear
Research can take many forms, but most often involves user interviews, focus groups, and surveys. The most important part of good user research is defining your research goals, which in turn informs the questions you ask.
Structuring text
Taming legal documents demands that we move from the wall of text to something that makes sense, and a big part of that is structure. We want to help users to find what they’re looking for, so if we don’t know what that is, we go back to the ‘User research’ section! What we’re trying to do is organise information in the document to help people to find, understand, and remenber information more easily. This in turn helps lawyers to maintain and change documents: they can spend more time on the work itself rather than trying to find where to make changes or find where the change should be made. We do this by:
Prioritising information in the document based on the needs of the reader
Structuring and highlighting information, for instance using bold text, colour coding, and callout boxes
Understanding how people might be looking at our document, for instance
Trying to locate specific information
Starting with a general question like ‘What do I need to do?’ and then exploring to find answers
Not having a specific question, just meandering through the document for a general understanding
Rewriting text
Many of the problems with legal documents stem from the way in which they are written. This may stem from:
lawyers defaulting to ‘legal language’;
clauses being reused as-is; or
an existing document being tweaked.
When rewriting text, I’m looking to understand the key message, and communicate that in the most straightforward way possible. This might involve using lists, removing redundant text (‘includes but is not limited to’ is always one of my favourites, demonstrating as it does a lack of understanding of the word ‘includes’), and making the language closer to how people communicate.
Visual design
Visuals might include:
A timeline that illustrates a sequence of events and dependencies
Styling that helps the user identify different types of content or supports navigation through the document
Visuals are just part of the overall design, and the same criteria must be applied: is this change improving the user’s understanding? Visuals can enhance a good design, but cannot save a poor design!
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