Legal Design

What is legal design?

Legal design is about improving the experience of law.

By applying human-centered design principles, design thinking methods and innovative technology, legal design empowers people who interact with legal information with:

• better access;
• increased understanding; and
• the ability to make better decisions.

Legal design involves thinking about law differently, so we also work with clients to upskill legal professionals on innovative thinking, empathic legal practice and collaborative, creative, and culturally competent working.

Legal design joins together different disciplines, stakeholders, and market forces to deliver on three goals:

• Better communication
• Richer culture creation
• Information that empowers

Who are we?

We are lawyers, designers, educators, and technologists. We are the world's pioneering, client-facing, full-service, legal design team.

Our offering is unique. We work hand-in-hand with our Simmons colleagues to combine world-class legal expertise and design thinking know-how to generate tangible results.

In a world where inclusivity, accessibility, reputation, integrity, compliance, and service matter, you can count on your Simmons legal design team to lead tangible, measurable change for a better legal experience.

What can we do?

We think differently. We look at things in a different way. We create different outcomes.

Elevate your legal information

From documents to playbooks to procedures and policies, we improve our clients’ legal information by focusing on four key areas:

• The content: How can we make legal information more understandable and readable?
• The visual design: How we can make the presentation of legal information more engaging and dynamic?
• The usability of the information: How is the reader going to use this information, and how do we optimise it for that purpose?
• The accessibility of the information: How can we ensure that all the people who will need to access this information will be able to do so?

We’ve applied legal design to reinvent:

• Due diligence reporting → creating interactive, action-oriented summaries of mission-critical information.
• Court evidence presentations → applying data science and design to bring to life outcome-changing insights.
• Risk disclosure booklets → clearly explaining complex products at an appropriate level for the consumer.
• Complex project timelines → using design features to allow business and legal to communicate more clearly.
• Deal-closing bibles and shareholder agreements → streamlining stakeholders’ ability to more smoothly locate critical information.

Create a more collaborative culture

We have more than a decade of experience in designing and delivering training that upskill teams at global organisations, focusing on:

• How to apply legal design in practice
• How to be innovative in law
• Design thinking, ideation, iteration
• Effective teaming and collaboration
• Inclusive leadership
• Incorporating better D&I, accessibility, user-centricity, and stakeholder engagement

We create digital-first, audience-tailored, inclusive training that combines the substantive content required to satisfy regulatory requirements, while also applying psychology and science to meet neurodiversity and audience needs.

In tandem with our training, we can follow through with manuals and implementation strategy to ensure that the positive effects of our training have a lasting impact.

Test, measure and analyse improvements

We believe the best way to demonstrate the improvements that legal design can provide is through qualitative and quantitative research-based testing and analysis. We gauge the effectiveness of our work throughout the process to ensure we are meeting needs and achieving goals.

To do this, we employ workshops, surveys, interviews, and a set of 60+ subjective and objective tests, which provide measurements on how our work improves accessibility, comprehension, neurodiversity needs, and user satisfaction.

This testing and analysis provides our clients with demonstrable evidence of improvement, helping them comply with regulatory requirements relating to accessibility, vulnerable customer needs, and consumer understanding.

Work with multidisciplinary Simmons experts

We’re multi-disciplinary in every way, from our team makeup, to the technology, techniques, and tools we apply, to the way we work.

We always start by choosing the right people to be in the room to listen to you and understand you, your team, your working style, your needs, and your goals.

Not only can we apply our expertise in legal design, but we are also able to collaborate easily and effectively with experts in data science, legal engineering, legal operations and process automation, ensuring we can provide the best solution for our clients.

We can draw upon Simmons’ global network of more than 2,000 lawyers and over 20 offices around the world to ensure the right line-up for the tasks at hand.

Collaborate with a diverse, global, and socially conscious footprint

We have a physical presence in the firm’s UK and EU offices, but our work spans across the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and beyond. At Simmons, our team supports many internal initiatives, including the firm’s Neurodiversity and Gender networks, our ESG and Commerciality academies, and Cross-Border Groups. We also support the firm’s external partnerships, with a particular focus on education and socioeconomic equality.

You can trust our expertise

Our team includes some of the world’s longest-established legal design practitioners.

We have won numerous awards for our work:

• Shortlisted Best Client Innovation, The Lawyer Awards (2024)
• Legal Tech Trailblazer, LawTechUK (2021)
• Rising Star of the Year (The Lynne Freeman Award), WeAreTheCity (2021)
• Award for Teaching Excellence (legal design course), IE University (2021)
• “Highly Commended” for Rising Star of the Year, British Legal Awards (2019)

“I think it’s safe to say we could see the difference you all would make from our first meetings … You have been an inspiration to us, stuck with us, and reminded us to keep going even when it felt like it would be impossible to deliver on our vision. You were always there.”- Large financial institution client

We are thought leaders in legal design and innovation

We share our insights with others on a global stage at industry events, including:

• Keynote, Legal Design Summit (Helsinki, 2023)
• Keynote, World Legal Design and Innovation Summit (Berlin, 2022)
• Keynote, World Legal Innovation and Design Summit (2021)
• Workshop, NGB Fast Forward Future Proof Conference (2021)
• Panel, Legal Innovators Conference (2021)
• Keynote, Legal Tech Madrid (2022)
• Keynote, World Legal Innovation and Design Summit (Berlin 2021)
• Workshop, NGB Fast Forward Future Proof Conference (Amsterdam 2021)

We have also authored chapters in:

• Design and Visualisation in Legal Education: Access to the Law (2021)
• The LegalTech Book (2020)

We share our knowledge with the next generation of legal professionals

We regularly partner with leading universities to shape tomorrow’s industry and legal design leaders.

• IE University, Spain: Annual LLM and LLB courses on legal innovation.
• University College London: Developing a multi-disciplinary legal design hackathon with the UCL Art Futures initiative .
• University of Oxford: Mentoring for Law & Computer Science and leading legal design workshops.
• Swansea University, Wales: Multiple workshops on legal design.
• Guest lectures at: Harvard Law School, University College London, Science Po, Queen Mary University, The University of St. Gallen, University College Dublin, Miami Law, and more.

“Working with the Simmons Legal Design team puts a spring in my step!” - Large financial institution client