This past year taught us that business is anything but “as usual.” We’ve adapted to a more virtual world where customer centricity, convenience, and accessibility aren’t just top-of-mind—they’re key to satisfaction and, ultimately, business success. At Simmons & Simmons, we work closely with clients to achieve these goals by applying Legal Design, drawing on the skills of our lawyers and the designers, data scientists, and legal engineers at Simmons Wavelength.
So, what is Legal Design? Why should you embrace it? Most importantly, how can you harness the power of Legal Design to meet your goals? Our Legal Design team answers these questions and shares their three top tips for embracing Legal Design in 2021.
What is Legal Design?
Legal design transforms the way we create, deliver, and experience traditional legal information for the better. Another way to put it? It’s the application of human-centred design principles, or design thinking, to reimagine the way we write, illustrate, present, and use information to better communicate. Legal Design can help meet needs like:
- How might we make employee conduct handbooks more engaging?
- How might we give customers terms and conditions that are easy to understand and navigate?
- How might we enable our teams to collaborate better?
- How might we present and use data that drives more informed management decisions?
How does Legal Design work?
Legal design is a dynamic, multidisciplinary approach that keeps the end user—be it a consumer, internal stakeholder, or even a regulator—at the heart of the process. It involves fine-tuned listening, workshops, consumer testing, and creativity in an iterative journey that reshapes traditional legal work into something more understandable, navigable, and user-friendly.
Here are our top three tips for embarking on your Legal Design journey in 2021:
Tip 1: Write for your audience.
Legal information is often opaque, complex, and difficult to understand, especially if the end reader is someone with little to no legal background. This barrier is easily overcome with Legal Design, which helps us to reframe how we write. To start, consider your end user: are you writing for someone with a legal background, or an audience needing technical terms-of-art? How does the voice of the information reflect your brand? Is the output consumer-friendly? With these answers in mind, construct the type and tone of your message to meet these needs, and remember that “Plain English” doesn’t always mean boring. The right messaging inspires clarity, confidence, and customer satisfaction.
Tip 2: Be inclusive.
In the move to a more digital marketplace, we’ve witnessed a shift from physical catalogues to online shopping, from leather-bound photo albums to the cloud, and from paper to PDF. Think about the last time you struggled to read an important document or complete a time-sensitive form on your phone or tablet. Legal Design considers the real-world practicalities of how the end user will access, work with, or digest the information you create. It also takes into account users’ accessibility needs, such as incorporating colour contrasts to aid those with sighted differences, employing icons to accommodate diverse learning styles, and taking into consideration assistive technology like screen reading software.
Tip 3: Test for certainty.
Legal Design creates confidence in what you want to create, be it a key customer-facing document or a new tool for the business. In the Legal Design process, we run workshops (often called “consumer testing,” whether the consumer is an actual end user, such as an external customer, Board member, or colleague from the finance or legal team) to check what is and isn’t working, and to action opportunities for improvement. This iterative, flexible process leads to deeper understanding of the business and a more robust, future-proof, and valuable end product. Validation through Legal Design-led consumer testing also reduces waste and improves satisfaction. It can also boost profitability, brand strength, and relationships.
Legal Design is more than a trend. It’s a 360-degree approach to legal information that’s here to stay, and it’s already shaping the future of how we communicate, collaborate, and engage with others. It’s a fast lane to driving positive behaviour and improving relationships with end users by crafting information that inspires clarity, confidence, and action. Take the next step on your Legal Design journey by reaching out to our team today.
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