Legal design | delivering the law differently

Let’s introduce you to legal design.

Most people don’t read legal documents. The truth is that the documents are often too long or difficult to understand. And there’s the fact that we’re continuously experiencing information overload from various sources. Unjustly, this truth means that the law is inaccessible to many people. And this reality is bad because these documents often have severe consequences for people.

But what if lawyers delivered the law differently?

Most lawyers focus only on how they practise the law. But they forget about how they deliver the law. This is where legal design comes in. Legal design is about delivering the law differently. And, at Michalsons, we practise and deliver the law differently.

What does legal design look like?

Here’s a snapshot of how we’ve re-designed an employment contract so it’s less intimidating to the reader:

Legal design is about you

As you can see, legal design is about putting you at the centre of legal documents. It’s about considering how we can make documents easier to understand through simple language and engaging visual cues. But, essentially, it’s about making the law accessible to you.

When we think about legal design, we ask ourselves questions like these:

• How can we make privacy policies more engaging?
• How can we make a quick, easy, and accurate guide to follow when data breaches happen?
• How can we give customers terms that are easier to understand and navigate?
• How can we present and use data to help organisations make better governance decisions?
• How can we summarise laws, like POPIA, in one visual document?