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Legal design should be considered as the solution to problems of public and corporate law in complex transactions

Legal design is a method that helps professionals apply “design-thinking” to law. In this way, lawyers can increase comprehensibility of their services and empower their clients to may make better and smarter decisions while they combine their legal professions with a design thinking approach.

Usage of legal design method is mostly known as a public law problem solver such as patient rights, refugee rights considering disadvantaged persons in access to law. Also, legal design should be considered when it comes to corporate law matters, since the materials used are very complex and hard to understand, even if you are an experienced and handy counsel.

Let’s Start with a Merger Deal and List Everything We Do Peer-To-Peer as a Legal Counsel. 

When the offer has been accepted you need to dive into a huge due diligence process. After the reviews of the target company’s legal material, you will also need to prepare a legal opinion based upon all the gathered factual information. It is in our hands to make this step more human-centered by applying legal design thinking method. 

First thing we should do is understand the concept of the target company. Is the company or the deal subject to any authority permission or does the applicable law require any other application more than the usual? As lawyers, we should understand the concept of the deal and the companies subject to the deal to answer these questions. Legal design thinking method helps us break the deal to pieces before we dive into review of countless documents. After we feel totally confident with the concept, we can understand what our primary focus should be when we proceed with the steps leading to the deal.  

Contracts and Closing Documents, All Over the Place: Benefit from Legal Information Design.

A typical merger deal starts with a letter of intent, continues with a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and ends up with a due diligence report, share purchase agreement and other closing documents.The most comprehensive version of them is always needed, but how can we make those thousands of papers more human centered? We can benefit from information design, especially with the contracts and other legal documents. 

Information design is the practice of presenting information in a way that fosters an efficient and effective understanding of the information. You can benefit from a combination of images, texts and numbers or infographics, the possibilities are endless!

We should put ourselves into our clients’ shoes and ask ourselves, what questions need to be answered before we close the deal? We should be simple at the front and smart at the back while we answer that question and put everything that needs to be solved into our documents. The more we use visualization and plain language, the more our client improves their insights and understandings. 

Simplification of the legal outputs: how can we avoid the possibility of making a mistake?

The complexity of law is the most important problem, and the need of making it more human-centered is our starting point. That is why simplification is so important for us. However, it is very possible to cause them to lose their meaning while we simplify them because of the nature of legal texts. We should note that simplification is not just to erase words from legal texts, because the information to be given may be incorrectly expressed. Considering that our goal is to give our clients the most proper information in the most understandable form, we should avoid from vague statements. 

Using a plain language, brief sentences, and statements suitable for daily language can be very useful to make a legal text more human centered. Also, using “suitcase words” simplifies our job since we aim to say less but express more in this method. Specifying the last user and the target group is also important since you will have different types of clients during your whole professional life. The icons and QR codes will also be your life saver during your information design adventure.