What is legal design thinking
Design thinking has been successfully used for several years in many sectors, with the aim of innovating and enhancing services and products. So far, however, the legal sector has only made small use of the possibilities offered by this methodology.
The great disruption that the legal profession has experienced thanks to digitization, in addition to raising clients’ expectations and the competition between legal professionals, has also helped to break down the established barriers of innovation in this field.
In spite of the difficulty of giving an all-embracing definition of the term “Legal design”, being a discipline still in evolution, we can try to give a brief explanation in order to get into the subject: legal design consists of a holistic method approach that merges the skills of legal figures and graphic designers by sharing the matrices of thought and procedural schemes between design and legal issues.
This sharing is new in the legal market, despite the fact that in almost all other areas there have been very good results in using similar procedures in the relevant issues.
The design thinking
The reference method, generally known as “Design thinking”, is one of the most successful methods of innovation of our era.
The primary objective of this method is to develop solutions, which focus on the user and innovation aimed at a real need, analog or digital.
The new domain of thought in the legal market introduced by legal design is built from a systemic approach that puts at the center: the user, a product or a technical solution.
In order to develop a legal design thinking mindset, the legal professional must acquire a deep understanding of both present and future needs of his clients.
The objective of this subject is to improve the understanding of the context and the needs of those who interact with legal regulations and to create improvements and innovations based on these understandings. This implies a visual design that leads the user to the center, so that the experience is facilitated and the norm and the legal system are not perceived (as often happens) as an obstacle or impediment.
In this way, in addition to providing an imput of innovation to the legal system, the subject is alien to the rules and that is having to interact with them in a situation of being able to make better and more informed decisions, emancipated from the legal professional.
Benefits
Legal design thinking, in addition to being compatible with large areas of the legal industry, brings significant benefits, including facilitating multidisciplinary collaboration and idea development by making projects more quickly verifiable through faster user understanding.
In conclusion, we can include some concrete examples of application: the layout of a legal advice, the organizational structure of the legal service provider, the way the legal service is provided, the way the collaboration with clients is to be provided, the explanation of laws or the drafting of contracts in an easily understandable way, the digital or analog instrumentation used by the user.