The digital transformation has introduced new concepts to the traditional market. The legal repertoire could not be left out of this, and so the current challenges, competition and the technological revolution have meant that new alternative management techniques have expanded beyond memorizing laws and court regulations.
As everything is so new, it’s common for the terms not yet to be consolidated and to generate doubts. Thus, people may wonder about the use of certain terms in this area.
It is in this context that Legal Design and, above all, Design Thinking and Visual Law come into play.
Design Thinking
Design Thinking is a methodology focused on organizing the creative process and generating solutions to problems. This tool can be used to find innovative solutions in any company.
This methodology is divided into several stages:
Although many people think that the word “design” is associated with “art” or “beauty”, the truth is that here the term is aimed at thinking of more creative solutions to problems that the market may have. The idea is to take as a basis the needs and obstacles that stand in the way of creating concepts and ideas that can, in an easier way, put an end to these “headaches”.
Design” then, more than beauty, proposes a new working culture to solve old problems. It’s basically looking with a more dynamic eye or seeing new paths from the perspective of the end consumer. In general, Design Thinking works in five phases: understanding the problem, compiling information, generating ideas, materializing ideals and, finally, validating them.
Legal Design
Legal Design is the application of Design Thinking in law, and focuses on helping the consumer market for legal services with one of the most consistent and constant problems presented: how to show law to people who are not lawyers?
It’s basically thinking “outside the box” in terms of “how do we show our work more easily to the market?”. In other words, Legal Design uses the application of principles and elements of design and user experience in the conception and elaboration of legal documents or products.
The concept can be applied to existing documents to improve them, or adopted in the design of a legal product or service. To do this, always take into account some essential points of user experience:
- Reduce the text of documents so that they are objective;
- Avoid words that are difficult to understand;
- Remove textual or visual pollution;
- Use iconography, colors, fonts, font sizes, think about the hierarchy of information and separate it as necessary;
- Try to use visual resources to highlight the meaning of the text or replace it (no resource should be used just because it is aesthetically appealing. The visual resource must serve a purpose.
Visual Law
Visual Law is a sub-area of Legal Design that aims to make law more understandable and clearer for the lay person, through visual elements such as videos, flowcharts, infographics, gamification, bullet points, storyboards, among other resources.
The aim is to transform legal information into something that anyone can understand, with the integration of videos and other visual elements.
