Complex legal information
in a clear and user-friendly way

Contract design

Fundamentally, contracts are tools: structured communications that aim to reconcile the parties’ expectations. A tool should speed up your business, not block it or slow it down — but in the real world, not all contracts work so well. When your contracts aren’t user-friendly (badly structured, written in legalese), it can lead to one of two Pretty Bad Things:

1) miscommunication (if people misunderstand the contract)
2) un-communication (if they don’t read the contract at all, because it feels like an impossible task)

A contract that’s hard for one of the parties to read and understand is a risky one, because it’s likely that they will interpret it differently. Cue unmet expectations, disappointment, and before long, you may have a dispute.

Contract design prevents that by making these contracts easy to read and understand. When you create contracts with the user in mind, you stop seeing them as a tool written by lawyers for lawyers. It makes you rethink the contract from the actual user’s perspective: for example, a client who has to sign the contract, or salespeople who will be negotiating it.

Here are some of the brilliant ‘side effects’ of applying legal design to your contracts:

• shorter negotiation times
• better risk management
• reduced litigation risk
• better internal and external client relationships

Contract design can take many forms. For each case, the right choice will depend on things like the type of user or users, the communication channel, the level of contract automation, and the specific objectives you want to achieve.

We create easy to use templates in Microsoft Word that are fully customizable. We also make sure that our redesigned documents can easily integrate with your existing contract automation or other systems. 

Better contracts mean better business. Do you want to learn how to transform your contracts from a tool written by lawyers for lawyers to a business tool? Sign up for our contract design workshop and discover what this legal design thing really looks like. Contact us for more information: dominique.meert@thevisuallawyer.be.

Policy design

People often consider policies as a necessary evil for businesses. On top of that, a lot of policies are lengthy documents that aren’t well-written or structured, which makes them difficult to navigate, read and understand. But policies are useful, because they set clear guidelines on what is and isn’t appropriate. Legal design turns ordinary policies into well-written, visually appealing documents that are more likely to actually be read, understood and applied.

Litigation design

Litigation design brings clarity to complexity inside and outside the courtroom. It helps with a whole range of difficult tasks: like explaining how a lawsuit is proceeding; presenting a complex case to the Board of Directors; convincing the judge with a visual one-pager summarising your case; drafting plea notes in the form of a slide deck for an arbitration procedure; or explaining a landmark case in your client newsletter.

As a former litigator, Dominique loves to dive into complex legal proceedings. Her legal expertise and experience means she knows the drill. She can easily bring your content and context together in a visual form that provides immediate insights. It can be a single infographic, a slide deck or a timeline visualising the key events of a case — and there are many other options. Want to challenge her with a complex legal case? Bring it on. Contact her directly via dominique@thevisuallawyer.be.

Client communications

Client-centricity has become a hot topic over the past few years. But, how client-friendly are your documents? Legal design makes your business future-compatible by making it easier to deliver your messages in the digital world and giving your clients the experience they have come to expect: clear and modern documents that are easy to digest. It helps build transparency, trust and respect, because people appreciate your effort to make documents simple and clear for them.

Training design

Everyone’s talking about lifelong learning. The word on the street is that it’s something we all have to do — Dominique herself is a huge fan. Surely, then, learning needs to be effective and fun. Too bad that a lot of training is a waste of time and money. It seldom creates any impact. How many times do you look back at training materials and actually do something with them?

Legal design can help with this, as well. We turn your text-heavy decks into standout presentations that make learning easier and improve information retention. There’s plenty of academic research on the use of visuals in combination with text; long story short, if you’re looking for a great way to waste your time and money on training materials that people won’t care for or remember at all, just use text with no visuals.

Or, if you’d like people to actually learn, let us design the best learning experience for them, whether it’s training materials for online learning platforms, webinars, or face-to-face training courses.

Miscellaneous

We’re living in an era of information overload. People want their information to be digestible — so whoever communicates better, wins. Being human-centric, legal design simplifies legal content without making it simplistic. It bridges the gap between legal professionals and layman. 

Legal design makes your business future-compatible by making it easier to deliver your messages in the digital world and giving your clients the experience they have come to expect: clear and modern documents that are easy to digest.