What is a legal designer?  What does she do?

Check out this interview of Meera Sivanathan, Lead Legal Designer at Dottir Attorneys.  Here is her definition of “Legal Design”:

Legal design is the application of design-thinking principles to the practice of law, to make legal systems, products, services and processes more useful, useable, understandable and engaging for all.

Presently, contracts are mainly drafted by lawyers for lawyers, our court systems are not easily navigable, terms & conditions and privacy policies are incomprehensible for most consumers and company internal policies and legal obligations are often little understood by staff. This has resulted in a large disconnect between the law, lawyers, companies and the end users of legal information and services.

With legal design, we can change this through a human-centered approach in which the users’ needs, wants and desires are first identified and then used as a basis to design and develop solutions. The result is legal information and services that are transparent, accessible, visually clearer and as mentioned above, useable, understandable, useful and engaging. When applied in a strategic manner, legal design can improve performance, innovation, brand perception, audience engagement, conversion rates and many other metrics.    – Read the entire interview here.