Virtual Court connecting Mobile Van: India stepping to Design Innovation in Law

Dated: November 19, 2020

                                                                                                                                                           - By Megha Bhatia

The crisis of COVID-19 has motivated us to re-think our ways and encouraged creative minds to come forward with solutions. One such example is MG Priyadarshini, Principal District Judge (Adilabad, Telangana), who launched ‘virtual court connecting mobile van’.

An example of legal design and frugal creativity in law, catalysing inclusiveness and accessibility in the legal field, is the effort to provide streamlined and efficient access to justice in the modern era.

Legal Design

By implementing design thinking methodologies in law to include user-centric solutions, legal design is a way of making legal resources more accessible, useful, and engaging. By transforming the legal vocabulary, conventional procedures, and overcoming legal problems, it focuses on incorporating a culture of creativity into legislation. As many can misunderstand, adding flavour to design does not mean rendering legal papers aesthetically appealing or colourful. Legal results may be improvised by using design strategy and procedures through placing the consumers at the centre of any product or service.

It is possible to categorise the application of legal design generally into socio-legal and commercial. Law students, academicians, laymen, policy makers and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are served through socio-legal application. It allows them to make sound legal decisions, and keeps them aware of the legal nitty-gritties conceptually.

As a commercial tool, it has the potential to automate legal processes such as designing mechanisms for document automation, digital contracts, simplification of contracts, etc., reducing the time for deliverables to be supplied.

Why Legal Design?

“Here is (one of) law’s dirty little secrets: you have already designed how you deliver legal services. Problem is, you, like most of us, did it poorly. And that’s because most of us didn’t do it intentionally. So most of our clients suffer through an accidentally mediocre user experience. And sadly it has taken decades for design thinking to infiltrate the business of law. But it is finally here”, said Marshall Lichty.

In order to meet the needs of the new competitive legal market, conventional legal practises are not adequate. Legal professionals and law firms are being forced to reconsider their market models with the advent of heavy automation and rapid progress of technology through artificial intelligence and blockchain.

Although we appreciate creativity, we fail to foresee the behavioural changes that the legal ecosystem will bring. By designing functional goods and services, legal design models and processes will help stakeholders respond to change. This will theoretically boost the stakeholders’ user experience.

“The language of the law should not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it”, Judge Learned Hand once said.

Accessibility and inclusivity are other issues with our profession. The use of jargon, layers of legislations, and procedural nuances has made law unavailable to laymen. As accessing legal service is time consuming, costly and unavailable, this has alienated the class of individuals who are in desperate need of justice. Legal design can be used to simplify laws for lay people and to increase the feasibility of legal solutions by reducing the time taken for legal proceedings to be completed.

Legal Design Goals

By designing solutions according to the needs of the people, legal design aims to strengthen the legal process. By simplifying the complicated legal terminology for efficient comprehension and communication, it encourages creativity in the field of law. It aims to recognise that access to justice is a virtue.

Legal design encourages cross-professional inclusion in the legal sector through the introduction of a multi-disciplinary approach by empowering lawyers to collaborate with technology experts, designers, and web developers to improvise the current legal service.

Who are they trying to help?

By knowing their needs and their pain points, legal design caters to a variety of stakeholders. It helps to develop user-related solutions for law firms, legal software firms and start-ups, independent legal professionals, law students and paralegals, law schools and professors, policy designers and policy makers, designers and graphic designers with user experience, legal aid groups, NGOs, and think tanks.

How could it help?

The legal profession is struggling with a rapid transition to technology-based legal systems in the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. By developing more user-friendly interfaces and user experience is one way in which legal design will help with the said change. People can also use Visual Law as a guide to make the procedure more seamless. Visual law is an intersection between law and visual design that can be transcended into projects such as designing client visual contracts, creating legal knowledge infographics, or making it easier to understand complex legal jargon.

Law firms will benefit widely from the implementation of legal design by updating conventional structures and rethinking the delivery of legal services. With end-users seeking better experiences, law firms understand the need to concentrate on providing tailor-made, customer-cantered legal solutions by gaining greater insight into the needs of their customers. As a matter of practise, customer service has remained one of the key goals of law firms. Legal design may be used as an instrument to create more imaginative ideas to achieve a better understanding of what the consumer wants.

One such example is ‘Whitespace Legal Collab’, a Baker McKenzie initiative. They also re-defined legal services by concentrating on multi-disciplinary cooperation and introduced a forum that would allow innovative problem-solving to flourish. This project brought researchers, designers, administrators, IT experts and lawyers together to prototype strategies at the intersection of policy, law and technology. With an emphasis on addressing increasingly complicated, multijurisdictional and law-related problems, this has also opened up new avenues and clients.

To remove the chain of repetitive work, legal technology applications and goods can be produced using technology. Legal goods, such as “Contract Express”, can also be interpreted as the consequence of the implementation of legislation that provides automated document production. It is complete programme for document automation which can create template agreements and simplify the process of drafting.

More advanced and tech-oriented technologies can be transformed into built-in software or applications using the design process, which can be created and purchased by law firms or professionals to enrich their core legal functions. When designing such goods, legal design methodologies can be considered.

Sometimes, due to the nature of the case, written submissions become extremely technical in commercial litigation matters. Imagine a situation in which our long written submissions can be re-designed in a simpler manner, promoting the judges' ease of readability. Otherwise it is taxing to understand industry-specific technical information for judges. This nuanced knowledge can be made simpler and easier to understand with the aid of legal design.

Amurabi, an international legal innovation firm, has done similar work. They analysed how judges handle written submissions by following a design framework and performing user study. The key pain points were that for every issue in the day, judges could not read 30-40 pages as it is not human to comprehend all of it in a short period. As a solution, by making visual improvements to facilitate reading and strategically improving key details, relevant arguments and exhibits, they re-designed the written submissions.

More law schools are finding value in incorporating legal design in their course structure with the initiation of the definition at Stanford. Law schools are building laboratories and promoting students through project-based learning to get trained in legal design. This increasing range of design-driven legal innovation initiatives includes the Stanford Legal Design Labthe NuLaw Lab of North-eastern Universitythe Chicago Kent Law Lab and the Access to Justice Lab of Harvard Law School.

Legal Design may also help legislators to re-think current laws and regulations and re-draft them. Government bodies in charge of policy making will benefit from the principles of legal design, depending on the policy formulation processes in each country.

Legal design has tremendous potential to better represent the ends of justice using new techniques and approaches with this large catalogue of ideas.


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