Making Legal Design a Thing — and an Academic Discipline
The notion of Legal Design has become more of a ‘thing’ over the past several years. But we still don’t know exactly what it could be. We know it can be a strategy for innovation — a set of mindsets and methods to use to figure out what’s wrong with a part of the legal system, and to devise new ways to improve it. But can it also be something more ambitious — an area of rigorous research and experiments, that have social impact and that generate a base of knowledge?
There are labs, programs, events, trainings, consultancies, and conferences focused on what legal design can do. Most of them focus on improving the legal system, developing new services and business models, and on training better professionals. But there is also huge potential for research and academic knowledge to be produced along with this very practical work.
Earlier this week a group of us working on legal design held a workshop at the JURIX conference in the Netherlands about what ‘legal design’ is and what kind of academic discipline it can be.
JURIX is a prominent legal tech conference, a terrific place for scholars working on law, technology, and innovation to come together to talk about best practices. We were excited to have a workshop there, organized by Arianna Rossi, Rossana Ducato, Helena Haapio, Monica Palmirani, and our Legal Design Lab team. The focus for us was on how to ground Legal Design work — that has emerged in a practical, applied way — as more of an academic discipline. That means having common research questions, ways of talking, instruments and protocols, and ongoing publications and conversations.
We had a call for papers that resulted in several meta-level papers about what kind of discipline we can create and what its purposes it might have. There was also a large number of papers with case studies — using methods to run and evaluate new design projects in the legal system, that can demonstrate what legal design research may look like in action.
One paper in particular was essential for this point of legal design’s development. Michael Doherty, a constitutional lawyer and senior lecturer at Lancashire Law School, wrote a very thoughtful piece about what kind of discipline we can shape legal design to be. If we are at a nascent stage in our community’s development, can we be intentional about what types of events, hierarchies, and community we build. We know there’s a lot wrong with academia (despite all the value it has) — so how can we build a discipline that avoids many of these dangers?
Another concern raised was that legal design, as more practical and creative than traditional legal theory work, might be dismissed as not academic enough. There needs to be more writing and networking work invested in building bridges into traditional legal disciplines — to see how our work can integrate into their research questions and feed into their conversations.
The goal here is not to pretend that legal design is a solitary, promising community. Rather than focus inwards, we need to have an integrative strategy. To make our discipline strong, our legal design community needs to partner with our close and well-developed neighbors in tribes of Law & Society, Empirical Legal Studies, Legal Informatics, Human-Computer Interaction, Research Through Design, Policy Design, and beyond. These partnerships will help us understand how our particular legal design focus can serve others work, and how we can borrow and build on their methodologies for our purposes of designing and evaluating new improvements to the legal system.
Specific case studies of legal design work, presented at the workshop, show how legal design research could develop as a particular field. Nora al-Haider presented a paper that documented her rapid prototyping approach to a new divorce solution — a bot that she built for people on Reddit relationship boards, talking about possible divorces, to supply them with correct handoffs to divorce legal aid in their jurisdiction. The project showed the design research — finding where people actually are expressing needs for legal help, understanding how to communicate with them, prototyping first versions of an intervention to gradually refine it, doing constant evaluation of it. It mixed this with a critical legal/policy lens — what is responsible, ethical, and legally correct to provide to someone in need?
This type of research can be in the vein of Human-Computer Interaction or Research Through Design academic work: building a new bot in a reflective way, using the creative and technical work to understand what is possible, what is desired, and what is legal/ethical. If we had more academic evaluation at early stages of new access to justice design work — as well as later on (after their launch) —we can establish stronger, more honest knowledge about what types of interventions best attract people to legal help and equip them with legal knowledge they can use.
Another paper in this vein was by Daniel Bernal and myself, that documents Daniel’s multi-year project to design better ways to get people who have just received an eviction notice to attend their eviction hearing. He has taught a series of classes in composition, design, and law to generate early stage new ideas to engage people in responding to their evictions — to make use of their legal rights.
In this series of design work, Daniel has produced academic knowledge through interviews, focus groups, online testing, and expert reviews of prototypes. This lab and online evaluation feeds into the agile prototyping process, leading to gradual refinement of the overall strategies as well as the particular interfaces and legal language. It also then builds to a solid working intervention, that can then be evaluated with a much larger, more rigorous, more controlled trial of a pilot program. This project demonstrates how a series of academic publications can emerge from a single, multi-year design/policy project. Each experiment not only helps the project advance, but it can also contribute to the community’s knowledge of how best to engage people in their legal protection, what the limits and advantages of technology are, and what policy or system changes may be needed.
Each of these stages of legal design work can produce their own kinds of knowledge. If we as legal design practitioners are more conscious of what kind of research and development we are doing, then we can better document and evaluate it. Most legal design work is around stage 2 and 3 — doing research into the status quo, mapping out personas and journeys, and creating early prototypes of better apps, communications, contracts, policies, and services. We need more academic capture and evaluation of this work in early stages — and we need more partnerships with researchers who can help us evaluate these early prototypes and pilots in the field, and over longer terms.
We concluded our workshop with a design/reflection session on what we can do next, to further our academic discipline. I drew some notes of the ideas that floated.
Hopefully the Legal Design Alliance can host and facilitate much of this work. If you are interested in doing this type of work — as a researcher who wants to study and evaluate new legal designs, or as a practitioner who is using design strategies to improve the legal system, (or as some hybrid like myself!) — please be in touch with LeDA or our Legal Design Lab.
We will likely hold some academic symposia soon. We want them to be different than the usual symposium though. They will be more interactive and more creative, using our design principles to intentionally create this better academic world.
