We know that legal documents aren't always the most exciting to read, or the easiest to understand – and that legal processes can be clunky.

We are a multi-disciplinary team of lawyers, designers, research analysts and innovators at Taylor Wessing looking to change that, and make the law more human.

Why legal design?

Simpler documents and improved contracting processes help you in a number of ways.

Build customer trust and strengthen customer relationships – when your contracts and documents are clear and easy to understand, you build customer trust.

Save time and increase contractual turnover – clear contracts help you negotiate more efficiently, and focus on what matters. Spend less time fielding legal queries, and more time doing business.

Empower your team – lawyers aren't the only people dealing with the law. Enable your colleagues across the business you use your legal resources efficiently.

Simple changes can lead to massive improvements - we regularly revisit your key goals, and can implement bespoke metrics to measure the outcomes. For example, one project we worked on updating a clients website terms of service and privacy notices – we reduced the average reading level by 3-4 grade levels.

Brand Alignment – your legal documents should reflect you. Legal design is the best way align your stakeholders legal experience with their brand experience.

Legal design means a human-centred approach to law

What is legal design?

Legal design is about making your contracts / legal documents work for you and your stakeholders. It means we combine our legal expertise and design thinking experience to carefully balance legal, regulatory, and commercial issues.

It's not just making documents visually appealing. It's taking a more creative, human-centred approach to solving your legal problems.

It's understanding your people, how they use legal information and putting them at the heart of your solution. In legal design, we start with you and your stakeholders – for example, your customers, managers, business partners, or staff.

It's re-designing how we express legal concepts and requirements in more engaging, effective and accessible ways – so people can understand it and how to act on it and feel empowered.

How can we support you?

We create engaging and effective legal content, tailored to your needs – be that framework agreements, negotiation guides, privacy policies, influencer agreements, ABC compliance programmes or staff handbooks. We integrate technology, like contract automation, if it improves the output. Let us know your legal problem and we can work with you to design a solution centred on you and your clients – one that everyone can easily understand and engage with.

The Legal Design Lab "was one of the most collaborative things I've been part of during lockdown and I felt like I learnt a lot. It was also impressively seamless!"

Our services

Introduction to Legal Design

Introduction to the basics of legal design to upskill you and your team, including everyday tips and tricks, tailored to your industry.

Document or process (re)design

We work with you to improve a specific contract, policy document or process. Through our structured, collaborative approach we create more engaging, effective and accessible outputs that can help you thrive. Techniques may include plain language drafting, icons or design patterns, contract simplification and contract visualisation.

Legal Design Labs

We lead you through a series of interactive workshops to address a specific legal issue (for example, a contract, document or process you want to improve) with a multidisciplinary team. We work together to create a bespoke solution, upskilling your team in the process and providing take-home materials so you can build on the Labs' foundation independently.

I enjoyed the "interactivity of the session – everyone was engaged and contributing and there were a number of different tasks to help challenge thinking around the issues"

Case studies

Building consumer trust

We created Terms of Service and a Privacy Notice for a consumer-facing wellness app. It was important that individuals easily understood how the app's services worked and how their personal information would be used.

We used design tools like plain language, supporting graphics, and floating menus to help individuals navigate and understand these documents.

We also say how long it will take to read – a BEIS-commissioned study found that telling people how long it will take to read can increase opening rates up to 105%.

Supporting sales teams

Sales and customer-facing teams need to move quickly, and be able to implement creative campaign ideas. A long legal memo explaining direct marketing law requirements isn't appropriate.

We re-designed this advice into a graphic, 2-page quick reference guide so sales teams can quickly understand what the law means for them, and when they need to get legal involved.

The details

How much will it cost?

It depends on what you need done – but we're happy to work with you to find a price that fits.

Our focus is to deliver value and we often look to agree a fixed price at the start for transparency and certainty.

How long does it take?

This is driven by the size of the project – a document re-design may take just a bit longer than the strictly legal update, whereas the Legal Design Labs are a more collaborative programme that can run for 3 to 12+ weeks.

Our introduction to legal design can slot into your lunchbreak!

What do I have to do?

We'll need your help to properly define the issue, and your input along the way, but it's really up to you how involved you and your team want to be in the process. We find it works best if you have a few key stakeholders or champions supporting the project. We also love getting the wider stakeholders involved where possible, whether that’s your colleagues in other teams, or getting input from your own customers.

How can we measure improvements?

We have created a menu of quantitative and qualitative KPI options, ranging from readability to contracting speed.

We select and define which KPIs will be most meaningful for your project and your organisation, and use this to help you define the success of your project.