Introducing: Legal Design Pakistan
Legal design is using design methods to make the law clearer and user-friendly. It blends law, design thinking, and technology to achieve this. By simplifying legal documents, streamlining tasks, and creating intuitive systems, it seeks to remove common hurdles people face when dealing with the law.
To understand the need for legal design better, let’s elaborate on the concepts of law and design.
The definition of law that has resonated with me the most has been the one by L. Fuller: “Law is the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules.” At its essence, the objective of any legal system is to ensure that humans subject their conduct to the dictated rules. A system fails when the human beings in question fail to understand the rules or find it extremely difficult to comply with the rules. In this case, enforcement becomes unfeasible, especially when there are a couple of hundred million humans.
Enter design, which is often confused with how things look when in fact, it is all about how things work. Law desperately needs a human-centric design to help humans regulate their conduct to the governance of rules and be able to comply. Of course, all non-compliance is not due to a lack of understanding of the law. A lot of it is deliberate. That is where enforcement comes in. But in my 15 years of practice as a lawyer, I have found that an overwhelming majority of people want to comply with the law. They just find it confusing, expensive, tedious, and time-consuming to do so. In many cases, they do not even know of the laws that exist for them to comply with.
Imagine a traffic light without the red, yellow, and green. Three plain white lights with a paragraph of dense text written on each. It’s written in a language you speak and understand, but you cannot make sense of this collection of words. A guy is standing next to it in an expensive suit who can tell you what it means, but you’ll have to pay up. This is a system designed to fail and would result in literal chaos.
The actual traffic light with the red, yellow, and green is probably one of the most successful and widely used cases of legal design in history. But that is where it stopped. The rest of the law is still hiding behind a dense wall of text, making it confusing, expensive, tedious, and time-consuming to understand and comply with.
Notice how Fuller’s definition of law does not talk about lawyers, judges, and courts? That is because they are merely instruments to achieve the main objective: to subject human conduct to the governance of rules. People across the world find their legal systems inefficient at varying degrees. It is time we reimagine these systems and redesign them to work for humans.
What about us lawyers? Inclusive legal systems that more people can understand, take ownership of, and participate in would result in more business for legal professionals. We need to focus on growing the size of the pie. Our slices would grow with it. Legal professionals whose business mainly relies on people not knowing or being able to understand the law need to reassess this view. It is far more rewarding to work with clients who have a general understanding of the law but need to engage a professional to help comply.
So here is the call to action: if you resonate with any of the above and are curious to learn more, join like-minded ones at Legal Design Pakistan. You don’t need to be a lawyer. You can be anyone interested in solving policy, governance, and compliance challenges using design.
Join the community by registering here: https://tally.so/r/mDpRNX
