3 examples of Legal Design use in Legal Management

You are in the middle of a legal design project? You are curious to know more about the use cases of this method and would like to see how legal design is applied among your peers through examples?

You are on the right track. The first phase of user research and exploration consists of methodically questioning your internal customers about their needs and also of exploring what is being done in a similar or external field to meet the needs expressed.

We take you with us to discover three concrete examples of the use of legal design.

To your notes!

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Why exploration will lead you in the right direction

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Whether you're a fan or not, you've probably already watched an episode of House or Cold Case.

Take any of these two series. A case, a patient is submitted to the teams since no one manages or has managed to find the solution.

Teams led by Lily Rush (Cold Case) and Gregory House (Dr. House) gather in front of a whiteboard and explore the leads that led to this crime or that disease. They explore. Background, habits, records, entourage, problems etc, etc...

It is this exploration phase that allows them to structure their work and find the solution to the problem: the type of disease to better treat the patient, a series of leads to find the suspect and solve the case.

Gregory House, Lily Rush, you, us, designers, marketers, scientists, sales people: we all start by exploring instead of rushing headlong into the last step.

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🚩 Learn more about legal design: Understanding the legal design movement

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Legal Design applied to contracts

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Contract management is one of the most important processes in a company, if not the most important. Without contracts, there are no agreements, no orders and therefore no sales.

Depending on the structure of your company (SME/quoted/Scale-up), your field of activity and the regulations governing your sector of activity, your contractual stakes will necessarily be different.

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ℹ️ The following is a non-exhaustive list of the most common contract management needs.

• Free up time for legal teams and give them autonomy over contractualization
• Reduce the time spent in negotiation to accelerate the conversion cycle
• Centralize and pool contractual resources
• Optimize the follow-up of contractual deadlines
• Manage contractual activity with reliable indicators

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According to Stefania Passera, here are the problems encountered by the actors of contractualization.

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💭 Contract Writers:

• Our internal customers do not read and/or understand our contracts.
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• Our internal customers don't know the key points of the contract.
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• Our internal customers/contractors misinterpret the contract and make mistakes when it comes to implementation - leading to contract claims and disputes.
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• Employees regularly ask the same questions of the legal department.
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• The business teams are not involved in writing the purely business elements of the contract. Each one transmits the information that seems important to them, in their own way.

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💭 Contract Readers:

• The contract is too long, I will only be able to read it diagonally.
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• I need quick answers to my questions.
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• I don't know where to find the information I need for a contractual issue x, y or z.
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• I rarely find the information I need, and if I do, I often have trouble understanding the solution.
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• I don't understand which of these provisions apply to me.
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• Contracts are probably written by lawyers for lawyers anyway, so why should I read them? It's not addressed to me.
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• Contract negotiations are taking far too long and are jeopardizing the signing of the agreement.

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‍Here isan example of the use of Legal Design applied to contracts : Amurabi x Renault

Free up 2.5 hours per week for lawyers and give autonomy to sales people.

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"Our contracting process created a certain amount of pride that started a momentum of transformation and digitalization through legal design within Renault. We've gained 2.5 per lawyer per week."

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Impulse given by : Legal Department

Beneficiary users: Sales people

Need: Sales teams on the road are closing large deals but are not self-sufficient in conducting negotiations from start to finish, which regularly leads them to call the legal department at the last minute. "Salespeople were calling the Legal Department from their cars, minutes before negotiations, asking what arguments sounded legal - not knowing what clauses needed to be negotiated and what process to follow." Amurabi

Method:

• Immersive workshop to understand their daily life, their friction points, their challenges.
• Focus on their perception of the legal system, their negotiation practices
• Looking for the legal information they need to feel 100% fit for the idea of conducting a business negotiation?

Result:

• Modification of the static PDF into a responsive web page (Desktop, Mobile, Tablet), more adapted to their working habits (in the car)
• A global view through the first page to allow sales people to find benchmarks according to their situation
• Each step is associated with specific information responding to the needs expressed during the immersion/user research phase
• The information is short, synthetic, clear and interactive to answer their questions with reactivity

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🚩 Discover the use case in its entirety: Amurabi x Renault

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‍Are youexperiencing any of the contractual issues listed above?

‍Youare not alone. Tell us about your problem, your issues, let's talk about it!

It is often when we confront our challenges with an outside eye that we are able to find solutions in a collaborative manner.

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Legal Design applied to Compliance (Sapin II Law)

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Complying with the Sapin II law, the European Data Protection Regulation (RGPD) or with the latest recommendation of the ACPR regarding payment institutions and service providers can be sprawling projects.

A multiplicity of contact points, several stakeholders within the company, having to shake up certain established processes that have become part of the habits of employees, and above all, significant financial and reputational issues.

Let's take the example of the Sapin II law, it is based on 8 fundamentals

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How to establish an anti-corruption code of conduct through Legal Design? 

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Challenge : Nobody reads and consults process bibles of a hundred pages... Formalize and document the processes, the current or exceptional operations of a company while avoiding the "400 page Bible" effect that nobody consults.

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Solution:

1. Integrate excerpts from the code of conduct into appropriate work environments
2. Process documents are not necessarily Word and PDF documents and can be the subject of emailing campaigns or automated reminders triggered by the occurrence of a related event.

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Example 1: Your employees use a knowledge management tool for all their production, or collaborate on Google Suite, Microsoft Teams or a CRM. It can be useful to integrate the code of conduct excerpts on the tool they use all day long. 

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Example 2 : Participation in a call for tenders triggers the sending of an email campaign on the Do's and Don'ts of this type of operation.

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How to set up an alerting device thanks to Legal Design? 

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Challenge: Employees are afraid of reprisals despite the protection measures provided by law and prefer to share the secret only with their close professional and family circle (close colleagues, N+1, family).

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Solution: The law of March 21, 2022 now authorizes anonymous alerts (Monetary and Financial Code - Art. L. 634-2. )

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Example: Set up and communicate internally on the implementation of an anonymous alert system. A situational communication following the implementation of the system. Structural communications at the frequency that seems most appropriate to your structure.

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How to regularly evaluate ethical management practices through Legal Design? 

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Challenge: "I don't have time for these kinds of assessments."

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Solution:

Conduct asynchronous assessments. Set up a face-to-face meeting only if necessary.

Prepare and structure your evaluation grids and customize them according to the operations processed by each employee every semester.

Ask questions on topics that you find suspicious asynchronously, in video, audio, written. Impose a response format if necessary. Whatever the format, it must allow you to track the completion of this evaluation.

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Example: You can use video recording tools for asynchronous communication (Loom, VideoAsk) or just ask each of your collaborators for a recording.

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How to develop a risk map with Legal Design? 

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Challenge: After an audit by the French Anti-Corruption Agency, you are accused of having identified a risk that was realized in your mapping. You are accused of not having taken any action to prevent its occurrence.

Solution: Once you have mapped out your risks, you can bring them to life by defining the points of contact, the methods of communication, the interlocutors and the frequency that will allow you to prevent the occurrence of such risks. All this while obviously providing for the traceability of all these preventive actions in order to be able to demonstrate this to the regulator in the event of an inspection.

Example: Participation in a call for tenders triggers the sending of an emailing campaign on the Dos & Don'ts of this type of operation in terms of ethics and corruption.

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‍Are youexperiencing any of the contractual issues listed above?

‍Youare not alone. Tell us about your problem, your issues, let's talk about it!

It is often when we confront our challenges with an outside eye that we are able to find solutions in a collaborative manner.

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Legal Design applied to privacy policies

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Legal documents should not be written by lawyers for lawyers. Legal documents must be useful because of the issues they cover. They must be engaging and designed to be used by the people they affect, not their lawyers.

The EU shares this view and has materialized it since 2018 in the European Data Protection Regulation: Information about the processing of personal data must be provided "in a concise, transparent, understandable and easily accessible manner, in clear and simple terms".

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CNIL recommendations:

• CNIL recommends clearer language for the general public
• CNIL: How to inform people and ensure transparency?

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Legal Design integrating notably plain language, adopting this method will be the best way to comply with the RGPD to inform in a concise, transparent, understandable and easily accessible way , in clear and simple terms.

Two good examples are the privacy policy and the mandatory mentions.

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"No one reads the privacy policy, everyone accepts the disclaimers without reading them anyway..."

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Yes, but no. The general public is more and more aware of the issues related to their personal data. Working on its privacy policy and on the mandatory mentions on a sales funnel can directly impact the turnover and the image of some companies.

If you're in a digital platform company, it's essential to work with your marketing or product teams to measure the impact of your current privacy policy on your sign-up rate.

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Juro x Stefania Passera

Building a privacy policy people actually want to read.

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"We are fortunate to work every day with forward-looking legal teams. Designing a human-centric privacy policy is one very practical and concrete way these teams can build a better legal organization. Worst case, you comply with your regulatory obligations; best case you help build a world class legal organization." Juro

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Impulse given by : Juro

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Beneficiary users: Juro users

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Need: Privacy policies typically contain a lot of detail, but users want to understand what the key points are and what they mean to them. Meeting this need with a wall of text rarely works.

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Method:

• Step 1 : Identification of the problem
• Step 2: Transformation of the way they design this type of document
• Step 3: Choice of the design model
• Step 4: User testing
• Step 5: Iterations

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Result:

• Global view on essential information.
• You can click on the full policy to learn more.
• Layer approach: Conveying information in small, easy-to-read blocks rather than drowning the user with a mass of information on several pages.

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🚩 Check out Richard Mabey's feedback in its entirety: Building a privacy policy people actually want to read

🚩 Legal Design and ROI: What indicators and how to measure the added value of Legal Design?

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