21 May 2026
Law is meant to support action. It structures relationships, allocates risk, and helps businesses make decisions. But legal work does not always function that way in practice. Contracts can be difficult to navigate, advice can be hard to translate into next steps, and key points are not always clear to the people expected to act on them.
This is the challenge legal design seeks to address.
Legal design applies human-centered design principles to law. It asks how legal information is used, by whom, and for what purpose. Margaret Hagan at Stanford Law School has described legal design as the application of human-centered design to law, making legal systems and services more usable, understandable, and human. Margaret Hagan – Director (Program), Lecturer, Staff – Stanford Law School
The aim is not to simplify law for its own sake. It is to make legal work more effective in practice. Legal quality is not only a question of technical correctness. It is also a question of whether the output supports understanding, decision-making, and implementation.
For most businesses, legal documents are not used by lawyers alone. They are read by founders, management teams, HR, procurement, sales teams, and other operational stakeholders. A contract may be legally robust, but still fall short as a practical tool if its structure is unclear, its language too dense, or its key points difficult to identify.
Legal design addresses that gap. It may involve clearer drafting, better structure, visual overviews, improved process design, or presenting legal information in ways that make responsibilities and choices easier to understand.
One of the drivers behind legal design has been the ambition to make legal information more accessible beyond the legal function. It reflects the idea that legal understanding should not depend entirely on formal legal training. When legal content becomes easier to follow and use, more people can engage with it confidently and contribute more effectively to decision-making.
That has become increasingly relevant as organisations work with larger volumes of legal information and more complex internal processes. In that environment, clarity is not simply a matter of style. It is a practical requirement. Legal work creates the most value when it is not only correct, but usable.
AI forms part of that broader development. It can support how legal information is produced, reviewed, and accessed. But the underlying question remains the same: whether legal work is designed in a way that helps people understand what matters and act on it.
From that perspective, legal design is not a departure from legal rigour. It is one way of making legal rigour more effective.
It is also a conversation worth having: how legal work can become clearer, more usable, and better aligned with the way organisations actually operate.
Want to know more? Contact Cecilia Malmberg Flodén
