Changing how lawyers write: the game changer for legals ops success.

I was stoked to co-facilitate LexSolution’s very first No Bull Legal Ops Workshop this summer, with my partner-in-crime Manu Kanwar. The event brought together fifty Legal Operations professionals to discuss the pressing issues they?face: with a no-bull attitude and using our unique "design thinking workout" method.

The hot topic was the importance of legal content in making Legal Operations a?success. That’s right, the content that lawyers produce all day, every day: contracts, policies, briefings, risk assessments, advice.

At LexSolutions, we’ve achieved amazing results for our clients, simply by optimising their content: typically, reducing deal cycles by 50-80%.

The power of redesigning legal content has serious and tangible business benefits. Yet it remains undervalued and even ignored.

So, I co-authored this article to take a?deeper look into why a legal function’s content matters and how to make it work.

Legal Content: The Secret Sauce of Legal Operations

Why Content Gets Overlooked

When legal teams look to innovate and to solve operational problems, they tend to look to where the hype is: new tech, or AI, or the latest process optimisation fad. Most don’t realise just how much of a?problem (and an opportunity) is locked up in their content.

That’s because what lawyers write is, in general, dysfunctional: long-winded, ambiguous, full of archaisms, with poor readability scores. Lawyers are not trained to make their work product user-centric. Most people struggle to understand it?—?whether it’s a?lengthy contract template or a?wall of text in an?email.

Overlooking this dysfunction means missing out on a?big opportunity to streamline processes and improve efficiency. Because bad content creates process issues, while good content solves them.

The Ripple Effect of Poor Legal Content

Dysfunctional content drastically slows down legal processes, and even leads to process problems that would otherwise not?exist:

• Long complex agreements lead to internal misalignments and more negotiation rounds and can take months or years to?sign.
• When the business doesn’t understand legal documents, they are over-reliant on the legal team which creates bottlenecks.

• Complex, poorly structured contracts require extra effort to automate.

• Lawyers produce mostly unstructured content which is hard to extract, analyse and?track.

If your business isn’t engaging with the content your in-house legal team produces (a common complaint from in-house legal teams!), it means the content is irrelevant, unclear, or boring. Legal content should be clear and user-centric and should align with business goals. Good legal content bridges the gap between legal and business, making everything run smoother.

The Role of Legal Design in Content

Misconceptions About Legal Design

There are two kinds of lawyers: those who understand legal design and those who don’t. Those who understand it know how fundamental it is to delivering a?better service to the business.

Legal design is not about making things look pretty; it’s about clarity, functionality and user experience.

It’s also not about dumbing down. A?good design project can reduce the length of a?contract by typically 50% whilst keeping all of the legal and commercial protections.

Legal design makes content more effective. By communicating more clearly and simply, legal teams can achieve outcomes with fewer process steps, and align better with business objectives. Well-designed legal documents can speed up internal approvals, reduce misunderstandings, eliminate negotiations, increase compliance and cut?costs.

At LexSolutions we addressed many such objectives when we worked with a?global media and hospitality business to redesign a?complex franchise agreement. We simplified it and rewrote it in plain language to reduce negotiations and eliminate the need for external negotiation support. The outcome? We reduced projected time to contract from 6?months to 2?months and cut external legal fees to zero?—?while saving nearly 600?hours of human resource time!

What Is The Content, And What Can You?Fix?

Whenever a?legal team tackles a?problem, there’s content underneath the problem.

The type of content depends on the problem. It might be a?contract, a?playbook, a?compliance policy, an intranet, an unstructured intake process, or even the emails the lawyers send. It might be the templates and advice that you get from your law firm, which need to be translated for the business every time! At LexSolutions we’ve seen huge opportunities to improve content across these formats and channels.

The key is?to:

1. Diagnose the problem?—?especially your objectives, who your users are, what their needs are, and what’s going wrong.

2. Understand the impact the content has on the problem.

3. Identify what can be clarified, simplified, rewritten in plain language, visualised and restructured?—?to eliminate the negative impacts and enhance the positive ones.

4. Apply a?design process to develop and implement your findings?—?and get help if it’s your first?time!

We applied this approach when working with a?sustainability company to make it easier to get to “yes” with their MNC customers. We mapped both sides’ objectives and built the contract around those, and then designed and wrote a?fresh and practical document using plain language and visual navigation aids. The outcome? Reduced deal times by 50% on average, and in some cases by?80%.

But Doesn’t Automation And AI Solve It All Anyway?

For a start, good structured content is essential for making AI work. I believe that human-centred content design will become a?critical tool for legal teams to stay relevant and to make their AI tools really work.

Content is just as relevant at the more mundane end of document automation. Before introducing any legal technology, you must sort out your content. Technology can’t fix content; it can only scale what you have. So you can either scale bad documents and processes, or scale good?ones.

It remains a frequent mistake for legal teams to rush into automating, without taking the time to truly redesign (not just rationalise) their template set. The result is a lost opportunity at best, failure of adoption at worst. The correct way, is to redesign for automation (at least) and hopefully redesign for business outcomes too.

When exploring tech, look for tools that help you do things in new and exciting ways. Majoto is a?unique document automation platform that is made for creating and automating designed contracts. Juralio is an exciting tool for planning and collaborating on legal work. Miro is a?fantastic "infinite canvas" whiteboard tool that frees your mind from the prison of the A4 sheet. Flank builds AI agents for resolving common queries from commercial?teams. Very different products, very different use cases, one thing in common: bringing an exciting and different way of solving stubborn problems.

The No Bull Takeaway: The Future Is User-Centric

To stay ahead, legal teams should continuously improve the relevance and clarity of their legal content. Focus on user needs, simplify, embrace new technologies, ensure they serve the users first and foremost.

Think of legal content as a?dynamic business tool. It needs to be relevant. That means efficient, user-friendly, capable of achieving business outcomes and future-proof.

If the content isn’t relevant, neither is the legal?team.

If you need to work with a?team of legal design enthusiasts who specialise in creating content that your business loves, reach out to me, Manu Kanwar , or Jo Gustafsson ! And stay tuned for more insights and practical tips in our new publication, the No Bull-etin (geddit). https://rebrand.ly/NoBull