Contract Design Systems

Introducing Contract Design Systems

By Andrew Stokes, CEO The Law Machine

If you’ve helped build a website or an app, you’ve probably heard of design systems.

Digital product designers use design systems to create products faster and more consistently across teams.

It might seem like that digital product design has nothing to do with drafting contracts, but design systems are of real interest to lawyers who write contracts. They have the potential to really improve the ways that lawyers work.

What are Design Systems and why were they invented ?

You can think of design systems as :

• an organized set of bricks to build products with; plus
• some design guidelines and practices to keep the aesthetics and function of the products consistent.

Web and app user interfaces have become very complex. The old way of designing websites - page by page - used to work when they were more static, but now user interfaces change very quickly. Without better organization, chaos sets in rapidly.

To stop the chaos, designers now curate the bricks making up user interfaces (colors, typefaces, spacings, buttons, forms, menus etc) into pattern libraries. Standards and statements of principle and practice complete those pattern libraries to define the vision and spirit of the design system.

Designers can then use the pattern libraries as a single source of aesthetic and functional truth for their creations, applying the guidelines and practices to keep faith with the system.

Organizing Design Systems

Atomic Design Diagram - Brad Foster, Atomic Design.

Atomic design, an influential book by Brad Foster, uses chemistry to give us a great way of organizing the bricks of a design systems. The simplest (atomic) elements of a user interface (like a typeface) are thought of as atoms, whilst more complex collections of elements are thought of successively as molecules, organisms, templates and pages, each building on elements lower down in the sequence. Together these categories describe a cohesive hierarchy of modular elements that fit and work together. Like atoms and molecules in chemistry.

This trick is widely used in UI design to organize design assets in a way that encourages modularity. It also prevents designers reinventing the wheel, because if an existing module does the job, you reuse it and save time.

Real World Advantages

Design systems are particularly good for agile product development. They allow multifunctional teams working in sprints to make products that are ‘joined up’ and work together in tone, aesthetics and functions.

One of the biggest benefits of using a design system is speed. You reuse bricks that already exist.

Design systems are not a product themselves, but more of an alphabet and some words, plus a set of principles about how to write, in the grammar of a particular language.

They are deeply connected to the products that are built from them, and they evolve with the needs of the products an organization makes. It’s not just designers that make use of them but product managers, developers and customer success managers too – anyone who needs a common language for expressing what needs to be made or improved.

Why Contract Design Systems ?

Lawyers have several points in common with digital product designers:

• They need to work fast
• Their deliverables (contracts) are becoming longer and more complex
• Lawyers often reuse know how assets (contract parts) they’ve made before.
• Those assets are often very poorly organized - hidden in old drafts on servers or in emails.

By creating and using design systems of legal content – legal components as well as statements of practice - the process of drafting contracts can be accelerated and made more consistent.

In other words contract design systems should benefit contracting the same way that design systems have benefitted digital product design.

After all, a contract is just another product that you can build more or less beautifully or efficiently. Increasingly the principles of user centric design are being applied to the content and presentation of contracts (this is one aspect of legal design). There's no reason why you shouldn’t apply product design principles to the way that the contracts themselves are built.

These are all reasons why we’ve put the idea of design systems at the center of The Law Machine.

Making Design Systems Work For Contracting

The Law Machine provides a collaborative design system framework that lets our users create and curate the legal components that they need for their contracts.

At the bottom of our hierarchy - the atoms and molecules - we have

• Variables (atoms),
• Definitions (molecules); and
• Clauses (molecules).

These components are collected together in a library that you can use to create automated templates.

The templates are two steps up the design system hierarchy. They're really simple because they only need to :

• Specify which clauses appear in the contract and when, (using clause directives - organisms) ; and
• Provide placeholders for objects like definitions tables, diagrams or other media (organisms again);

That combination of modularity and simplicity means that we’ve been able to make clause directives and templates drag and drop, which is a huge time saver.

With our framework your design system becomes a simple but powerful document automation tool. You go straight from the drag and drop picture to the automated template. The framework does the automation for you, users pick a template, a questionnaire is generated automatically, and a contract can be generated.

Above all it’s quick – we’ve found three times faster than drafting manually. That means you never have to consider whether it’s worth automating a document. Even if you only want to use a contract once, you get to a first draft quicker by automating.

Open source is the future of legal content

A common feature of the publicly available UI design systems and pattern libraries is that they are open source. Anyone can use and adapt them – this and the open source movement generally have enabled and accelerated countless projects building websites or applications globally.

There is an emerging open source movement in contracting, evidenced by Claustack’s oneNDA and oneDPA, and also Bonterms’ cloud services agreement. We believe that open source is the future for legal content, so we have also put that capability at the center of our design system framework.

The Law Machine allows you to import and export contract design systems from an online hub. That means that you don’t have to start from scratch when you make your own design system. You can ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ and build your bespoke content on top of existing content - a bit like using open source software from GitHub.

We want to lead the way with this, so we are working on our own open source contract design system. Anyone will be able to use it via The Law Machine platform, meaning that our users will be able to use it straight out of the box, and to extend it to create their own automated contract design systems.

We hope it will change the way that many contracts are drafted for the better.

If you want to know more about UI Design Systems…

There are a number of excellent examples.

Google’s Material Design and IBM’s Carbon Design System are both influential.

Figma is a good example of a collaborative design tool that is well suited to create and share the graphical aspects of a design system between cross-disciplinary teams of (say) product owners, designers and developers who are all working on developing different aspect of a product. Figma is amazing – it’s the design tool of choice at The Law Machine.

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