A Brief History of Legal Design

After legal tech, NewLaw and NextLaw, the legal industry seem to have a new buzzword. At the same time, legal design is great news for all artists, creative people, legal rebels, law punks, no-tie lawyers, BigLaw refugees, social entrepreneurs, dreamers, visionaries, future leaders, founders and shapers.

Back in 1993, when I got my postgraduate law degree in Scotland, nobody had even heard about legal tech. Even Richard Susskind, who had just written his first book on his own expert system and was a guest at our jurisprudence class, had not found the words he later used in his books to explain the standardisation and automatisation of the legal industry.

Walking up and down the windy streets of Edinburgh, most people greeting me were from the music faculty where I spent much time in orchestras and choirs. In Old College, which was home to the law faculty, I had two favourite places: jurisprudence class and the computer lab. Thanks to the late Neil McCormick, I was actually allowed to combine all my three passions: music, tech and creating stuff.

One of my tasks was to put together what I learnt in public international law and squeeze it into a computer programme which I called “State 2000”. The user interface looks as funny to our modern eyes as does the plastic floppy disk on which the expert system was saved. At the end of the exercise, you had a question and answer machine allowing you to assess if a case would qualify to be brought to the International Court of Justice.

We have come a long way since then.

The idea of legal design was first brought to my attention by Felix Rackwitz, a lawyer who did an MBA and took design thinking courses at the HPI in Berlin. Felix shared a book recommendation which ignited my fire on applying design in the field of law, even if the book talks about business in general, its title is “The Design of Business - why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage” by Roger Martin; I still believe it’s a brilliant read for anyone who wants to create new ventures in the legal business. To be fair, today I have added to my top reading list Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown and Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential within Us All by the Kelley brothers (gratefiul to Michael Callier for recommending it).

It seemed I found my thing. Unlike traditional law school, legal design requires you to be an artist as well. As machines are getting better and better, you should also be able to talk to them. Of course a modern lawyer knows how to put content into a WordPress back end and may also be able at least read some computer code. If I can do it at 48, anyone can. Of course children should learn something like Ruby on Rails as their first nonhuman language. If Estonian youngsters can do it, your kids can do it too.

My personal journey took me to Amsterdam in February 2016 where I spent a wonderful week doing the Design Thinking Bootcamp in DT Academy. If you want to have a quiet time thinking about your life, become a pilgrim walking on the Way of St. James. If you want to do crazy things like selling DutchCoins to Arab refugees in a launderette, do the Bootcamp in Amsterdam.

There are great introductions into Legal Design. Margaret Hagan at Stanford offers excellent resources and thought leadership what can be achieved with what she calls first, second and third level legal design. Building on this, we started organising a Legal Design Challenge last summer. Professor Leo Staub of St Gallen University has kindly given support at lifting the Legal Design Challenge to the next level later this year. MC Academy of International Legal Studies in Brussels and Bahrain, the brainchild of my friend Adnan A Bayno, has made design thinking in the legal industry as one of its key areas of the legal innovation cluster, which I supervise.

We had a joyful trip with a bunch of colleagues from Xenion to Helsinki last November, which is home to a vivid game industry and some marvellous people who organised a Legal Design Summit (Antti Innanen, Johanna Rantanen, Pilvi Alopaeus). Tamay Schimang and Astrid Kohlmeier have summarized the highlights of this event. You find some pictures and key messages here. This is the end of my personal history intertwined with the rather short history of legal design up to now.

After this article was first published, we had a great conference in Munich on 21-22 June 2018. The world’s capital of beer was the stage of design.legal (https://design.legal). This conference with a mix of masterclass inputs and real hands-on doing together turned out to be unique and different from everything I’ve seen so far in San Francisco, New York, London or continental Europe. Thus it was not really surprising that the 2nd design.legal event took place in 2019. This time we were part of a tech & innovation conference in Bahrain, having the chance to co-design with colleagues from all over the Middle East. I look much forward to further community activites which are on the way including the next event in 2020. Let's keep on creating together. And drop me a line if you are interested in joining the design.legal movement.