Maurits Fourier is on a mission to make legal information compatible with modern business.
It's a mission that goes beyond plain language, to using visuals informed by user research to present legal information in a more usable way, through Legal Design.
Maurits started his career in Freshfields’ litigation practice – where, as a former graphic designer – he began using visual elements in litigation procedures.
In 2016 he founded Fornier Legal Design and now works entirely on legal design with in-house legal teams and law firms.
Maurits’ legal design studio uses beautiful and modern visuals to communicate legal information, offering us a glimpse into what the future of the legal industry might look like.
We spoke with Maurits in late 2019 and discussed the latest trends in legal design and the challenges faced by law firms and in-house teams.
What is Legal Design?
In essence Legal Design is the idea to bring a culture of design thinking, user research, and human-centered design methods into the world of law. It’s an idea that allows lawyers to deliver services and communicate information that are ultimately more usable, useful, and engaging.
As Maurits puts it:
“The idea isn’t that brilliant — you have to communicate information … it very simply is using visuals to improve the legal user experience for the lawyer, judge, customer, general counsel, regulator, and everybody who is an active player in the legal space.”
Why does this Matter?
The way legal information is traditionally communicated is no longer compatible with modern business and their employees.
“often we [Fornier Legal Design] get contacted by lawyers who are asked by their clients to work with us to help them communicate with each other”
Let’s repeat that: clients are seeking help to communicate with and understand their own lawyers. Take a moment to appreciate the level of disconnect that exists for a client to ask their firm to effectively hire a translator to turn the legal information they’re paying for into something that’s actually usable.
It’s a position that no law firm or in-house legal team wants to be in. To deliver continuing value and quality services to clients, lawyers need to be ahead of the curve.
The majority of Maurits’ engagements are on projects for in-house teams to improve the communication of legal information in various forms. The proportion of in-house legal design requests are increasing, and in this market, it is the client that is demanding change.
We believe this trend can be traced to a greater cultural shift in expectations of user experience. The world’s largest companies – now dominated by tech giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google – have conditioned us to expect information to be delivered in a user friendly way, where design excellence is the norm.
As a result modern companies and employees are expecting the same from legal information and are pushing for change, saying: “the way you are communicating with me is not working anymore.”
Legal Design in Action
Maurits shared two case studies to showcase the possibilities of legal design and what a human-centered legal communication looks.
1. Reimagine a binding term sheet.
Problem:
Venture capital investors are constantly negotiating and interpreting key information from contracts on a daily basis. Traditional term sheets are energy draining and time consuming to understand, but more importantly for VCs, they are not compatible with the founders of modern companies. This causes friction and delay at the term sheet stage, where timing can be critical. It affects the bottom line.
Legal Design Solution:
Maurits’ firm used legal design principles to reimagine a visual term sheet to provide a faster and simpler alternative to convey the same legal information, that fits the expectations and culture of modern startups. Though Maurits admits that from a risk perspective, it took the partners some time to get used to it, it serves as a great example of how far you can go with visual contracts as opposed to being just an additional visual explainer.
2. Employment Contracts of the Future
Problem:
Employees and employers want to be able to easily understand important details of their employment contracts by simply looking at it.
Legal Design Solution:
Using Legal Design principles employment contract can be redesigned to be intuitively understood by its users, the employer and employee. In Maurits’ view, employment contracts are often easy targets for legal design as they carry a lower risk for firms, whilst also promoting a culture to attract and retain talent.
Where to from here?
Are we communicating legal information in a way that’s compatible with modern businesses and employees? Do we as lawyers have the risk tolerance that allows for legal design to reach its full potential?
We asked Maurits what is the current mainstream view of legal design within the industry:
“I speak to a lot of lawyers and they always say “yeah its interesting, but its hard and expensive and I’m not comfortable with the tools” or “I like the idea but I’m basically too busy to innovate”, its like this cartoon with people pushing a cart with rectangular wheels … that is exactly how i feel lawyers are looking at this sometimes.”
Like in any industry, innovation and change takes time and resources, and always carries a degree of risk. But the broad cultural shifts towards visual communication and how people process information is not going to reverse. As legal professionals, we have a great opportunity to prepare and adapt to these changing expectations from our clients and community.
Thinking more about legal design is a good place to start.
To check out more of Maurits’ work visit Fornier Legal Design.
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