Legal Design
Human-centered, visual, multisensory law
What if the law could be shown, not just written?
The term “legal design” goes back to Swiss legal scholar Colette R. Brunschwig. Her 2001 doctoral thesis at the University of Zurich, Visualisierung von Rechtsnormen: Legal Design (Visualizing Legal Norms), asked a question few lawyers had asked: what if the law could be shown, not just written? Brunschwig went on to lead a legal visualization unit at Zurich and helped found the wider fields of visual and multisensory law, exploring how images, sound, and other senses can help people grasp what the law means for them. Her early work laid the foundation for much of what followed.
“Humans are multisensory beings and live in a multisensory world. Human communication involves the production and perception of messages, as well as the five senses (hearing, vision, touch, taste, and smell). Multimodal or multisensory systems are capable of receiving and sending information by using various sensory channels involving vision, hearing, and movement, but preferably all five senses.”
— Colette Brunschwig, University of Zurich, Department of Law, Centre for Legal History, Legal Visualization Unit
So, how can law be multisensory? It is Colette Brunschwig’s mission to propose answers to that question. See, for example, Law Is Not or Must Not Be Just Verbal and Visual in the 21st Century: Toward Multisensory Law (see page 231 of the downloaded document).
Visual communcation and access
Even before the term took hold, Dutch lawyer and teacher Susanne van der Meer (who published as Susanne Hoogwater) was showing lawyers what visual communication could do. Drawing on her work as an attorney, in-house counsel, and educator, she wrote Beeldtaal voor juristen (Visual Language for Lawyers) in the 1990s. The book starts from a simple truth: the law is for everyone, but not everyone can get to it, and lawyers have a responsibility to close that gap. It shows how graphic models can make legal information accessible and practical for others, and points out that drawing a diagram also helps lawyers themselves think through what they know. With more than thirty visual diagrams and a step-by-step method for making their own, it gave lawyers a hands-on way to start. She continued this work through her practice, Legal Visuals, advising on accessible legal information and the value of visual communication in law.
Legal design takes the tools of human -centered design
Legal design takes the tools of human-centered design, the same thinking that shapes great apps and products, and applies them to law. Most legal tools weren’t built with the user in mind. They were built by lawyers, for lawyers, in language only lawyers love. Legal design flips that. It starts with how people actually experience the law, whether that’s a tenant reading a lease, a business owner trying to understand a contract, or a lawyer trying to serve a client well, and works backward to a better solution. The aim is not to water down the law but to make it work. A well-designed contract is still rigorous and enforceable, and it can also be read and understood. A well-designed legal process can feel like a path forward instead of a maze.
Designing the structure people live inside
One helpful way to see it: law isn’t just a set of abstract rules. It’s infrastructure that people live inside, like the roads and bridges they travel every day. When a bridge is badly built, we don’t blame the drivers. Legal design recognizes that many legal problems come from poorly designed documents and processes, not bad intentions, and it works to fix the structure. It uses plain language, clear visual layouts, and layered information that gives people the essentials first and the details when they need them. It also aims to prevent problems, smoothing out friction before it turns into a dispute. And it draws on many fields, including design thinking, psychology, behavioral science, and systems theory.
How the field grew
The field grew rapidly in the 2010s. Margaret Hagan founded the Legal Design Lab at Stanford in 2013, bringing together the law school and Stanford’s design school, and her online book Law by Design introduced human-centered design to a new generation of lawyers. In Finland, Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera pioneered contract visualization, showing that diagrams and visual layouts help people understand agreements faster and more accurately. Today legal design labs and networks exist around the world, and law firms, courts, and legal aid organizations are using its methods.
Published in 2026, Visual Literacy for Lawyers: A Guide to Enhancing Your Contracts and Practice, by Olga V. Mack, Linsey Krolik, and Tessa Manuello, brings these ideas into everyday law practice. The authors make the case that visual intelligence is now a core communication skill, and they offer frameworks and basic concepts to help legal professionals, not just lawyers, understand, interpret, and communicate in an increasingly visual world. Mack, a former general counsel and legal technology leader who teaches at Berkeley Law, and Manuello, who has spent more than a decade helping legal departments turn complex contracts into clear, usable tools, bring a practical, business-minded view of what good legal design can do.
Margaret Hagan describes legal design as a toolkit that works at every scale, from a single infographic or redesigned contract, to a client’s whole journey through a court process, to the structure of a law firm, all the way up to entirely new courts, agencies, and ways of delivering justice. The people who do this work wear several hats. They communicate visually, bring people together, build and test ideas with real users, and keep refining. Most of all, they know how to step back and ask not just “How do we fix this?” but “Are we even asking the right question?”
Today legal design is everywhere, even where people don’t notice it. At the smallest level, it’s in something as simple as the choice of a typeface. Matthew Butterick’s Typography for Lawyers convinced many lawyers that how a page looks affects how it’s read, and some courts, such as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, now give guidance on fonts and layout for briefs. It shows up in plain-language court forms, privacy notices with icons, step-by-step online tools for people without lawyers, and contracts with timelines and flowcharts. And it reaches all the way to fully illustrated comic contracts. The movement is truly global. The Legal Design Alliance, founded in 2018, connects lawyers, designers, and researchers across Europe and beyond. Courts and lawyers in Brazil have embraced “visual law” with remarkable energy, and legal design labs, conferences, and courses now span North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Like a seed carried on the wind, the idea has taken root wherever people are tired of law that only lawyers can understand.
From comic contracts to Intractive Law
Some of the most striking legal design work has come from comic contracts, which turn legal agreements into illustrated stories that people can actually read and understand. Pioneered by Robert de Rooy in South Africa and Camilla Baasch Andersen in Australia, comic contracts are legally binding and have been used for domestic workers, farmworkers, banks, engineering firms, and more. (See Comic Contracts page.)
Legal design fits naturally with Integrative Law. Both see law as something that should serve people and relationships, not confuse or intimidate them. Conscious Contracts, for example, use design principles to create agreements grounded in the parties’ shared values and written in language people actually use. When expectations are visible and easy to navigate, people are more likely to trust the law, follow it, and resolve conflicts before they grow. Legal relationships become clearer, sturdier, and better able to change over time.
I think there will be a "new normal" once people see what can be done differently.
This page was researched and designed by arbonin