Jusletter IT

Designing Readable Contracts: Goodbye to Legal Writing – Welcome to Information Design and Visualization

  • Autor/Autorin: Helena Haapio
  • Kategorie: Beiträge
  • Region: Finnland
  • Rechtsgebiete: Rechtsvisualisierung
  • Sammlung: Tagungsband IRIS 2013
  • Zitiervorschlag: Helena Haapio, Designing Readable Contracts: Goodbye to Legal Writing – Welcome to Information Design and Visualization, in: Jusletter IT 20. Februar 2013
While readability, user-centeredness and simplification have influenced many fields, they have hardly caught the attention of the legal or contracting community. The focus of contract drafters has been predominantly on the needs of lawyers: litigants, judges, and arbitrators. The needs of clients have been to a great extent neglected. For clients, most contracts look like legal documents that only experts can decode. If we prioritize the needs of clients, legal writing is not the way to go. Changing the way contracts are written, moving from legalese to plain language, certainly helps. Yet this paper argues that a more profound change is required. While contracts need to be legally sound, their design should be driven by what clients want and deserve: readable contracts that they can easily understand and act upon. This paper presents samples of contract prototypes produced using information design and visualization. User test results and research work in progress indicate that these approaches have the potential to fundamentally change the way contracts are designed, communicated and perceived, offering unexplored opportunities for both research and practice.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

  • 1. Introduction: What
  • 2. Clients Need (and Deserve) Better, Readable Contracts
  • 3. Readability through Information Design and Visualization
  • 4. Examples of Using Information Design and Visualization in Contracts
  • 5. Conclusion
  • 6. References

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