The legal system has a design problem
Most of us know from personal or anecdotal experiences that there’s nothing enjoyable about going to court, or filling out paperwork, or reading things you can’t understand without a law degree.
But even though the legal system is complex and burdensome, that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved to better meet client needs. And the good news is, a lot of the problems with legal services are uniquely suited to design solutions.
Legal problems don’t occur in isolation
The majority of my legal education was spent looking at relatively straightforward hypothetical legal problems and working out the best way to apply the law to the facts. But when I started getting practical experience at community legal centres that dealt with homelessness, family violence, and youth issues, my experience was that the law can only solve a small part of their complex problem. Sometimes the best I could do is refer people to another support service.
Legal problems are linked to increased disadvantage
That increased legal problems are linked to increased indicators of disadvantage is nothing new. Any legal aid lawyer, case worker, or advocate can share their stories of seeing clients returning with similar issues, often due to systemic injustices or socio-economic factors. What this means in terms of design solutions is that problems cluster, but the solutions are often disparate and singular. Return clients need more from their legal services than band-aid fixes.
The customer experience of legal services hasn’t kept up
There are really innovative design solutions being implemented in retail, entertainment, banking, and even the postal service — changes that could be applied to the justice sector. But due to the traditional nature of the law, and chronically underfunded legal aid organisations, many of these improvements won’t reach the legal sector.
How HCD can help
If design is the process of creatively and strategically solving problems, human-centred design (HCD) is an approach that puts the people affected by the problems at the centre of the solution. It begins with a focus on the people who would use a service, system, product, or technology to understand their needs and then iteratively experiment to develop a solution. HCD has been applied successfully to complex problems in a range of fields, from helping students co-design their own education experience to informing solutions that help prevent chronic diseases.
Legal design is the application of HCD to the legal sector. It’s about creating intentional interactions with the legal system to make things better for the people using the system. HCD is uniquely suited to finding solutions to these design challenges in the legal sector because of its focus on improving legal services from the bottom up, beginning with the people using the service, rather than a top-down view that prioritises the constraints of existing law and policy.