Design in Legal Education

Emily Allbon, Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Emily Allbon, Amanda Perry-Kessaris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032271569
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429664618
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This visually rich, experience-led collection explores what design can do for legal education. In recent decades design has increasingly come to be understood as a resource to improve other fields of public, private and civil society practice; and legal design—that is, the application of design-based methods to legal practice—is increasingly embedded in lawyering across the world. It brings together experts from multiple disciplines, professions and jurisdictions to reflect upon how designerly mindsets, processes and strategies can enhance teaching and learning across higher education, public legal information and legal practice; and will be of interest and use to those teaching and learning in any and all of those fields.

1 What can design do for legal education?

Emily Allbon ¹ and Amanda Perry-Kessaris ²

DOI: 10.4324/9780429021411-1

This collection explores what design can do for legal education. It defines design broadly to include a wide range of practices that are devoted to the planning and making by humans of tangibles and intangibles including, for example, product design, graphic design, system design and interaction design; and it addresses a wide range of legal education contexts including higher education, public legal information and legal practice.

In this chapter we introduce some key characteristics of design, and suggest how they might support core objectives in legal education. In the process we demonstrate that designerly ways can influence any and all levels of legal pedagogy—from the top—the relatively abstract, overarching ‘approach’, including conceptual frames and underpinning normative ‘aspirations’; to the bottom—the relatively concrete, specific and action-oriented ‘tasks’ that learners and teachers perform independently or together.³ And we take care to attend not only to the potential rewards of drawing on designerly ways, but also to some of the risks.

What are designerly ways?

In recent decades design has increasingly come to be understood as a resource to improve other fields of public, private and civil society practice.⁴ Since the early 2000s our attention has been drawn to what design can do for law by, for example, Colette Brunschwig, who was the first to highlight the potential of visual communication in the legal sphere⁵; Helena Haapio (see Chapter 16) and Stefania Passera, who were the first to focus on contract visualisation especially through the process of a design sprint;⁶ Caitlin Moon, who has opened the door to radical change by introducing legal practitioners to human-centred design;⁷ and Margaret Hagan, who has pioneered the use of design labs to explore how legal services might be made more accessible and engaging.⁸ Today legal design—that is, the application of design-based methods to legal practice—is not only a recognised speciality, but also increasingly embedded across the world in leading law firms and in-house legal departments.⁹ Which is why we see Rae Morgan—formerly Product Development Lead at LexisNexis, now principal consultant at design agency Wilson Fletcher—calling in Chapter 19 of this volume for future-focused students and their teachers to pro-actively engage with designerly ways so that they might distinguish themselves in their future legal practice.

Opinions differ as to the core characteristics of design, as to which terminologies best capture them and as to how they might contribute to other fields of practice. We focus on designerly mindsets, processes, strategies. Designerly mindsets are simultaneously practical—that is, seeking and able to make things happen; critical—that is, seeking and able to identify what is wrong and why; and imaginative—that is, seeking and able to conjure what is not yet/still present. We all need and have these abilities—indeed, as we shall see, they are central to lawyering. And these abilities can be enhanced by designerly processes and strategies.¹⁰ How?

Designerly strategies emphasise making ideas visible and tangible. Most forms of design, are explicitly and primarily about producing visible and/or tangible artefacts for end-users—whether a poster, an app, a pair of shoes or indeed a visual contract. Furthermore, in part because they tend to be devoted to making visible and tangible things, designers tend to communicate visibly and tangibly along the way—to themselves and to others. For example, they make prototypes of their ideas—anything from a carboard table-top model to a full-scale set complete with props—to help them to see, to think and to collaborate.¹¹

Designerly processes tend to emphasise experimentation, both in the sense of generating and following new possibilities; and in the sense of testing hypotheses. Design is about making, and making is an experimental process of generating and testing. Designers do this by prompting and facilitating iterative, divergent and convergent thinking. In so doing they produce a sense of ‘structured freedom’ in which we can more effectively work with ideas.¹²

In combination these mindsets, processes and strategies can generate ‘enabling ecosystems’ in which our objectives become more possible and probable.¹³ In order to consider how design might contribute to legal education we must establish what are and ought to be the objectives of legal education.

What is legal education for?

Answers to this question will, of course, vary. We propose that legal education is and ought to be aimed at prompting and facilitating people—including students, publics and clients—to work effectively with law. Furthermore, we propose that, like designers, those who wish to work effectively with law must be practical, critical and imaginative. They must be practical, in the sense of knowing how the law is likely to be interpreted, and how to make things happen smoothly and predictably. Those who wish to work effectively with law must also be critical—not only in the sense of identifying multiple sides of every argument, but also in the sense of keeping an eye on what is wrong with law. And those who wish to work with law must be imaginative—not only in the sense of being able to work conceptually, but also in the sense of being able to envisage how whatever is wrong with law might be made right.¹⁴

But how do we judge what is wrong or right in the context of legal education? Here we can draw on Roger Cotterrell’s call to nurture and promote the ‘well-being of law as a practical idea’ and as a ‘communal’, as opposed to solely private, ‘resource’. For law to function as a practical, communal resource it must be inclusive of the perceptions, expectations and experiences of all those within its actual and potential jurisdiction. Likewise legal educational spaces.¹⁵

An inclusive education ecosystem is one ‘in which pedagogy, curricula and assessment are designed and delivered to engage students in learning that is meaningful, relevant and accessible to all’; and it entails not only ‘taking account of’, but proactively ‘valuing’, difference. The call for inclusive approaches to education originated in disabilities studies literature, which in turn drew on design literature to argue that both retrospective adaptation and proactive specialisation are expensive and exclusionary. Better, they argued, to adopt a ‘universal design’ approach which anticipates diversity, and which builds in the flexibility necessary to value and include it in all its forms.¹⁶ Despite often being used interchangeably, there are distinctions to be drawn between universal design and inclusive design. As Kat Holmes notes, the former has primarily focused on the accessibility of physical space (primarily architecture), and the latter from digital technologies—for example, ‘captioning for people who are deaf and audio record books for blind communities’.¹⁷ Most importantly, she notes that inclusive design is committed to the principle of co-design—that is, to the idea that designers must work with excluded communities rather than creating for them. Examples of co-design in action can be found across several contributions in this volume.

So how might designerly ways support the development of legal education ecosystems that promote practical-critical-imaginative thinking, as well as being inclusive? The following section begins to answer this question by highlighting two designerly ‘ways’—visual and material communication strategies, and experimental processes. It draws on our own experiences, as well as the experiences reported in the contributions to this volume and by others working at the intersection of design and law.

Visual and material communication strategies, experimental processes

Text remains empress of the legal world. But by supplementing the textual with visual and material formats, and by encouraging experimentation, we can make legal communications more inclusive—that is, more meaningful, relevant and accessible. The following subsections focus on how designerly ways can prompt and facilitate us not only to see legal ideas, but also to actively explore them: to move among them, and in so doing to better understand, even to change, them.¹⁸

Seeing

Information design is the sub-field of design most commonly applied to help us see law. It is devoted to making dense and/or complex information accessible. Information designers aim to transform pieces of data into information, which the user can then convert into knowledge. Richard Saul Wurman famously proposed that, while ‘information may be infinite’, there are only five methods by which to ‘structure’ it so that it can begin to be transformed into knowledge: category, time, location, alphabet or continuum. The trick is to choose the method that is most suitable, depending on what knowledge you wish to convey, to whom and in what context.¹⁹ So information designers draw on insights from disciplines ranging from interface design to cognitive psychology, information science to journalism and marketing to sociolinguistics; and they use design processes to ensure that those insights are applied ‘to all aspects of information, including its content and language’, as well as its visual form.²⁰ Successful information design ensures that information is ‘attractive’ and relevant to ‘the situation in which it appears’; and it ‘reduces fatigue and errors in information processing’, and thereby ‘speeds up tasks’.²¹ For example, as Sarah Stein Lubrano explains in Chapter 5, strategies such as visual mapping can, among other things, activate affective context and help to manage cognitive load.

Two examples designed by Emily Allbon illustrate the point. First, Lawbore is an award-winning community site that is designed to offer law students an engaging pathway to free online legal resources. It integrates, and thereby leavens, text with images chosen carefully to intrigue, to deepen communication and to make users smile...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• 1. What can design do for legal education?
• PART I: Higher Education
• PART II: Public Legal Education
• PART III: Legal Practice
• Index