Legal Design as Process Design

That body of work has, however, an unspoken centre of gravity. Its founding cases are drawn from jurisdictions in which most users approach the legal system from a position of basic, if frustrated, engagement. The frustration is real. Consumer contracts are unreadable⁴, court forms baffle litigants in person⁵, and statutes are needlessly complex even for trained readers. But in these contexts the underlying expectation that the legal system can in principle be navigated to good effect is largely intact. Legal Design here is reform from within: making something already trusted easier to use.

This article asks what changes when Legal Design is brought into a context where that default does not hold to the same extent. In several post-Soviet jurisdictions, the socio-legal literature has identified a recurring feature of citizens' and businesses' relation to formal law that is distinct from difficulty in reading legal text. This feature has been variously described as a tendency to rely on informal channels alongside the formal-legal one, and it is sometimes discussed under the heading of legal nihilism in post-Soviet socio-legal scholarship⁶. The proposition explored here is that, where this feature is present, comprehensibility-centred Legal Design may address only part of what is at stake. Reformed contract templates and visualizations of procedures, on their own, may have a limited effect on user engagement where additional layers of trust and habit are in play.

The article’s contribution is therefore narrow and specific. It does not attempt to build a general theory of Legal Design. It defends one claim: that in low-trust legal environments, Legal Design must be reconceived as process design, that is, as work on the institutional and behavioural infrastructure that surrounds legal documents, rather than as work on the documents themselves.

The argument proceeds in five steps. Section 2 sketches the contemporary Legal Design field and its implicit assumptions about the user. Section 3 reviews the recent literature on plain legal language to establish what is, and is not, the bottleneck in legal communication. Section 4 introduces legal nihilism as a diagnostic category and connects it to the Azerbaijani and Georgian legal environments familiar to the author through professional practice. Section 5 outlines what Legal Design as process design looks like across three domains: legislative drafting, public legal education, and LegalTech. Section 6 reflects on method, scope and limits.

A note on method. This article is a conceptual contribution that draws on existing socio-legal scholarship on post-Soviet legal cultures, on the Legal Design literature, and on the author’s familiarity with the legal environments of Azerbaijan and Georgia. Two jurisdictions are referenced not as paired comparative cases but simply as two settings with which the author has personal familiarity, sufficient to illustrate the issues raised here. The article does not present new quantitative empirical data; references to these jurisdictions are illustrative rather than evidentiary. Where specific empirical claims are made, sources are provided; where the source is the author’s own general observation, this is stated.

Three lineages converge in what is now called Legal Design. The first is the Stanford Legal Design Lab tradition associated with Margaret Hagan, in which design-thinking methods are imported from human-centred design and applied to legal services, particularly in access-to-justice contexts⁷. The second is the Nordic contract-design tradition associated with Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera, focused on the visual and structural redesign of commercial contracts⁸. The third, less institutionally consolidated, is the older plain-language movement that developed independently in common-law jurisdictions: the work of David Mellinkoff on the language of the law⁹, the United States Plain Writing Act 2010¹⁰, and the Nordic klarspråk tradition.

Each of these lineages, in different ways, treats the legal document as the primary site of intervention. The Stanford tradition reaches further, into procedural redesign and service delivery, but its publicly visible outputs continue to be heavily document-centred. The contract-visualization literature, despite advocating for systemic change, presents most of its case studies at the level of the single redesigned document or pattern.

There is, in addition, an empirical strand that has matured rapidly in recent years. Martínez, Mollica and Gibson demonstrated, through a large-scale corpus analysis paired with a 184-participant comprehension experiment, that the difficulty of legal language is driven not by specialised conceptual content but by specific writing features: centre-embedded clauses, low-frequency jargon, passive voice and non-standard capitalization¹¹. Benoliel and Becher applied standard linguistic readability tests to the 500 most popular sign-in-wrap consumer contracts in the United States and found that their average readability was comparable to that of academic journal articles¹². A recent Australian study compared visual and text-based contracts in two large companies and demonstrated, via OLS regression on transaction-cost proxies, that visual format reduces those costs¹³.

What unites these strands is an implicit user. That user is someone who already operates inside a generally functional legal order: a consumer signing online terms, a litigant in person filing a family-court application, a procurement manager reviewing a long supplier contract. She wants to do something within the legal system, and Legal Design’s job is to make doing it less painful. The literature does not, by and large, address users for whom the question of whether to engage the formal legal system at all is open. That gap is the entry point for this article.

Even within the field’s own assumptions, the simplification-equals-comprehensibility equation is unstable. The most pointed critique comes from Zsolt Ződi, who argues that the comprehensible style of legal texts is treated by plain-language movements as a predominantly linguistic problem when in fact comprehensibility has dimensions that linguistic editing cannot reach¹⁴. Even after passive voice, archaisms and Latinate vocabulary have been excised, a legal text remains embedded in an institutional, procedural and interpretive context that the lay reader does not share. A rule on lodging an appeal can be syntactically simple yet remain unintelligible to someone who does not know what an appeal is, when it must be filed, or what its consequences are. Comprehensibility, on this view, is not produced by editing alone but by aligning the text with the reader’s institutional knowledge.

The plain-language literature thus already concedes, in its most rigorous moments, that simplification has a comprehensibility ceiling. The argument of this article is that there is a further layer below the institutional one which neither plain-language reformers nor process-oriented Legal Designers have foregrounded: the question of whether the user treats engagement with the formal legal system as a worthwhile move at all. In jurisdictions where that question is routinely answered in the negative, no amount of textual or institutional polish will raise the rate of formal engagement, because the user has already routed around the formal channel.

A counter-tradition runs through the literature. The conservative case for technical legal language, made forcefully by Mellinkoff¹⁷ and reinforced in different keys by Tiersma¹⁸, does not contradict this argument. It confines itself to a different question. The conservative case is that legal language is technical because law is technical, and that simplification can sometimes destroy precision. That is a real concern for the drafter but says nothing about whether the lay user will engage the formal system in the first place. The two debates have largely talked past each other.

A brief historical aside is in order. As Goody pointed out, it is writing rather than speech that distinguishes custom from law¹⁹. A well-crafted legal text represents the next stage in the evolution of law, but the development of writing and the diffusion of literacy did not, in themselves, automatically yield more comprehensible law. The recurrent gap between text and audience is a structural feature of literate legal orders, not a pathology of any one of them.

To anchor the foregoing in a concrete empirical observation, this section reports a small replication exercise. Macleod’s widely-cited Note in the Boston College Law Review surveyed the use of fifteen Latin expressions in decisions of the United States Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, finding that Latin usage in those courts had risen sharply after 1950, with shorter and more translatable phrases appearing more frequently²⁰. The author replicated the Macleod methodology against a corpus of arbitrazh-court decisions from CIS jurisdictions²¹. In a first stage, the same fifteen terms used by Macleod were searched against the corpus (Figure 1). Most expressions appeared rarely or not at all, which is unsurprising: phrases such as sua sponte, obiter dictum, ratio decidendi and nunc pro tunc are operational only in common-law adjudication, where doctrines of stare decisis and the structure of judicial reasoning give them a working grammar. In civil-law systems they are at most ornamental.

A second stage substituted phrases with greater functional currency in civil-law adjudication: pacta sunt servanda, lex specialis, lex posterior derogat legi priori, prima facie, res judicata, and obiter dictum (Figure 2). Even so, against the total volume of judicial acts in the corpus the absolute frequency remained modest. The author tentatively hypothesizes that a non-trivial share of Latin occurrences in the corpus enters via parties' submissions rather than judicial drafting, and is preserved into the final text by the well-attested practice of incorporating party-text into reasoning sections under caseload pressure.

Two interpretive cautions are appropriate. First, a low frequency of Latin expressions in CIS arbitrazh decisions does not, on its own, support a claim about the comprehensibility of those decisions; as Ződi argues, comprehensibility difficulties are not located primarily in foreign vocabulary²². Second, the European Court of Human Rights, which routinely uses Latin terminology, is not a counter-example: its case-load is mediated almost entirely by professional representation and operates within a stabilized international-law lexicon²³.

The exercise, modest though it is, supports one claim relevant to the argument of this article: the standard plain-language target of removing foreign-language ornament is, in the CIS arbitrazh setting, not where the diagnostic action is. Whatever is failing in the user’s relationship with these decisions, it is not failure to parse Latin.

The term legal nihilism has a long pedigree in Russian-language jurisprudence and in post-Soviet socio-legal scholarship. Hendley defines it operationally as ‘a lack of respect for law' and traces, on the basis of large-scale survey data, the demographic distribution of nihilist attitudes in contemporary Russia²⁴. The phenomenon is to be distinguished both from anti-legalism (an active rejection of law) and from mere ignorance: legal nihilism is the rational-enough response of an actor who has correctly inferred that the formal system will not deliver predictable outcomes for actors of her position.

Operationally, several patterns are diagnostic of the condition. Disputes that the formal civil-law system is in principle equipped to resolve are routed instead through informal channels (family pressure, business-network sanctions, or the extralegal deployment of administrative resources), producing what Hendley has analysed as a structurally dualistic legal order in which formal-legal channels operate alongside, rather than in place of, informal ones²⁵. Formal contracts, when they are signed, function less as substantive instructions to performance than as boilerplate insurance against an unlikely future challenge; the substantive bargain is held elsewhere. Procedural compliance is performed without conviction, producing a paper trail that is technically correct but substantively detached from the underlying transaction. Citizens approach the courts only when no informal channel is available and frequently exit the formal system as soon as one becomes available again.

The Legal Design literature has not, to the author’s knowledge, theorised this condition. Its working assumption is the opposite: that users want to engage and are stopped at the threshold by impenetrable forms and unfriendly interfaces²⁶. In a legal-nihilist environment the threshold problem is upstream of any of those interfaces. Friction in the form is at most the third or fourth obstacle to engagement; the first is whether engagement is worth pursuing at all.

It is worth meeting an obvious objection. One might say: surely better-designed documents and clearer procedures will, over time, themselves contribute to rebuilding trust, and so even in lower-trust environments the standard Legal Design playbook should produce eventual benefits. This article does not deny that possibility. It does, however, note a more specific question worth foregrounding. When document-level interventions are deployed without comparable attention to the surrounding institutional and behavioural work, the polished interface and the underlying process can diverge in user experience. In settings where users are attentive to such divergence, the design effort placed in the visible layer may have a different effect than its authors intend, and the question of how surface and substance interact deserves explicit attention in the Legal Design literature²⁷.

The selection of Azerbaijan and Georgia for this discussion does not constitute a comparative case study. The two jurisdictions are introduced simply because the author has some familiarity with both, sufficient to use them as illustrative settings; the discussion below does not undertake any systematic comparison between them. They are referenced as two contexts in which the issues raised by this article can be brought into focus, and in which features identified in the broader post-Soviet socio-legal literature are observable to varying degrees.

In both jurisdictions, Legal Design initiatives have begun to appear over the past several years: redesigned contract templates made openly available, visualizations of procedural pathways for non-lawyers, explanatory infographics for everyday legal interactions, podcasts and lecture programmes addressed to professional and lay audiences. The reception of such initiatives, as the author has had occasion to observe, has been mixed in a way that may be instructive. Companies and public institutions have tended to participate willingly when redesign work is offered without cost, while financial investment in such work has so far remained modest. Among practitioners, the response has often been one of engaged interest combined with a recurring practical concern: whether redesigned documents will in fact be accepted by counterparties and adjudicators accustomed to the established form. End-users, where the redesigned artifacts have reached them, have generally received them positively, though it is too early to speak of measurable knock-on effects on rates of engagement with formal legal channels.

The interpretation offered here is that the redesigned artifacts work where they are placed but do not, by themselves, propagate upstream into the institutional behaviour that would make formal engagement attractive. A clearer contract is a better contract, but it is not a clearer civil-procedure system. A visualized procedural map is a better map, but it does not change what happens at the destination.

A specific example may help to indicate the kind of design work involved at the document level. In one project in which the author was involved, attention was given to colour perception in procedural diagrams prepared for submission to a court. Recognising the possibility that an adjudicator might experience some form of colour vision deficiency, the visual components were configured to retain their communicative function independently of colour discrimination (Figure 3). The example is small, but it suggests that even routine Legal Design choices, when made with attention to the actual conditions of reception, require a degree of precision and contextual awareness that is not always foregrounded in the field’s didactic literature. A specific example may help to indicate the kind of design work involved at the document level. In one project in which the author was involved, attention was given to colour perception in procedural diagrams prepared for submission to a court. Recognising the possibility that an adjudicator might experience some form of colour vision deficiency, the visual components were configured to retain their communicative function independently of colour discrimination (Figure 3). The example is small, but it suggests that even routine Legal Design choices, when made with attention to the actual conditions of reception, require a degree of precision and contextual awareness that is not always foregrounded in the field’s didactic literature. A specific example may help to indicate the kind of design work involved at the document level. In one project in which the author was involved, attention was given to colour perception in procedural diagrams prepared for submission to a court. Recognising the possibility that an adjudicator might experience some form of colour vision deficiency, the visual components were configured to retain their communicative function independently of colour discrimination (Figure 3). The example is small, but it suggests that even routine Legal Design choices, when made with attention to the actual conditions of reception, require a degree of precision and contextual awareness that is not always foregrounded in the field’s didactic literature.

An illustrative observation from a different angle may help to make a related point concrete. In one of the jurisdictions discussed, a large retail bank introduced a polished mobile application that received generally positive user feedback for its appearance and basic functionality. For certain routine operations, such as obtaining a written statement of account activity, the application directs users to a physical branch, where the underlying procedure has retained much of its original manual structure. The visible interface has, in this respect, received significant attention from a design perspective, while the underlying process has been less affected by it. The point of the observation is not to criticise this particular implementation, which represents a meaningful step forward in customer experience, but to suggest that the interaction between interface design and process design is itself a question worth foregrounding in the Legal Design literature.

In both jurisdictions, the share of total employment in the agricultural sector is comparatively high,²⁸ which makes agriculture a particularly informative domain in which to observe how Legal Design practice is implemented locally. The position of seasonal agricultural workers is of particular interest. In this context, Legal Design returns in some respects to its early concerns, recalling the well-known case of comic-strip employment contracts developed for low-literacy farm workers in South Africa,²⁹ where the field demonstrated, at an early stage, its capacity to address access-to-justice concerns for workers in low-formalisation labour relations.

A careful observation is, however, appropriate. What is needed is not, in the first instance, regulation of how the contract looks, but rather attention to how the entire process of hiring, work and ongoing employment conditions actually unfolds for the seasonal worker. A more comprehensible contract addresses only one part of the problem: in the best case, the worker understands the content of the document she has signed. Legal Design understood as process design addresses the question more comprehensively, allowing each interaction between the parties to take place within a legal field that is reasonably straightforward to engage with. To take a concrete example: the worker need not make multiple visits to an office, need not open accounts at particular banks and wait for written statements to be issued in person, and so on. It is interventions of this kind that constitute process-oriented Legal Design in the sense developed in this article.

A working assumption that runs through this article is that people are, by default, disposed to interact with one another, with business and with the state within legal frameworks. Where that interaction is structured in a way that is cumbersome or uncomfortable, two responses tend to emerge in practice: either workarounds outside the formal framework are sought, or the weaker party silently complies on whatever terms are effectively imposed. The category of seasonal agricultural workers is chosen here as an illustration precisely because their rights tend to be among the least well-protected, conditions can most easily be imposed tacitly, and their negotiating position is comparatively limited.

A good process design in this domain might include a number of concrete features which together make legal options genuinely available to the weaker party to the contract: remote contract conclusion, minimisation of time and travel demands on the worker, timely payment (including, where appropriate, automated execution of scheduled payments), online initiation of dispute-resolution procedures, accessible mediation, and simplified routes to formal judicial recourse, among others. There is, however, a substantial difference between specifying such features in a well-drafted contract and ensuring that they exist as a real and functioning process. It is at this point that technology, both LegalTech and FinTech, becomes a substantive component of the design effort rather than an optional accompaniment.

This points to a further proposition. Legal Design that does not draw on the available technological infrastructure amounts, in practice, to document drafting. Improving the experience and the journey of the parties to a legal interaction requires the full body of available instruments, used in combination, to address the problem at the level at which it actually arises.

As a brief visual note, the setting in which the questions discussed in this section take concrete form, the vineyards and orchards in which seasonal workers spend their working seasons, is itself a useful image to hold in mind when considering what process-oriented Legal Design in this domain might mean in practice. The everyday rhythms of hiring, payment and routine interaction with intermediaries that structure work in such settings are not visible in the text of a contract, however well-designed; they are visible in the surrounding process.

If the foregoing diagnosis is correct, Legal Design in low-trust legal environments must move its centre of gravity from the document to the process surrounding it. This section identifies three concrete sites at which such process work is feasible and where the author’s own practice and the existing Legal Design literature offer some leverage.

The lexical and structural features of legislation set the upstream conditions for everything that happens at the level of contracts, procedural forms and judicial decisions. Where statutory language is opaque, professional drafters reproduce its conventions in their own work, by direct citation or stylistic imitation, and the cycle reinforces itself. Comparative experience suggests two productive directions. The first is the introduction of formal plain-language requirements at the statutory level. The Plain Writing Act of 2010 in the United States³⁰, the United Kingdom Office of the Parliamentary Counsel’s drafting guidance, and Sweden’s klarspråk tradition all locate the obligation to write clearly at the legislative or administrative level rather than treating it as a virtue of individual drafters. Neither Azerbaijan nor Georgia at present has an instrument comparable to these. Introducing one would not, by itself, address legal nihilism, but it would remove one upstream contributor to the perception that formal documents are written for a different audience.

The second direction is structural and visual interventions at the level of statutory drafting itself. Tabular formatting of variable parameters such as tax rates, thresholds and time-limits is a well-attested device that reduces ambiguity and supports automated implementation. The Tax Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan, for example, contains provisions on personal income tax that, when presented as a single sentence, obscure what is structurally a small two-row table:

Original. Income not exceeding 2,500 AZN per month is subject to personal income tax at a rate of 14 per cent. Income exceeding 2,500 AZN per month is taxed at a rate of 14 per cent on the first 2,500 AZN, plus 25 per cent on the amount exceeding 2,500 AZN.

The same provision can be presented as a two-row table aligning monthly income, applicable rate, and calculation formula. The substantive rule is preserved; the parsing burden is removed. This is not a gain in clarity at the cost of precision but a gain in clarity at no cost in precision. Such interventions are practically achievable, low-controversy, and replicable across many statutes. To make the point concrete, consider the provision of the Tax Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan on personal income tax cited above. The same rule can be re-expressed in tabular form without any change of substance, as shown below.

The same logic applies more broadly. The pace at which technological tools are entering legal work has accelerated to the point that the evaluation of legal text against design criteria is no longer a hypothetical exercise. As one practical example, a publicly available skill developed by the author for use with Anthropic’s Claude audits a submitted legal document against six design-relevant criteria (language patterns, readability scores, structure and navigation, hidden conditions, statutory duplication and visual hierarchy) and returns an assessment without rewriting the document³¹.

If the diagnostic claim of section 4 is correct, the most leveraged intervention is not making the next document clearer but contributing to the gradual rebuilding of baseline legal-system trust. This is what Lassalle, in a different idiom, would have described as the slow alignment of formal text with the underlying social forces that give it life³². Public legal education is the vehicle for this. Three concrete activities are within reach of practitioners and small institutions even in the absence of state-level reform: research and case publications in Legal Design that are accessible to non-specialists; a sustained public-facing channel (podcast, video, or short-form articles) featuring practising lawyers in conversation about how the system actually works; and lecture programmes addressed to academic and professional audiences.

These activities are not, by themselves, Legal Design in the sense the field has institutionalized. They are, however, the precondition for it in low-trust environments. Their function is to gradually reshape the user’s expectation of what formal-legal engagement will yield, so that document-level Legal Design interventions, when subsequently encountered, are read as substantive rather than decorative.

The third site is LegalTech, but understood specifically as a process intervention rather than a digital interface laid over an unchanged process. The bank-application vignette in section 4 illustrated how interface-only LegalTech can entrench rather than alleviate the surface/substance gap. The corrective is to anchor LegalTech work to the entire user journey and to subordinate interface decisions to the redesign of what happens behind the interface.

There is a residual point worth registering here. Even an extensively re-engineered process retains the formal-procedural commitments that Weber identified as constitutive of legal-rational authority³³. Process design in this article is not a euphemism for procedural minimalism. It is a re-allocation of design effort: from the document, where the field has concentrated its attention, to the institutional architecture that determines whether anyone will read the document in the first place.

Three limits of the present argument should be acknowledged. First, the empirical anchor is auto-ethnographic and partially case-based; it does not present quantitative survey data or controlled intervention studies. The argument is therefore best read as a hypothesis-formulation contribution, identifying a phenomenon (the gap between document-centred Legal Design and the conditions of low-trust legal systems) that warrants subsequent empirical investigation.

Second, the diagnostic category of legal nihilism is used here in a deliberately operational sense. A more rigorous treatment would situate it within the post-Soviet socio-legal literature in finer grain and disaggregate its variants by institutional setting, generational cohort and economic stratum, in line with Hendley’s survey-based work. This article does not undertake that disaggregation and acknowledges the cost of not doing so.

Third, the article focuses on a specific type of low-trust legal environment, namely the post-Soviet variant familiar to the author. The argument may extend to other low-trust legal environments (in Latin America, parts of South-East Asia, and elsewhere), but such extension would require its own empirical and contextual work and is not claimed here.

Legal Design, as it is currently practised, has built a mature toolkit for one default user: a person who already operates within a generally trusted legal order and is held back by document-level friction. This article has argued that that user is not the universal user. In jurisdictions characterized by what can be operationally termed legal nihilism, the bottleneck on legal engagement is not document-level friction but the user’s standing assessment that engagement with the formal system is not worth the effort.

The implication for Legal Design is not that document work should be abandoned. It is that document work, in low-trust environments, must be subordinate to process work: to the redesign of the institutional choreography that determines whether and on what terms users approach the formal system at all. Three sites where such process work is feasible have been identified, namely legislative drafting, public legal education, and LegalTech understood as process intervention rather than interface decoration.

These claims arise from a specific vantage point and bear that vantage point’s limits. They are offered as an invitation to a Legal Design literature that has, at the moment of its institutionalization, the opportunity to globalize its diagnostic categories before its methods are exported into contexts in which their implicit assumptions do not hold.

The author is engaged with Digital Law Lab, a non-profit initiative active in LegalTech, Digital Law, Legal Design, public legal education and related activities in the jurisdictions referenced in this article. The author is also the developer of the Legal Design Assessment skill referenced in section 5.1 of this article, which is hosted on the Lawve platform and made publicly available on a non-commercial basis; the author derives no financial benefit from it. Activities of Digital Law Lab are mentioned in sections 5.2 and 5.3 as examples of work in this area. No external funding was received in connection with this article, and the author declares no other competing interests.

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