How do we learn from each other, and other fields, to communicate complex legal information in standardized ways? How can we adapt other people’s successful models of communication to our own work?
Design Pattern Libraries serve this purpose: to present semi-codified ways that a person can present “well-designed” information. They are not strict recipes; they are adaptable structures that can be re-purposed and re-mixed to serve specific challenges.
Contract Design Pattern Library
Margaret Hagan and Helena Haapio created a Contract Design Pattern Library in 2015, along with a paper for IRIS that documents this work.
Privacy Design Pattern Library
Currently, we are working on a Privacy Design Pattern Library, with Arianna Rossi, Helena Haapio, and the Legal Design Lab Team.
Know Your Rights Pattern Library
In February 2015, our team began assembling a Know Your Rights design pattern library, to catalogue different strategies for communicating basic rights to people.
Cross-Legal Design Patterns
Across different areas of practice and purposes, we find some visual design patterns regularly cropping up in good legal visual design. These apply to the various pattern libraries, and we’re collecting them here as a meta-level crop of patterns.
The Contract Design Pattern Library
The Contract Design Pattern Library is a collection of solution patterns, that can be used while creating contracts to make them clearer, more navigable, and more usable.
This is a resource for lawyers, business-people, and others interested in making more usable and comprehensible contracts. We are a team of lawyers and designers, working to systematize good practices in creating effective contracts, that work not only for lawyers but also for other professionals and laypeople who need to understand and use these contracts.
This website is an early stage prototype of the library, so we have a limited number of patterns. We invite your feedback and contributions, to improve this resource.
See best practices and inspiration that you can use to make your contracts more effective and user-friendly, by exploring our Design Patterns for better composition, text, and visualization within your contracts, and for process-steps to use when negotiating, crafting, and implementing it.
The Know Your Rights Design Pattern Library
In the Know Your Rights design pattern library, we are collecting examples of how to empower people with knowledge of their rights, vis-a-vis the government and other institutions. We have examples from paper, games, interactive tools, and beyond — along with documentation of our workshops to explore new directions.
Submit a Pattern
Do you have an idea for a pattern to be included in our pattern design library? Tell us about it and we will be in touch!