News
| 20.12.2022

There is a pressing need for more comprehensible negotiation and contracting practice – legal design could be the key

Personer som sitter vid ett bord och skriver under ett kontrakt
There is an urgent need for a better legal quality in negotiation and commercial contracting practice. Legal design can provide for comprehensibility and a higher quality, according to Katri Nousiainen, doctoral student at Hanken School of Economics and professional in legal education.

Porträttbild av Katri Nousiainen
Katri Nousiainen

“The idea behind legal design is to make judicial information, services, and products more approachable and understandable by employing human-centred design methods. This is reached by combining design methods and the latest innovations in the field of technology”, Nousiainen, who holds a fellow position at the Harvard Law School, explains. 

In addition, legal design as an approach takes the advantage of interdisciplinary best practices and know-how, for instance, of law and economics, behavioural economics, visual arts, linguistics, business research, engineering, neuroscience, and psychology, in creating the most efficient, high quality, and valuable legal services, products and processes for the end users.

“The legal design approach will increase efficiency and provide for improved quality in legal practice. Legal design is not a single document, it´s an ongoing process”, Nousiainen says.

Traditional legalese contracts are difficult to understand

Nousiainen states that the legal design approach can bring systemic impact in society by decreasing information and knowledge asymmetry. 

Her pioneering empirical study (Negotiation Journal, Harvard Law, forthcoming in February 2023) found that the legal designed commercial contracts were more comprehensible — even to lawyers and sophisticated parties. Almost 62.5 percent of the participants preferred the legal designed contract over the traditional legalese contract. 

“The preliminary results further revealed that around 70 percent of the participants were not able to comprehend the traditional written legal terms and found them ambiguous, and even nearly 90 percent of the participants pointed out that there could be further room for improvement within the clarity of the terms”, Nousiainen says.

Legal design brings many benefits

This novel experimental study has further shown that the advantage of legal design approach is to create more comprehensible contracts that bring benefits and incentives, such as, innovation for sustainability, signaling of trust, image, and transparency, decrease in transaction and opportunity costs, competitive business advantage, and more deep-rooted contractual commitment.

Nousiainen says that the legal design approach is also well-suited to be employed within emerging and new technologies. 

“This could be pivotal in the current rise of new quantum technologies such as quantum computers. My colleague Joonas Keski-Rahkonen and I have written a Quantum Roadmap – Law, Economics, Sustainability, and Society , that will guide legal professionals and other authorities through its five principles to achieve a more sustainable approach within emerging technologies.”

More information: