How I can help
Legal design has been described as ‘the application of human-centred design to … law, to make legal systems and services more human-centred, usable, and satisfying’. Design considerations factor into how best to present online terms to customers, redrafting arcane legal language into plain English, using visuals to summarise complexity, developing interactive legal tools, and all manner of things in between. I’ve worked on many such matters and am keen to help.
Some examples
The projects I’ve worked on include:
- distilling complex legal review processes into user-friendly decision trees
- re-writing contracts into plainer English forms
- developing an online collection form to accelerate a client job, standardise certain outputs and make the inputted data available in multiple forms (HTML, Word and spreadsheet)
- developing online tools to help people navigate the law and obtain preliminary advice
- designing tube-map style diagrams to explain cross-government information flows.
(I’m not able to show examples of all projects listed above as some are not public.)
Blog musings
I also write a blog called WP and Legal Stuff that seeks to explain and make the ‘legal stuff’ easier for users of WordPress (and other content management systems for that matter). A number of posts on that blog are influenced by legal design thinking.
They include:
- “I’d rather see [an] attorney’s attention spent … on clarity and brevity”, in which I present two different ‘human readable’ versions of the GPL software licence (the first summarises the GPL in sequential form and the second takes a Creative Commons-style approach to summarising the GPL)
- How to apply the GPL to your themes and plugins (and avoid getting in the shi*), which provides detailed guidance to help developers apply the GPL to their plugins and themes, as well as an online ‘GPL Engine’ to help them do so
- Discouraging public redistribution of commercial themes and plugins – poll results, in which I published the results of a poll I’d taken that were relevant to a contractual mechanism I’d proposed that would seek to discourage purchasers of a commercial theme or plugin from making the theme or plugin available on a website for download by others (whether for free or a charge), even when the theme or plugin is 100% GPL-licensed
- Step-by-step guide to attributing Creative Commons-licensed images, in which I sought to help people attribute Creative Commons-licensed images correctly
- Template terms and policies for WordPress multisite businesses, in which I provide – as the title suggests – free access to template terms and policies for those enabling others to create WordPress sites through a multisite installation
- Protecting WordPress consultancies with terms of business, in which I sought to help WordPress consultancies protect themselves by providing template plain-English terms of business
- How lawyers’ terms for your WordPress business can affect your revenue, in which I explained how the manner in which lawyers (or others) draft terms of use and other legal terms for their clients’ online businesses can have a significant impact on customers’ perception of the business and potentially the business’s bottom line.
- A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL, which introduces an ebook I wrote that helps people understand and apply the GPL across a wide range of subjects.