DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020 3 © 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Legal Design as a Thing: A Theory of Change and a Set of Methods to Craft a Human-Centered Legal System Margaret Hagan Introduction Human-centered design has been a dominant innovation method- ology in service industries, from medicine to insurance to finance. 1 It has now come to the legal system, together with movements related to legal technology, legal hacking, and access to justice reform, as a collective legal design movement. 2 University labs, conferences, classes, and new job positions are oriented around “legal design”—the marriage of a human-cen- tered design approach to the challenges and structures of the legal system. 3 This burgeoning community of people is interested in using a design approach to improve the legal system. 4 In light of this growth, the need arises for more rigor: rigor in how a design process is applied, in how design research is conducted, and in how the outcomes of this process and research are evaluated. Fur- ther discussion is needed to ground this design work, which is often creative, decentralized, and open, in an essential set of meth- ods and instruments. These parameters can ensure honest reflec- tion on how well the design approach can serve the legal system, improve people’s access to justice, and promote innovation in this professional community. This special issue presents pieces from lawyers, designers, technologists, scholars, and community organizers that detail what legal design is in practice. The pieces demonstrate how the craft of legal design is developing as one that combines a community- oriented co-design ethos, with a commitment to navigating the bureaucracies of the legal system to effect change, and with the integration of empirical research to evaluate whether user-centered design and policy proposals do, in fact, improve people’s outcomes. Before readers dive into this collection of cases, this intro- ductory piece gives some initial grounding. It offers an initial legal design process, set of research methodologies and instruments, and grounding in analogous fields and literature. It also offers a wider theory of change—of how a design approach can feed into https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00600 1 Charles Owen, “Design Thinking: Notes on Its Nature and Use,” Design Research Quarterly 1, no. 2 (2006): 16–27; Tim Brown, “Design Thinking,” Harvard Business Review (June 2008): 85–92; Charles Owen, “Design Thinking: Driving Innovation,” BPM Strategies Magazine, The Business Process Management Institute, September 2006; and Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 5–21. doi.org/10.2307/1511637. 2 Colette Brunschwig, “On Visual Law: Visual Legal Communication Practices and Their Scholarly Exploration,” in Zeichen Und Zauber Des Rechts: Festschrift Für Friedrich Lachmayer [Signs and Magic of the Rights: Commemorative for Friedrich Lachmayer] eds. Erich Schweihofer et al. (Bern: Editions Weblaw, 2014), 899–933; Véronique Fraser and Jean-François Roberge, “Legal Design Lawyering: Rebooting Legal Business Model with Design Thinking,” Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal 16, no. 2008 (2016): 303–16; Jamie Young, A Virtual Day in Court: Design Thinking and Virtual Courts (London: RSA, 2011); Victor Quintanilla, “Human-Centered Civil Justice Design,” Penn State Law Review 121, no. 3 (2017): 745–806; and Mark Szabo, “Design Thinking in Legal Practice Management,” Design Management Review 21, no. 3 (September 29, 2010): 44–6. 3 Margaret Hagan, “The State of Legal Design: The Big Takeaways of the Stanford Law + Design Summit,” Legal Design and Innovation, September 25, 2017, https://medium.com/legal-design- and-innovation/the-state-of-legal-design- the-big-takeaways-of-the-stanford-law- Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00600 by guest on 02 December 2021