Law for Normal People

Originally posted on the d.school’s Whiteboard:
Over this past fellowship year, I’ve run so many workshops and pop-up classes on how to make law more engaging and usable for “normal people”.

People with legal problems or who aren’t highly educated are not alone in this “normal” bucket. People with PhDs, highly paid professionals, even law school graduates fall into this category as well — they want and need legal tools and processes that are built for “normal people”. That’s not to say these people want everything dumbed down. But they don’t want to use an exhausting amount of brain power to just figure out how to get from A to B in the world of law.

No one — except some supernormal lawyers — really enjoys the status quo of densely textual legalese and byzantine process that you must go through to get a legal problem solved.

So now, in the post-workshop phase of my fellowship, I’m sifting through all the findings and putting together patterns that can guide new families of legal product and service design.