Visualisation makes contracts easier to understand, especially for non-lawyer, day-to-day users. Despite its benefits, the practice doesn’t appear to be widespread. In order to explore some of the reasons that lawyers might be reluctant to prepare visuals, I undertook a contract visualisation exercise on a commonly used construction contract, AS4000. In this post I present […]
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Seeing the criminal justice system as infrastructure
The damning insights into the parlous state of the UK’s criminal justice system by the Secret Barrister are caused in part by a public and political class with little regard for the essential public good that the criminal justice system delivers. With that in mind, re-branding of the criminal justice system as ‘essential public infrastructure’ […]
LegalTech in a Flat World
In Rules for a Flat World – Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy, Professor Gillian Hadfield argues that our legal infrastructure is failing to keep pace with the complexity of our modern, digitised world. In this post, I note how legaltech is beginning to address some of […]
Design parallels in Legal and Healthcare
In listening to a new podcast on the cost of healthcare in the US, I was struck by the many parallels between consuming healthcare, in particular in the US market, and consuming legal services. The parallels span much of the dysfunction of the US healthcare system and go to some of the classic gripes about […]
Construction-to-Law: Gantt Charts
Technology doesn’t have to be new to add value. Innovation is as much about matching an old idea to a new application. The Gantt Chart was developed over a century ago. It is a visual design tool which communicates the relationship between, and duration of, different activities in a project. Despite its age, it remains […]
Construction-to-Law: Tendering
(This is my second substantive post in a series on what the legal industry could learn from the construction industry. For my introductory note, see here.) The ‘tender’ process is widely used in the construction industry to help clients select the best contractor to carry out a project. Tendering allows clients to easily compare the […]
Construction-to-Law: Structure
This is my first substantive post in a series on the structure, tools and processes that the legal industry could borrow from the construction industry. (For my introductory note, see here.) In this post I focus on structure – for example, how a client engaging a law firm to run litigation might do so in […]
