Practicing Legal Design – Book Promotion

Invaluable new title on delivering better legal services

Practicing Legal Design bridges the gap between theory and execution, offering a comprehensive guide to implementing legal design in law firms, legal departments, institutions, and other legal service environments.

Legal design is no longer a niche concept but a growing movement reshaping how legal services are delivered, understood, and experienced. While discussions around innovation in law have gained momentum, meaningful adoption often lags behind ambition. Many legal professionals recognize the need for transformation but struggle to integrate a prototype-driven and interdisciplinary approach into their working environments.

From exploring user-centered approaches to structuring design-driven processes, the book provides actionable insights into how legal design can enhance clarity, accessibility, and efficiency in legal services, and most importantly, how it can help you develop better relationships with your clients.

You will find this book useful if you:

• Want to understand your clients better
• Wish to know more about legal design
• Want to create works in legal design
• Are intrigued about new ways of providing legal advice
• Are curious about the evolution of legal services

Hi Marco, great to see you here. I guess the first question is a mandatory one. Why this book?

Hi Allard, and hi everyone who reads. The answer is multifaceted. First of all, there are not many books about practicing legal design. This might be the only one that fully focuses on how it actually works in the real world. Secondly, the book does something rare: it explores the tensions and contradictions that emerge when you apply design thinking to law, a domain traditionally built on precision, hierarchy, and control. In my mind (and I hope to have achieved what I was hoping for), this is  not just a “how-to” manual. It’s a mirror that reflects both the reasons why creativity matters and what happens when you introduce it into systems that instinctively resist it. You know, the book is written from real experience: successes and failures, workshops and negotiations, long conversations, and quiet reflections. It aims to be both inspiring and brutally honest about the complexities of practicing legal design today.

Finally, let me clarify something on a more practical note. The book is available both in print and digital formats, because accessibility matters as much as ideas.

The second question is a natural consequence of the first answer. Why now?

Because legal design is at a turning point. The field itself is evolving, and fast. Artificial intelligence is transforming how we think, how we practice, and the very nature of the legal services (sometimes products) we provide.

The crucial question is: are we staying true to the core principles of legal design (creating a user-centered, human experiences) or are we clinging to outdated versions of what legal design used to be?

This book tries to offer an answer. Not a definitive one, but a practical, reflective, and honest one. It’s meant to guide professionals navigating this moment of transformation, combining strategic insight with grounded practice. In many ways, it’s the book I wish I could have read when I began my journey in this field – a bridge between vision and execution, between ideals and the day-to-day reality of working with clients.

What is the target of your book?

Most practical books are written for a mixed audience of students, academics, and practitioners, and that’s partly true here too. It will certainly appeal to those studying or teaching legal design and innovation, whether in law schools or other universities.

But, in essence, this book speaks most directly to law firm partners and general counsels. It invites them to rethink how they work with internal and external clients, how they communicate, and how they design legal experiences that are truly effective for people.

It’s about shifting from a transactional mindset to a relational one. From producing documents to shaping experiences. From serving the law to serving those who live through it.

How is it structured?

The book is divided into four main parts. The first is a general intro to the topic. I almost removed it at first, but I realized many readers still need a clear picture about the core of legal design. What legal design is, why it matters, and where it fits. The second one concerns the related areas (such as gamification, proactive law, artificial intelligence, dark patterns, and ESG). Many of these fields influence and intersect with legal design without being identical to it, and they deserve a dedicated discussion. The third part is where hands-on starts. We focus on challenges, facilitation, team dynamics, and the real obstacles of applying design to legal work. The last part is the Leonardo Framework, the methodology we developed at Better Ipsum for document design. We decided to share it openly because we care more about growing a community than guarding a method.

Each part concludes with an in-depth interview (we called it “thoughtful reflections”) that expands and humanizes the discussion: Michael Doherty, the first tenured professor of legal design worldwide; Sally Guyer, CEO of World Commerce and Contracting; Ashley Ruggles and Maclen Stanley, legal influencers with more than 1million followers on TikTok and 300.000 on Instagram; Matthew Butterick, author of Typography for Lawyers , font creator, and counsel in landmark copyright cases.

Together, these conversations add texture, perspective, and humanity to the book. They remind us that legal design is not just about tools and methods. It’s about people, dialogue, and shared meaning.

Let’s go back a few months or years. Is there something you would have done differently?

That’s not an easy question. I probably underestimated how much impact the structure of the book would have on everything else. I re-drafted the structure several times (should I include the interviews or not? How about examples? Etc) All of this despite having a pre-defined table of contents. If we compare it with the structure, the writing itself turned out to be easier than expected

Another challenge – at times a hellish one- has been balancing a business while writing a book. The two worlds require different energies, and switching between them constantly was like living in two time zones at once.

Finally, I would mention the editing, a process that often feels like writing the book all over again. Working line by line made the text sharper, clearer, and more coherent, but it was almost as demanding as the writing part. Language is central to everything, and even more so in a book devoted to communication. Revisiting, rethinking, and refining every sentence until it truly earned its place became not just a task, but part of the book’s very philosophy

Imagine it’s 2030. How do you see the world of legal design?

That’s a million-dollar question.

If I look at the half-full glass, I see a world where artificial intelligence has amplified access to justice, where automated translation tools empower non-native speakers, and where visual and interactive documents are the norm. Contracts are not static texts but dynamic experiences: gamified, adaptive, and measurable. Data-driven insights have made legal processes not only more efficient but more humane. Legal design, in that world, is no longer a niche; it’s a mindset woven into the DNA of how law is practiced and taught.

But the half-empty glass tells a different story, one of stagnation. A world where legal design gets absorbed by bureaucracy or turned into marketing jargon. Where the ISOs on plain language and legal communication are not used. Where we forget that design is about empathy, and law about trust. If we get stuck defending old models of authority or tradition, we risk making ourselves irrelevant.

To cut it short, the future of legal design depends on whether we keep faith in its principles: clarity, accessibility, and humanity. If we do, the field won’t just survive: it will redefine what law means for people.

One last question. If you could give one suggestion to those practicing or aiming to practice legal design, what would it be?

Play. That’s it. I’ve always believed that play is a deeper form of work, and that’s especially true in legal design, where co-creation, experimentation, and prototyping are at the heart of what we do. Play opens the mind, lowers barriers, and brings people together. It transforms the design process from something technical into something alive, human, and collaborative.

So my suggestion is simple: play seriously. Explore, test, fail, rebuild. Let curiosity drive you. Because play, when done with purpose, is what keeps innovation real, and law human.