Legal design at Northeastern
*resisting the urge to open with “Hello World”… *
Publishing my first real post here in the form of a live blog. I first learned of this practice while perusing Crystal Lee’s thoughtful posts. As a habitual transcriber, I feel in my element 😎.
Below is my capture of a conversation hosted this afternoon by Northeastern University’s Center for Design about the recently published book Legal Design: Dignifying People in Legal Systems.
CfD 2025 Spring Conversation Series: Legal Design: Dignifying People in Legal Systems
Moderator: Miso Kim
Panelists: Steven Geofrey, Alexander Nally, Gabriel Teninbaum
This book was co-edited by Northeastern CAMD and NULab scholars Miso Kim, Dan Jackson, and Jules Rochelle Siervert, and features additional contributions from the panelists today.
How do we define the emerging field of legal design? Legal design “seeks to improve the legal system’s accessibility, usability, and effectiveness through human-centered design methods and principles.”
There are many ways to think about the end goal of design. These contributors argue the goal of design is to elevate human quality of life and human dignity. Specifically, they ask: How can we humanize legal systems?
Panelists to present on their chapter contributions…
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Steven Geofrey (Associate Professor at Northeastern and Coordinator of Creative Coding) Chapter: “Building technology with(out) people”
What happens when you place technology in the legal system?
Qualities of personhood that design wants to uphold, such as dignity, agency, self-efficacy, can become contentious when building technology. At times we think we’re building technology with people, but really we’re building without them.
There’s a trend in current law school curricula to teach lawyers how to code. One justification (Georgetown University): it will make them a more efficient lawyer. Broadening their toolkit could make them more productive.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with incorporating these tools into these professions. However, there is a gradient of values produced. What happens when the same technological discourse that’s attached to these tools is imported into legal practice?
Techno-solutionist views and values of Silicon Valley—tech for the sake of tech—is a particular orientation toward technology. This orientation builds without people. Advancement is only and always good according to this view. Tech is thought to intrinsically improve the lives of real people. But we’ve seen many examples that show this isn’t true.
Tech courses in law school are framed as inherently helpful, and these skills are framed as neutral. But if we care about preserving the dignity of real people, we need to understand what’s lost when we import the values of tech into law wholesale. We need to take a moment to think critically about how we frame and teach these skills in legal education.
Building technology with people instead places value in technologically-situated skills. Technology is not neutral, it’s always designed by someone with a set of values. Value-sensitive design is a better approach — what does the interaction between law and tech look like, and how can we ensure we center humans and our dignity?
Recommendations:
- Be wary of how we use tech – when and why. Not everyone in law needs to be a technologist, a programmer, a developer. Plenty of roles in law do not need to be automated or completed programmatically. We should ask: when does tech make a positive contribution?
- When we teach technical skills, we should center the discussion of values, aims, and motivation. What does it mean to use this tech in my practice? Who are the stakeholders? How are they impacted by my use of this tech in this context?
- Integrate into these curricula the additional literacies that are required to use tech thoughtfully, e.g., design literacy. Code, for instance, isn’t just a tool with instrumental value, it’s embedded in all these different ways of thinking about the world.
- Rather than creating lawyers who can code, maybe we focus on training literate practitioners of technology – being aware of the situated dimensions of that tech, it is a medium of interaction between you and the task at hand.
Per Ward and Bruce’s The Tech that Comes Next: the inviolable veneration of tech is unsustainable and inaccessible. Instead, we should move toward values alignment.
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Alexander Nally, JD
Lots of things out in the world have been architected for us without our consultation or involvement. Legal design opens up conversations about what we are designing, for whom, and why.
How can we start to design policies that reflect and address our needs and lived experiences?
Through the NULaw lab, Nally worked on an app to surface legal resources for women veterans. Critical to this work was engaging in co-design exercises to learn what solutions would be most impactful to them.
Working for the MA Department of Higher Education, Nally has seen how technology can be useful in legal work, e.g., for programmatically organizing and categorizing constituent complaints to enable quicker responses. Sometimes this integration of tech into legal work is pretty simple, or “low-tech.”
Great legal design doesn’t always look cool or shiny, but it does always involve intentionality and ensuring those most impacted have a seat at the table.
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Gabe Teninbaum (Professor of Legal Writing at Suffolk Law School) The Peril and Promise of Certificates and Degree Programs in Legal Design
How do you separate credentials from the knowledge and wisdom they’re meant to signal?
In legal education, students are highly focused on credentials and grades. As we design tools to teach students how to become better legal practitioners, how do we get them focused on the learning itself?
Principles of the legal innovation community at Suffolk:
- Show don’t tell: Rather than talk about things, we do things. E.g., making a tool to support victims of hate crimes. How can online tools help improve efficiency in the court while also delivering a desirable outcome for all? Community liaison to research what users need is critical.
- Downplay grades: People want a grade, certificate etc. We work very hard to de-emphasize this and instead support learning in a relatively low-stakes environment.
- Create a community: Make sure people who are interested in these concepts have others they can collaborate with. Thinking beyond the classroom.
- Build space for informal exploration: Enable people to explore new ideas outside of a particular class or project.
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Panelist discussion
What is legal design?
Alexander: Legal design is thinking expansively about what people need and how they access it.
Gabriel: Legal design seeks to create alignment between processes and outcomes. Historically it hasn’t always worked this way. Legal design asks us to think about how our rules and policies will actually play out. But legal design can of course also be used for negative, less prosocial ends, e.g., propping up those already in power.
Steven: Using design as a heuristic to improve legal processes. The law itself is a designed artifact. Thinking of it this way opens up possibilities for how we can change it. There are simple mechanisms in law that can be used as a design heuristic to figure out how we can improve the lives of people interacting with these systems.
What is the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives?
Gabriel: I think the ideal future of law looks more like public health school than medical school. Given the access to justice gap and our increasing inability to solve legal needs, our future looks more like public health. This means engaging in partnerships, recognizing that when we encounter everyday legal problems, they aren’t just legal problems: they are just manifesting through law. So housing, medical, counseling, all these industries involved in caring for others, need to collaborate.
Alexander: Legal design is particularly needed in our legislature, e.g., state government. The current conversations around policy ideas are far removed from the lived experience of constituents. These institutions could share in the excitement of developing better processes before laws become concrete. It’s easier to co-design from the start rather than change laws retroactively.
Steven: I have been thinking a lot about human-centered approaches in AI and the opportunities for interdisciplinary interventions in that domain to serve as a model for what we do in other domains, including legal design. Bringing together diverse voices, taking a participatory approach toward AI – this same approach can be adopted in legal design. Per an earlier point, some of the best legal design doesn’t necessarily look cool or flashy. If we can figure out how to lean into the legal equivalent of “minimal computing,” that will be a central part of the future.