We make legal content understandable to build sustainable relationships: Visual Contracts

Visual Contracts strive for an equal and just world. By creating proactive visual contracts the company builds a catalyst for a more human friendly just system. Their visual contracts and co-creation approach help build confidence in dealing with legal topics and supports in making autonomous decisions.

With this the company helps making the legal system accessible to everyone, regardless of background, disability or level of education. So that people are legally empowered and become active citizens; citizens who know their rights and obligations and act pro-actively towards this.

The purpose of a visual contract

The firm creates visual contracts that help people make autonomous decisions and build sustainable relationships. Their visual contracts are pro-active and result focused instead of traditional, only risk averse and written for courts/judges/lawyer.

They believe anyone is capable of making good contracts and the law should be accessible to everyone, just as the medium that is used to create these contracts to make them tangible.

Q. What's in it for you?

Depending on your background you can find the relevant content for you.
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Employee/citizen: Understand legal documents and make autonomous decisions to enhance your personal legal empowerment.

‍Business owner: Building sustainable relationships and creating a strategic advantage with clearer and more user friendly legal communication.
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Legal Counsel: Bringing legal expertise and advice across in an accessible way and making it easier to integrate legal earlier in the process.

Legal Design Thinker: Helping the legal field to create a mindset change and to implement visual legal documents.

An example of visual contract

User friendly NDA

The challenge: For AIRBUS Defense and Space and together with Visual’s colleague Legal Designer Astrid Kohlmeier, they redesigned and co-created a user friendly NDA for the collaboration on innovative projects with startups. AIRBUS continuously seeks to strengthen their market position in an established industry by developing new products in collaboration with startups. In these collaborations the first point of contact is to sign a NDA. In this situation AIRBUS recognizes their position and legal resources compared to startups that often don't have in-house legal counsels, which leads to uncertainty regarding signing a NDA. With the redesigned design AIRBUS shows their best effort to build a sustainable relationship focused on trust, in order to set the environment for great innovation.

The approach: In order to create this trust, a better understandable contract/NDA was the focus of this project. The contract innovators team of AIRBUS learned in a first Kick off workshop the Legal Design method. In a joined effort together with Astrid Kohlmeier, they prepared and conducted this workshop to let participants come into the flow of Visual’s special way of approaching challenges and to analyze the internal status quo of the problem at the same time. The team started with the assumption that “startup companies don‘t want NDAs and don’t take care too much about legal issues”.

Visual Contracts following deep research phase in which they conducted intense interviews with all relevant stakeholders in the ecosystem of NDAs (Legal department, contracting department, procurement, startup companies etc.) showed a complete different view on this topic. The main finding of the research was that startup companies want their IP to be protected as much as possible by an NDA but wish for an agreement to sign, that is transparent, easy to access and understandable.

The outcome

Based on these findings Visual co-created a first version of a re-structured, shortened and simplified NDA including explanations of legal expressions for people without legal background. The test with users showed not only potential for further improvement but also the potential impact user centric contracts could expand: with the transparent and understandable NDA users felt understood and taken serious as a business partner. Remarkable on this project was that this trust building effect was triggered only by re-designing a contract!

Meet Lieke Beelen, Founder/CEO

As a founder of the legal design thinking platform Visual Contracts and previously as freelance UX designer/researcher/visual thinker Lieke strives to improve the quality of lives and create a social impact. At Visual Contracts she does that by making the legal world more accessible and understandable, using human centered approaches and visual thinking amongst others.

What she really loves to do is to set the first steps in product/service development by prototyping new innovative concepts and testing them with customers and/or end-users. Making vague and abstract ideas which are still in the heads of people concrete and tangible with visualization and prototypes. And with that further develop products and services that create impact and improve quality of life.

“Our unique selling point is our design/tech background and expertise in collaboration with lawyers, while most Legal Designers come from a legal background and then start learning to design.”