Legal design in action: why openness matters for climate and the profession

What does it mean for law to open up? For centuries legal practice was the preserve of specialists; a closed system dominated by qualified professionals, speaking in technical language and advising within narrow boundaries.

But many critical challenges we face today don’t fit neatly into those boundaries. Climate change in particular is too large, complex and distributed to be solved by one discipline alone. It is at once a legal, economic, technological, social and environmental issue which demands responses that are just as interconnected. And climate is not unique in this: many pressing issues share the same cross-domain complexity.

This is one of the reasons the world of law is changing fast. Technology, new standards, and shifting expectations are reshaping what it means to practise law. Legal teams are beginning to collaborate closely with designers, technologists, accountants, and even local communities to create solutions that cut across domains. In short, law is being democratised.

At The Chancery Lane Project, we see this shift as essential. We publish our content openly and share roles like our Legal Designer to show what multidisciplinary practice looks like in reality. This article explores how design thinking is becoming mainstream in law and what that means for the profession’s future.

Forces reshaping the legal profession

Law’s evolution isn’t happening in isolation. Rapid advances in technology are rewriting the way legal work gets done. While business models in law are famously slow to change, technology and law are now inseparable. AI, automation, and data tools are shifting routine tasks, and in the process creating entirely new kinds of legal roles. The growth of “legal engineer” positions, for example, shows how quickly the profession is adapting. These roles blend legal operations, product design, and technical implementation – a sign that multidisciplinary skills are now essential to the modern legal toolkit.

Let’s get the tricky part out of the way: this role doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional box. It’s part legal ops, part product specialist, part solutions architect, and part client whisperer. If you enjoy roles that stay static, this probably isn’t it.

Legora, Legal Engineer job advert

This shift isn’t just being driven by technology. Clients and society at large expect more transparency, accessibility, and sustainability from legal services. Contracts are no longer simply about allocating risk; they are also instruments for change, helping organisations deliver on climate commitments, demonstrate supply chain integrity, and uphold human rights. At a community level, the Legal Design Summit, which we support and sponsor, embodies this shift. Its 2025 agenda covers everything from generative AI to climate contracts and legal literacy, reflecting the broadening scope of what legal practice can and should engage with.

Standards are reinforcing this trend. Just recently, the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) released ISO 24495-2 on plain language in legal communication. This may sound niche, but it potentially represents a watershed moment: a global benchmark for clear, effective drafting that embeds design principles into professional practice. Plain language is no longer a matter of preference; it is becoming a compliance requirement and a measure of quality. For lawyers, it means designing documents that are not just legally accurate but also accessible and actionable for the people who rely on them.

Put together, these developments show that the legal profession simply cannot stay siloed. Technology is accelerating change, clients and communities are demanding more, and standards are setting new expectations. To meet this moment, lawyers must work alongside designers, technologists, and other disciplines to shape solutions that reach beyond the narrow boundaries of traditional practice.

How we’ve used design techniques to increase impact

Our approach to legal design is practical, people-centred and aligned with climate and nature action. We appreciate the value design brings to legal transformation and try to apply it to our work in the broadest sense. Our organisation was founded on collaborative expert-led drafting, but today we use a broader range of methods; from primary research and concept testing with users, through accessibility standards for our legal content.

We follow this approach not only to make climate-aligned contracting clearer, more usable, and easier to adopt in the real world, but because it delivers greater impact and helps drive our mission forward.

Here are just a few recent examples of how we’ve used design techniques in our work;

• Principles lead resources: In parallel to our highly specific clauses, we also identified a need to create high level guides that translate contracting principles into frameworks accessible to non-lawyers. This now means that roughly 35% of our users come from non-legal professions such policy advisors, supply chain experts and academics.
• Co-creation and co-design: Our latest guide on deforestation-free supply chains was co-created with legal experts, NGOs, and companies. This helps us simplify a complex legal market so it makes sense for users, drawing on a wide mix of perspectives.
• Content testing: we’ve ran content testing sessions with lawyers around the world to check that our resources are accessible and adaptable to other jurisdictions and contexts. This led to over 165,000 global users in 2024.
• Behaviour change: We’ve been applying the COM-B framework across several initiatives to strengthen the impact of climate-aligned contracting. Our monthly working group creates an opportunity for practitioners to come together, share knowledge, and build momentum as a community. Our online training course builds capability by equipping legal and business professionals with the skills and confidence to align their practices with climate action. Together, these activities help sustain motivation by showing the real-world impact of collective learning and action.
• Monitoring behaviour: By tracking shifts in visitor behaviour to our website, such as increasing page views per visit coupled with shorter session times, we’ve revealed how AI is reshaping engagement with out content. This has helped guide our future strategy on how we stay connected with both visible and invisible audiences.

For us, design turns inclusion into impact. By making contracts and resources accessible to both lawyers and non-lawyers, we ensure climate-aligned solutions can be understood, adapted, and acted on by the widest possible audience. Embedding design thinking across our work – from content testing and co-creation to behaviour change and analytics – helps us deliver clearer, more usable outputs that drive climate and nature action in practice. Our ambition is that design becomes second nature across the legal profession, so that every lawyer sees it as part of how they create change.

What open legal practice could look like…

One thing we love about the legal design movement is how closely it mirrors our own. Both share similar goals, challenges, and stakeholders, and both are strengthened when they work together. We know that lawyers can navigate climate challenges more effectively with a design-led mindset and the last 18 months show just how quickly progress can be made when openness and collaboration take root.

Legal design has shifted from being a “nice idea” to a codified practice supported by international standards, new professional roles, and major community events like the Legal Design Summit. This is the kind of momentum that hints at what a more open legal practice might look like in the future. It would be a profession where lawyers are not gatekeepers but collaborators, where documents are written to be acted on by everyone who needs them, and where design thinking is as common as legal drafting.

If these trends continue, open legal practice could mean lawyers working alongside educators to redesign how law is taught, partnering with technologists to shape trustworthy AI systems, and co-creating with communities most affected by climate change. In short: a legal profession that welcomes in new voices, and that measures its success not just by compliance or precedent, but by clarity, usability, and impact in the real world.

… and the new places it could take lawyers

Openness cuts both ways. If law is welcoming new disciplines, it can also step into spaces where it’s been absent or sidelined. For example:

• Public service design: Lawyers embedded in service design teams for healthcare, welfare, housing, and education. Instead of law being something that shows up at the end as regulation or compliance, legal design would help shape the citizen experience from the start — making rights, entitlements, and obligations usable in real time.
• Climate and environmental transitions: Legal design used not just for corporate compliance, but as a participatory method for communities to design adaptation plans, shared stewardship agreements, or regenerative business models. Law would shift from the role of regulator to co-designer of environmental futures.
• Community organising and collective action: Law opened up as a civic tool, not just something you “buy.” Community groups could adapt and deploy legal templates for local campaigns, climate action, or cooperative ownership models. This takes law into the realm of grassroots organising, historically off-limits to formal legal practice.

Opening up the law doesn’t mean losing rigour or professionalism, it means applying those strengths in new contexts where they can have greater impact. From shaping how public services are delivered, to helping communities plan for climate transitions, to giving grassroots groups the tools they need to act, lawyers have a chance to move from the margins to the centre of social change.

The challenge is to bring design, collaboration and openness into everyday practice, not just special projects. If we can do that, the legal profession will not only remain relevant but will become a more practical, trusted partner in tackling the complex issues of our time.