Legal Design Thinking, Visuals in Contracts and its Legal Validity
Abstract
According to the results of recent studies, contracts today are not drafted or work the way its users intend. In general, too much emphasis is made in minimizing risk and not much work is made in order for contracts to serve as tools for the parties to accomplish their commercial objectives. This situation demands a change of paradigm. An alternative to the current paradigm is that of “Proactive and Preventive Law”, which objective is to prevent the occurrence of a conflict before it arises, incentivizing collaboration and trying to make contracts serve as a tool for those purposes. In order for this to be accomplished, it is necessary to work to make contracts truly understandable and usable by its true users. One way to procure for contracts to be more understandable and usable is by means of tools that Legal Design Thinking and contract design make available to us, such as visuals tools: icons, timelines, cycles, diagrams and tables, among others. We understand that the use of these kind of tools has full legal validity as the principle of contractual freedom allows for the parties to determine the content, style and format of a contract.
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