Is Legal Design Jam™ only for lawyers or designers?
No, Legal Design Jam™ is for everyone who is interested in trying to make legal documents easier and more user-friendly. You may be a coder, a journalist, a civil servant, a business person who deals with contracts – or just a citizen who wishes to make legal documents more human-readable!
How does this differ from a hackathon or a service jam?
A Legal Design Jam™ is different from a hackathon because you do not need to be able to code to join. All the prototypes we build are rough, static prototypes. You do not even have to be skilled in design software: your rough prototype can be completely done with paper, pens and collage.
A Legal Design Jam™ is also different from a service jam because it is usually much shorter, and it is not necessarily about services. The goal is mostly on documents and how to redesign them into something usable, engaging, and pleasant for users.
Why should I join – or request – a Legal Design Jam™?
• To learn how to communicate effectively complex information
• To try out a user-centered approach to legal communication
• To improve your skills in working in a multidisciplinary team
• To face an interesting information design challenge
• To innovate document traditions that belong to the past
• To have fun, and meet likeminded, cool people interested in legal design
What do you mean by “Legal Design Jam™ can be organized as a free public event, as classroom experience, or as a special training for organizations and professionals”?
Legal Design Jam™ is a workshop format, and can be used for different purposes.
Often, LDJ™ has been provided as a special workshop for university students in design or law (or both at the same time!). In this case, the client is an educational institution who wishes to provide an unique multidisciplinary experience to their students.
In other cases, LDJs™ have been organized as free public events in collaboration with local hosts: the LDJ™ is used as an "excuse" to mingle, network, and do something together with likeminded people in cities I have been visiting.
Lastly, LDJ™ can be purchased by organizations as a training experience for its personnel, or as a way to intensively kickstart the redesign of own documents.
We are an NGO / student group / voluntary association / advocacy group. Can we have a discount or a Legal Design Jam™ pro-bono?
I evaluate such requests case by case.
If I am already travelling to your city, I have time, and you agree to make all LDJs™ results public under a CC license, I may be able to help!
Can I organize my own Legal Design Jam independently in my own city? Will you send me a toolkit for organizers?
Unfortunately no. You can take inspiration for this workshop and come up with your own version of it, but you cannot call it a "Legal Design Jam™", claim affiliation with Legal Design Jam™, and I will not send you a ready-made organizer's toolkit.
Who are the people behind Legal Design Jam™?
Legal Design Jam™ has been created by legal design pioneer Stefania Passera . Back in 2013, Stefania was searching for a way to inspire others to experience in first person legal design, visual thinking, and prototyping methods: this is how the Legal Design Jam™ format was born. Since then, she has been organizing and facilitating each Legal Design Jam™ in collaboration with different local hosts and partners in Europe and USA.