About
Legal design is a new way of drafting contracts and banking documentation in a clear and comprehensible manner for the readers in order to generate trust in the bank-customer relationship
Innovation presentation
Legal design is a new way of drafting contracts and - more generally - any document that the bank prepares for its customers.
We have started thinking of reviewing the Bank's contracts because we ourselves, when reading such contracts, sometimes got confused in their textual and expository complexity. We therefore thought that for the client this difficulty could only be even greater.The innovation of this approach therefore consists in preparing documents and contracts having in mind the reader's point of view and not that of the bank, thus trying to adopt clear, easy-to-understand language and replacing any regulatory references with provisions of the same content but using a common language.
Another new feature is the graphic appearance of these documents: in order to achieve the objective of ease of reading, it is also important that the concepts expressed are well represented from a visual point of view, using, for example, icons for an immediate understanding of the topics dealt with at a given point in the document or bold type to emphasise important aspects. The layout in this sense also has a primary function, the use of properly organised and spaced text enables the reader not to get lost and to find what he is looking for without too much effort.
Achieving the objectives of ease of reading and effective understanding of the document on the part of the reader are ultimately aimed at a further objective: to generate trust with customers and, consequently, distinctive relations even in comparison with the offerings of competitors.
To date, we have been working on approximately 10 contracts (i.e. prepaid card, current account, investment advise, etc), managing to decrease of 60% the number of words for each of them, and we aim to review in Legal Design the whole Bank's documentation in the next few months.
Uniqueness of the project
The uniqueness of the project stems from the Bank's change of paradigm in communicating with its customers and consisting in the rewriting of contracts and banking documentation in order to simplify and make as clear as possible concepts that, by their nature, are not.
In particular, this paradigm shift can be summarised in the following points:
Simplicity and Trasparency: simple and clear language. No more regulatory references or provisions of a highly technical nature and difficult for the non-expert to understand, but texts completely revised having in mind the reader's and not the Bank's perspective. This has entailed a complete review of the contracts in place, with a rewriting exercise aimed at expressing those same concepts in a common, easy-to-read, and therefore understandable language for the reader, in order to invite her/him to actually read them and - if our job has been carried out properly - create a bond of trust between the customer and the Bank.
Restructuring of the text and graphics: the simplification activity was not limited to the revision of the texts, but also to the restructuring - from a graphic point of view - of their representation. Before the intervention, in fact, the contractual texts were presented in three columns on each side of the pages and using a particularly small font; this made it difficult for the reader to read the contract, just as it was difficult to find a certain topic within an actual 'wall of text'. For this reason, with Legal Design's intervention, the texts have been placed in a single column per side (thus extending the writing space), the font size has been increased and icons have also been introduced to better visually identify the topics covered within the contract.
Digitalisation and Accessibility: the text is born digital and can be adapted to all formats available for viewing. In addition, in compliance with the regulatory parameters of the so-called "Stanca Law", the text thus drafted is already in line with accessibility requirements in all formats.
