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In this Q&A Callum Brown, Senior Legal Designer at Simmons & Simmons, talks about his professional background, legal design, and how it shaped the CreaTech Glossary.
There aren’t many “Senior Legal Designers” listed on LinkedIn, what’s your story?
As far as I know, there are only three of us – turns out we were all English as a Foreign Language teachers, I think that says something?
I have certainly jumped around a bit. I did my MA in Philosophy, taught English on and off for a decade, worked in kitchens, did some IT gigs here and there. I was a semi-professional fire juggler…
I decided to “settle down” and do my Law conversion (GDL) but I couldn’t get past the feeling that it was all so broken *wide sweeping arm gesture*.
Everything I’d done before showed me that there had to be a better way, so I found a place that promised something different.
Now I get to look at traditional problems from an out-of-the-box way; communicate complex, language-heavy concepts in a way anyone can understand; organise systems and projects so that everything is in place; use tech to solve problems, and add a little “wow”. It all fit together in the end.
What’s exciting you about work right now?
I slowly became frustrated at how awful legal documents are. I think the defining moment was asking a senior colleague if we could make the risk tables (classic Red, Yellow, Green charts) more accessible to colourblind people, he replied that he was colourblind, that was why he asked me to make them…
The more I got involved in UI/ UX (user interface/user experience) projects, the more aware I became of accessibility issues/solutions, the more aware I became that law ignores the issues completely, the more frustrated I became.
It's now becoming more of a conversation, and clients are really wanting to discuss it. Some of this is regulation led. The FCA’s Consumer Duty calls out making information accessible to vulnerable consumers. But much of it is genuine and personal interest. Legal design gives legal teams space to talk about inclusion and accessibility, not just the letter of the law.
I’m excited to see where this road is going.
What were your impressions coming to the CreaTech glossary co-creation process?
At Simmons Wavelength, we're all about multi-disciplinary teams. There are very few real-world problems that one expertise can solve.
At the hackathon, I met students from arts, sciences, computer science, law, the arts and sciences (BASc) degree path. They all had their own perspectives and thought patterns that allowed them to come up with fresh, meaningful, relatable content. A lawyer could sit down and draft a definition for “ownership”, but would it work for the target audience?
Where did the idea for the site come from?
I love ordering things and working out how things are structured. If you think of a library, how do you find a book? If it was ordered by height it would be useless (it happened). How are your books organised? If you find books in your shelves because you remember what they look like, would it be better to order by colour or size?
Where this is going is that we have a list of legal/ art/ tech concepts with explanations. Glossaries are usually alphabetical, but what happens if you don’t know the word you’re looking for? Not being able to find the term you need in an index is painful.
But another aspect of these concepts is that they’re building blocks. “Copyright” involves “art work”, “owner”, “fair usage”. The best recipes list ingredients by where you would find them so you can get them all at the same time and not crisscross the supermarket.
We’re big fans of taking inspiration from existing good (and bad) design. The Table of the Elements, which formed the core design system gave us a familiar, extensible and clear structure. Each coloured block in the table is thematic, the elements all have a similar features or structure. “Ownership” and “privacy” might not seem similar, but they get their meaning from a legal framework.
But conceptualising the concepts as elements also allows us to tie in that they’re ingredients. That there is an almost algebraic relationship between them: “ownership” is made up of “art work”, “creator” and “sale/ contract”. We can therefore bring back the imagery of the elements to represent these concepts in a consistent visual way. [Editor's note: in phase one of the glossary launch, these ‘elements’ are listed as ‘tags’ allowing users to easily find and search against these core concepts or ‘ingredients’]
“It's really important to consider how people can find the things they need when they don’t know what they’re looking for. It's equally important to help people find what they’re looking for quickly and easily (otherwise they may just give up). Hopefully you find this site is both familiar and intuitive.
What's next for you?
I'm doing a lot of research into language complexity; how to understand it, evaluate it, improve it.
This involves learning some natural language processing skills, reading as much of the papers and research that has been done over the years, and the cutting edge computational linguistics work going on right now. Building out the tools we currently have.
There will be a lot of work in phrasing and condensing this research and capability into something that makes sense to clients and colleagues. Something that can actually help teams improve the accessibility and intelligibility of what they write.
I think this is pretty exciting stuff, there's a lot of work to be done.