Legal Design Workshop - Demonstrating Impact in Research, Practice and Education

Legal Design has evolved from a niche concept into a recognized discipline, yet demonstrating its impact on legal processes, rules, and institutions remains a substantially underdeveloped area of inquiry. The effects on legal research, practice, and education are, and should be, varied, requiring diversified methods and criteria of evaluation. 

Several challenges account for this gap. Some stem from the absence of a shared understanding of what legal design is and what falls outside its scope. Others arise from the open-textured multi- and interdisciplinarity of this nascent field — where information design, UX design, and service design, among others, operate in productive but often unresolved tension. Further complexity is introduced by the discipline's international dimension and the divergences across legal traditions (e.g., common law vs. civil law systems) and legal domains. Compounding these difficulties, a persistent divide separates academic scholarship from professional practice: the two communities frequently operate with different conceptual frameworks, priorities, and languages. 

This workshop is conceived as a structured space to bridge that gap. By bringing together researchers, practitioners, educators, and students, it aims to collaboratively develop a preliminary methodological toolkit — one that accounts for the discipline's internal plurality and assembles methods and documented examples of measurable impact, understood broadly and not confined to empirical or quantitative approaches.