We strive for an equal and just world. By creating proactive visual contracts we build a catalyst for a more human friendly just system. Our visual contracts and co-creation approach help build confidence in dealing with legal topics and supports in making autonomous decisions.
With this we help making the legal system accessible to everyone, regardless of background, disability or level of education. So that people are legally empowered and become active citizens; citizens who know their rights and obligations and act pro-actively towards this.
By 2030 we will have:
- Legally empowered 10Mln people with understandable and user friendly contracts, regardless of background or literacy level.
200 Universities that have adopted our Legal Design Thinking approach + visual contract creation tool for user centered legal services & disruption of the legal sector: future lawyers that help create a human centered just system
Created 250 internships for people without a degree/education/access to opportunities
Depending on your background you can find the relevant content for you.
Employee/citizen: Understand legal documents and make autonomous decisions to enhance your personal legal empowerment. You can help us test and improve our designs here.
Business owner: Building sustainable relationships and creating a strategic advantage with clearer and more user friendly legal communication. Go to hire an expert.
Legal Counsel: Bringing legal expertise and advise across in an accessible way and making it easier to integrate legal earlier in the process. Go to hire an expert.
Legal Design Thinker: Helping the legal field to create a mindset change and to implement visual legal documents. Go to academy or community.
A proactive visual contract is a contract that is user friendly (people actually understand them) and which people can use to build sustainable relationships and prevent conflicts with. They are created with a method called 'Legal Design Thinking' that uses UX design, information design, visual thinking, plain legal language and pro-active law.
A survey conducted by World Commerce and Contracting reveals that only 1 out of 10 people find contracts 'easy to understand' (Read more). This is largely due to the language and medium that is used and the perception of law that people have ('contracts are a necessary evil instead of something you can use to distinguish yourself with'.)
For this reason a movement in Legal Design Thinking, visual contracts and pro-active law are going on in order to change this problem.
Read more about it in-depth in our articles:
'What is Legal Design Thinking?
'What is a visual contract?'
Visual Contracts is a platform and ecosystem of legal innovators, multidisciplinary teams and tools to create proactive visual contracts that are tested with the end-user in order to reach the change we aim for. The platform provides the tools, process and mindset change to create such understandable and proactive visual contracts.
The ecosystem is structured by our 4 pillars that work together. In order to create the systems’ change necessary for the adoption of visual contracts, we need to help legal educators to innovate their curricula, train lawyers and designers and other professionals into a mindset that is necessary to create visual contracts and a community to share knowledge and skills. While the builder helps us scale our impact and accessibility of the services we offer to different target groups outside the corporate world, the studio is there to keep exploring new grounds in Legal Design Thinking, technologies and social justice impact measurement.
VC Academy focuses on the development and offering of quality Legal Design Thinking training and tools to enhance the mindset and skills in creating visual contracts. Our library, tools and trainings support professionals and academia into becoming a skilled legal designer.
For all contract builders, regardless of their size of business, the VC Builder offers a SaaS solution that increases the speed of adoption and implementation of using visual contracts.
Together with our community we co-create new contract templates and share knowledge and skills with like minded professionals. The community helps open up the mindset and break through walls of perceptions that exist in the legal and business world regarding how law is practiced.
Our expert Legal Designers help you in creating custom visual contracts and other Legal Design Thinking projects.
We focus on impact measurement and the social impact we make with our designs.
Visual Contracts is founded in 2017 by service and UX designer Lieke Beelen who has been working on legal innovation since 2015 after winning the The Hague Innovators prize. Together with a lawyer they developed a new concept of the privacy statement of Facebook as a case study to explore new ways of creating accessible, understanding and engaging legal documents. This was how Lieke rolled into the field of Legal Design Thinking and Visual Contracts and since then Visual Contracts grew towards a team of awesome social justice warriors that work towards equal opportunities for all, each from their own core strength:
Are you aligned with our vision and values, and love this intersection of the fields of Design, Law & Technology? We are always looking for new people to join our team.
Our unique selling point is our design/tech background and expertise in collaboration with lawyers, while most Legal Designers come from a legal background and then start learning to design. We see our expertise as the most beneficial in breaking the patterns in the legal field and apply just about the right amount of law, design and tech for every case.
The use of imagination or original ideas to create something.
The absence of pretence, deceit, or hypocrisy.
The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
The capacity to recover quickly from obstacles.
In order to make the biggest impact and working towards a systemic change in the legal and justice sector, we call for universities, governments, NGOs, corporates and other organisations to work with us and increase our impact. Get in touch to discuss the potential collaboration possibilities and how you can help us to create more impact in creating Access to Justice and legal empowerment.
