88 percent of contracts are “difficult or impossible to understand.” Here’s how lawyers can use this to generate revenue and new clients.

TIM Brazil is a leading telecom company in Brazil. It has over 60 million customers. Brazil is a uniquely litigious country in the consumer rights space allowing cases to be filed and won easily. But nobody wants to file complaints, they want to get what they are paying for. When there is confusion, things go wrong, and this leads to filing a complaint.

But how can a regulated company with loads of obligations and rules it must follow and communicate to its customers do this while simultaneously not overwhelming its customers with voluminous legalese they are unlikely to read let alone understand? TIM Brazil did this by reducing a 40-page contract to 2 pages. This heightened consumer understanding and dramatically reduced complaints and litigation.

Intro to Visual law (designing legal information).

You don’t have to be a Brazilian telecom to get value from this. In fact, any law firm can begin offering Visual Law services once they obtain the proper skill and capability

Here is a brief primer on Visual Law:

1. Contracts have substance and shape

The substance of the contract is where lawyers typically focus, and this fills pages with words and legalese. This substance dictates the shape of the document usually creating columns of text upon text upon text. But information can be shaped. How is text displayed? Is text the only medium to convey information? For instance, ever try to write text to explain comparisons between multiple numerical values? Charts are better for that.

2. Lawyers are responsible for understanding

Layers write for other lawyers and in the context of a future adversarial situation. That is how most contracts are created, contemplating any future bad outcome. That is a huge miss because it leads to few understanding the contract in the present context. No understanding means nobody knows how to behave which leads to challenges following the obligations in the contract. It is a vicious cycle. Legal information can be conveyed in easier-to-understand ways so each contracting party clearly understands the contract without the need for legal help or interpretation.

3. Contracts run the local and global economies

Like TIM Brazil, most businesses use contracts in many ways — with suppliers and with their customers. From NDAs, to bills, contracts are everywhere. In the modern economy, more businesses are reimaging these documents so they can more rapidly engage suppliers or customers, rather than frustrate, or move slowly. It has commercial value too ↓.

Exploring visual law may lead lawyers to create fee-generating services (add-on or standalone) that help clients:

• Reduce complaints & litigation = saved costs and increased customer retention
• Faster engagement of suppliers = increased speed to market
• Maintain enforceability = rights and protections are still afforded

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog