Measuring the impact and value of legal design in commercial contracting within the law and economics framework

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Sammanfattning

Through extensive field work, it has become apparent that there exists room to improve the current negotiation and contracting practice with human-centred design. This work addresses the fundamental problems of legalese and information asymmetry in the context of negotiation and commercial contracting practice. It provides a framework to discuss how complexity in contracts evolves and what kind of transaction costs as well as risks the current practice entails. The work intends to provide practical incentives and benefits for contract drafters and companies to develop their negotiation and contracting practice to be more comprehensible, transparent, user-centric, ethical, and written within plain language.
The research intends to have a direct impact on current negotiation and commercial contracting practice, ethics related contracting decisions, and contractual policy development. Legal design provides for greater comprehensibility—especially for people with no legal training—reducing the likelihood of conflicts in negotiation and contracting practice. Legal design builds upon interdisciplinarity. It works at the intersection of design methods, technology, and law. It provides valuable methodology and tools for legal professionals to reduce complexity. Legal design intends to make legal products, processes, and services more understandable for people with no judicial training.
The empirical study results show that the legal designed contract terms were regarded as more comprehensible than traditional legalese contract terms – i.e., the formal and technical language used by lawyers that is opaque, full of jargon, and hard to understand. Almost two thirds (62.5%) of the study’s participants chose legal designed contract terms over traditional legalese contract terms. In addition, the results revealed that the legal designed contract terms were more comprehensible – even to lawyers and sophisticated parties. The study shows that legal design will foster competitive business advantage, business sustainability, contractual commitment, risk management, and the high-quality legal services as well as reduce transaction costs. It is demonstrated that legal design can help legal professionals to best serve their clients’ interest in offering comprehensible legal services. Aligned with the empirical results, comprehensibility is presented as a legal quality metric.
The work is oriented towards the practical employing of legal design in the negotiation and contracting practice in the corporate and legal world. The research generally employs an interdisciplinary and international approach.
OriginalspråkEngelska
KvalifikationDoktor i filosofi
Handledare
  • Kukkonen, Matti, Handledare
Tilldelningsdatum21.06.2023
UtgivningsortHelsinki
Förlag
Tryckta ISBN978-952-232-493-1
Elektroniska ISBN978-952-232-494-8
StatusPublicerad - 2023
MoE-publikationstypG5 Doktorsavhandling (artikel)

Nyckelord

  • 513 Juridik

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