Arbitration and Legal Design
A use case for legal design to improve the way we provide Arbitration services and documents in moot simulations and arbitration jurisdiction.
Context
Arbitration is a mechanism through which a dispute is submitted, by agreement of the parties, to an arbitrator or a tribunal, who will be responsible for rendering a decision on the dispute, which will be binding on the parties.
The complexity of the cases or their broad scope …, on many occasions do not allow the parties to adequately communicate their position and claims to the arbitrator or tribunal, as an arbitrator is generally in charge of many cases at the same time and if he or she is not properly informed about the case, an arbitration award may end up being rendered against him or her.
In view of the above, the question arises: How can we make it easier for the parties to illustrate their position and claims to the arbitrator or tribunal with the help of the legal design and thus make it easier to understand the cases?
MOOT Arbitration simulation- UCSP
Universidad Católica San Pablo form Arequipa, Peru, reached out to us, to understand how we can intervine the artifacts, documents and processes involve in their moot arbitration simulation for in house practice but also to get insights to improve the performance of the university's arbitration team leaded by professor Alem Zeballos, who believes that arbitration can start applying behavioral design and legal design, for the documents of the process and the way it has been provided to improve the way arbitration jurisdiction works and also to improve the performance of the university's arbitration team on international arbitration competitions.
Project as is:
Arbitration, like so many other legal processes, has not undergone very drastic changes, except in terms of arbitration rules and jurisdictions.
Nor have there been any changes in terms of the forms to be used to support facts, pleadings, submission of arbitration applications, arbitration agreements, among other key points of contact in the arbitration process.
When we started the redesign and improvement use case from a legal design and innovation perspective for the university’s arbitration moot case, we set out to not only provide useful tools and resources for the team that participates in the moot competitions representing the university; beyond just the improvement for the team, we decided to make prototypes of both the process to explain it, as well as prototypes that could serve as a basis for drafting better legal documents that make the process easy to understand for all parties involved, because although the initial tools and formats were quite good in terms of content, we felt that by applying legal design principles, all of the above could be improved.
Our main motivation is that arbitrators and arbitration centres at national and international level may be interested in applying legal design in the processes, in the documents and tools that are part of the process and also in the legal design of the documents and tools that are part of the process.
WOW Legal Experience step by step Re-design process
- Understanding the pain points
- Understanding the scope
- Lots of coordination and feedback with the professor leader of the university's moot team and our team members to deliver better prototypes.
4.We review different rules applicable to the specific case but above all regulations of different arbitration centers to validate the ideas.
5.Prototypes low fidelity and high fidelity ones , in total we did 3 iterations.
6.Testing and feedback , aproximately for 2 weeks.
Final results as follows:
Arbitration case and petition/sue: How to expose the facts in a clearer and more understandable and visual way.
Arbitration award: How to expose the legal foundamentation of the arbitration jury or solo arbitrators to arrive to their end resolution of the case.
Arbitration process rules: How to explain the rules that lead certain arbitration process in a way that is more visual and more comprehensive for the parties.
Conclusion and takeaways:
- Arbitration process can be improved applying legal design
- Abitration documents and tools can be re designed for better understanding of the parties of the process, with independence of their literacy, applying visual resources, plain language and hierarchy frames and timelines.
- Arbitration rulin mannuals can be very extense and difficult to understand but they can also be improved and simplifies applying legal design methodologies and automation.
Upcoming ideas:
-We are looking partners working on arbitration to test our prototypes
-We want to help more arbitration centers and arbitrators
-Fully automation of arbitration cases since the onboarding until the notification and other call-to-actions that must be completed to finish the arbitration process. (Online dispute resolutions platforms are needed).
-Tech or legal tech partners to maybe have more arbitration metaverse experiences like the ones that have been celebrated as a simulation or a true case like the colombian ones.
Great examples and links of interest:
About the team:
Naomi Antonella García -Junior Legal Design trainee & UX research
Lucía Chávez -Junior Legal Design trainee & UX research
About WOW Legal Experience: We are the first legal operations design agency with global reach and with a team of professionals from different sectors who know the legal sector. We are not consultants, we are mentors and partners for the co-design, co-creation and co-enabling of projects and solutions that allow the legal and justice sector to innovate, ensuring that the experience of users and consumers in these sectors is the best.
