Contracts and other legal documents look horrible and are impossible to read.
Even documents produced by the world’s most prestigious law firms are basically Microsoft Word files in Times Roman font with hard coded formating (i.e., no style sheets or templates, but text is formatted directly to be centered, bold, italic.)
But the content is even worse than the design. Complicated sentences and unclear paragraph structures requires you to look for hidden clauses that could be hugely important for the meaning of the contract. (The legal profession probably has an interest in keeping it this way).
Two improvements:
- Bring the design, the look and feel, back to 2021. Fonts, white space, paragraph hierarchies.
- Add a non-binding layman “so what” summary before each paragraph, backed up by the legal code.
As a result contracts will be shorter to negotiate, and people might actually read the terms of use. I might have a look at the SlideMagic terms of use and see if I can give an example…
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash