Legal Design Patterns: Towards A New Language for Legal Information Design

Patterns are a central tool in legal design. They are conceptual schemes or entities describing solutions to a recurring legal problem, helping to make contracts, disclosures and policies accessible to users and easier to prepare. In this paper, we take stock of existing legal design patterns and pattern libraries and present the idea of a legal design pattern language intended to lead to documenting and sharing good practices across disciplines and to more actionable pattern libraries.