Outsourcing Legal Design vs. Building In-House Capabilities: A Strategic Perspective

As legal design continues to gain traction across law firms and in-house departments, one question repeatedly surfaces: Should legal design be outsourced to professional designers, or developed as a core capability within legal teams?

On the surface, outsourcing appears to be a natural solution. Designers are trained in visual communication and user experience. However, legal design is not merely an exercise in aesthetics, it is a functional rethinking of how legal information is structured, delivered, and understood.

In this article, we explore the risks of outsourcing legal design too readily, when it can be appropriate, and why building internal literacy may be the more sustainable, cost-effective approach for many legal teams.

1. The Hidden Risks of Outsourcing Legal Design

Outsourcing legal design to external designers, particularly those unfamiliar with legal workflows, can lead to serious limitations. Consider the following challenges:

• Lack of Legal Fluency

Designers who are unfamiliar with legal content may inadvertently simplify or distort key legal nuances. The result may look appealing but fails to meet compliance, accuracy, or risk-management standards.

• Tools and Accessibility Barriers

Many design professionals work with tools like Figma, InDesign, or Adobe Illustrator. These platforms produce visually polished outputs, but they are not ideal for legal teams who work in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. This creates bottlenecks when teams need to update, revise, or redline documents, often under time pressure.

• Maintenance and Workflow Challenges

Designers typically deliver a final product, often a static PDF, but are not available to make the edits when last-minute comments arrive from a client or counterpart. This disconnection from real-time legal workflows creates fragility in the process.

Put simply, outsourcing can create what looks like legal design, but functions as surface-level decoration, not a strategic solution. Legal design can work, but only when supported by thoughtful collaboration practices. 

2. When Outsourcing Does Make Sense

Outsourcing can add value when handled correctly, especially for materials that are intended to be more visual in nature, such as:

• Explainer documents or infographics

• User guides for digital platforms

• Onboarding documents for consumer-facing policies

However, for legal instruments like contracts, terms of use, or compliance documents, outsourcing is only advisable when:

• The designer has a deep understanding of legal content and its constraints

• There is close collaboration between legal and design teams throughout the process

• The output is delivered in a maintainable and editable format (ie., not a static PDF)

• The design enhances usability and comprehension, not just visual appeal

Once you’ve selected the right designer (ideally with experience in legal content), your legal team must be prepared to engage effectively. This begins with onboarding the designer into your legal context: What’s the function of this document? Who reads it? What are the legal constraints?

One often overlooked (but essential) requirement is internal capability: someone on the legal team, ideally the Head of Legal, Legal Ops, or another project lead, must have sufficient training in legal design. Without this foundational knowledge, it's nearly impossible to effectively scope the project, supervise the work, or align the design outcomes with legal objectives and user needs. 

Legal design isn't just about aesthetics, it's about structure, clarity, and function. When legal and design teams speak a common language, the results are not only visually appealing but legally effective and operationally sustainable.

3. Why Internal Capacity Matters

There is a growing recognition among legal teams that design is a strategic capability, not just a creative service. As a result, many are opting to train their lawyers and legal operations professionals in legal design fundamentals.

Here are the benefits of building in-house capabilities:

• Contextual Understanding

Lawyers bring deep knowledge of the document’s purpose, legal implications, and the expectations of its intended audience, whether that's a vendor, regulator, or internal stakeholder. This contextual insight is hard to replicate externally and ensures that the design choices support the legal and business goals. A procurement lawyer redesigning an MSA will know where suppliers usually get confused or push back, and can design those sections for clarity or negotiation flexibility.

• Agility

When legal teams build design capabilities internally, they can make updates quickly—whether it’s regulatory changes, business model shifts, or user feedback—without waiting on a third party. This responsiveness is critical in fast-moving environments. An in-house legal team can instantly revise their NDAs after a policy update and release a new version that’s still user-friendly, without needing to rebrief a designer.

• Consistency

Having internal capacity leads to a unified design language and tone across documents—making contracts easier to navigate and less intimidating for business users. It also avoids the patchwork effect that happens when every document is designed by a different vendor. A legal department using the same structure, headings, and summary format across employment, partnership, and data-sharing agreements improves user trust and reduces onboarding time for non-legal teams.

• Empowerment

When lawyers learn how to communicate visually and structurally, not just legally, they write clearer, more usable documents. This reduces disputes, boosts compliance, and improves business collaboration. A GC who integrates plain language summaries into a partnership agreement makes it easier for commercial teams to close deals faster and with fewer questions.

4. Practical Recommendations

Whether your team is just beginning or scaling its legal design efforts, consider the following strategic steps:

• Recommendation 1: Start Small

Choose one high-volume, business-critical document, like an NDA, engagement letter, or procurement agreement, and apply legal design principles to improve it. Focus on simplifying language, improving layout, and enhancing navigability. Starting small reduces risk, keeps the project manageable, and delivers measurable results quickly. It also helps secure internal buy-in and creates a template or internal model others can follow. Trying to “redesign everything” at once can overwhelm legal teams, stall momentum, and lead to inconsistent results. Worse, sticking with dense, outdated documents means continued delays, misunderstandings, and frustration from business stakeholders.

• Recommendation 2: Use Familiar Tools

Leverage tools your team already knows, like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or PowerPoint. These platforms are surprisingly powerful when used intentionally: tables, heading structures, collapsible sections, and styled callouts can go a long way. Keeping the tech stack familiar ensures adoption. If documents can’t be easily edited, updated, or reviewed by legal teams, they’ll get sidelined, no matter how well designed. Using specialized design tools like Figma or InDesign without legal team buy-in leads to bottlenecks. Lawyers may avoid updating the document altogether or revert to old templates, undoing all progress.

• Recommendation 3: Focus on Functional Design

Design isn’t just about aesthetics, it’s about usability. Use clear structure, visual cues, summaries, white space, and logical flow to guide the reader. This reduces cognitive load, the mental effort needed to understand complex information. Well-structured legal documents reduce misinterpretation, speed up decision-making, and increase compliance. Functional design makes the law more accessible—without sacrificing precision. Poorly structured documents increase the risk of misunderstanding, negotiation delays, or costly errors. In regulated sectors, unclear clauses can also lead to compliance issues or disputes.

• Recommendation 4: Test with Real Users

Don’t assume the document works, test it. Ask non-lawyers (from HR, Sales, Operations, etc.) to review the redesigned version. Can they understand the key points without help? Do they know what actions to take? Legal teams are often too close to the content to spot usability issues. Real-user feedback helps ensure the document does what it’s meant to: communicate clearly and enable action. Skipping testing means your “redesigned” document may still confuse the very people it’s intended for. If users ignore or misunderstand key clauses, the legal risk doesn’t go away, it grows.

• Recommendation 5: Foster Collaborative Practices

Equally important is creating a shared collaboration space. Redesigning a legal document isn’t a solo task, it requires co-creation. We recommend setting up joint working sessions, sharing insights about client's goals, and legal requirements, using practical tools like functionality checklists. These checklists help teams explore design features, and assess which ones are feasible, impactful, and maintainable in tools like Word or Google Docs.

5. Legal Design Is Not a Luxury, It's a Legal Competency

Legal design is not about beautifying contracts. It’s about making legal documents intelligible, navigable, and usable for the people who rely on them. That’s not a “nice-to-have.” That’s the bare minimum today. As regulations increasingly demand clarity, transparency, and accessibility (think GDPR, the Consumer Duty, or plain language laws in financial services), the days of wall-to-wall legalese are numbered. Regulators are no longer just asking what you disclose, but how you disclose it. 

At the same time, business environments are moving faster than ever. Even big tech is now redesigning legal agreements for humans. Contracts need to be clear not just for lawyers, but for finance teams, product leads, procurement, HR, and partners. If your stakeholders can’t understand the document, they won’t trust it. That’s bad for compliance, bad for speed, and bad for the deal.  Legal design is becoming a differentiator, and soon, a baseline expectation. 

And let’s be honest: Most legal documents today are formatted as if we were still using typewriters. (If you don’t believe us, read “Your PC is Not a Typewriter.” by Robin Williams - for Mac users you can also find "Beyond The Mac is Not a Typewriter." ) Fonts haven’t changed, structure is nonexistent, and usability is still an afterthought. In a world of visual dashboards, digital onboarding flows, and AI-generated insights, a 15-page block of justified Times New Roman doesn’t just feel dated, it’s a risk.  

Because when legal content is truly user-friendly, everyone wins: legal teams reduce risk, business teams move faster, and clients stay better informed.

Ready to Build Legal Design Capacity? Our Contract and Legal Design Certification is a 3-month immersive program (with self-paced and private project-based options). Designed for legal professionals, it equips you to:

• Redesign your own contracts and policies.

• Apply plain language and usability principles.

• Deliver compliant, user-friendly documents, without graphic design skills.

• And so much more ...

For law firms and in-house departments seeking to embed legal design as a service, we offer tailored strategic support to help you design, implement, and scale your approach sustainably.

📩 To learn more or schedule a consultation, contact us today.