The Chancery Lane Project’s Senior Legal Designer Role: A Blueprint for the Future of Legal Design

This week, The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP), the global charity leveraging legal documents and processes to reduce emissions across 110+ countries, released a Senior Legal Designer job description. And it is nothing short of a milestone.

Why? Because it sets out, with clarity and authority, what it actually means to hire for legal design. For years, many organizations have struggled to scope these roles: What skills matter? What should be prioritized? Which tools are essential?

TCLP’s description answers these questions and provides a framework that any forward-thinking organization can adopt.

What the Role Emphasizes, and Why It Matters

The job description is striking in its focus:

• Strategic planning and alignment — ensuring design supports organizational goals.

• Design and innovation — creating new, practical ways to transform legal processes.

• Research and analysis — grounding design in evidence, not guesswork.

• Technical communication — translating legal complexity into usable clarity.

• Leadership — both in design and project execution.

What’s equally important is what it doesn’t emphasize: tools. Nowhere does it suggest mastery of Figma, Miro, or any particular software. That’s because tools are secondary. The real value lies in methodology, design thinking, service design, user-centric problem-solving, and the ability to apply these approaches in legal contexts.

✅ Download the Senior Legal Designer Job Description here.

Why This Matters for the Legal Design Profession

This description signals something bigger: legal design is no longer a niche experiment. It’s a recognized, strategic capability.

And TCLP, with its mission to rewire contracts and legal systems for climate action, is showing the world how these roles should be scoped. For organizations looking to hire, this is the gold standard: emphasize mindset, methodology, leadership, and impact, not shiny tools.

👉 Explore the TCLP's initiative here.

Preparing Professionals for These Roles

This is exactly why we built the Online Contract & Legal Design Certification.

Our participants, lawyers, in-house counsel, contract managers, and other professionals, leave with precisely the skills highlighted in TCLP’s job description:

• Design thinking foundations — understanding the frameworks and mindset.

• Practical visual design techniques — using a step-by-step approach, that works regardless of the tools, including inside Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, as well as design tools like Canva or more advanced (yes, the tools, but used strategically).

• User-centricity — practicing usability testing  to validate clarity and impact and show the gains.

• Process improvement — learning to build systems of continuous improvement within legal teams.

• Leadership through design — being able to guide organizations towards simpler, clearer, more effective legal documents.

This program is hands-on. It’s tested. And it works. 100% of our graduates say they feel confident applying what they’ve learned right away. You can find some reviews from the course here.

A Benchmark for the Profession

TCLP’s Senior Legal Designer job description is more than just a hiring document. It’s a signal to the market that legal design has matured, and that it requires professionals who are strategic, practical, and user-centered.

If your organization is considering hiring a legal designer, start with TCLP’s framework. And if you’re a professional looking to prepare yourself for such roles, the path is clear: invest in mastering the skills, methodologies, and mindset that the leading organizations now expect.

Legal design is on the rise, and this is exactly the kind of clarity our profession needed.