 |
| Dmitry Shniger |
Visuals are a powerful information medium. The many people who describe themselves as right-brained or as visual learners illustrate that point. Visuals cross language barriers and function as an international language. They make complex ideas easier to understand. They help overcome cognitive barriers, including illiteracy. They connect legal content to everyday experience, which motivates engagement.
Visuals are also a lot of fun.
robuart: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
This view is changing. Human-centred approaches — legal design and proactive law — have entered practice and theory. Legal information design has become an important field within this shift. Lawyers now compete in a market where clients expect clarity and usability. The ability to communicate visually, not only in writing and speech, is a competitive advantage.
Most importantly, visualization makes law more accessible — and therefore better.
Simplification drives two functions that visualization offers to lawyers. The first is obvious: presentation, illustration or, more broadly, communication. In that function, lawyers simplify information and then translate it into visual form. The second function is often overlooked: visualization also supports legal analysis. By visualizing complexity, we make it manageable and deepen understanding.
Visualization as an analytical tool
Diagrams are invaluable tools for analyzing complex legal issues. You can see a diagram at once; you cannot do that with 50 pages of text. Text forces you to remember what you read earlier. A diagram keeps the whole structure in view.
Graphic language also supports generalization and abstraction. Diagrams show more with less. They are saturated with material information, and each element carries meaning. Unlike text, they do not contain immaterial or irrelevant details and filler.
Visualizations expose gaps. A process map reveals bottlenecks. A relationship diagram highlights contradictions. A mind map shows what you cannot explain clearly. Gaps in a diagram often signal deeper systemic problems. Text does not provide this level of visibility.
Finally, diagrams provide a means of strategizing. A diagram is not only a description — it can function as a model of the legal situation. It becomes a helpful tool for developing a complex litigation strategy, structuring a transaction or projecting a policy proposal. By adding or removing elements and adjusting connections, you can observe how the overall structure changes and anticipate the consequences of those changes.
Visualization in contract work
Contract practice leads the way in visual communication. Visualization ranges from full comic contracts to simple icons or timelines. In each case, visuals improve understanding, negotiation, performance and interpretation.
Comic contracts present terms through images. Some comic contracts rely almost entirely on images. Others layer visuals over traditional clauses. Layering allows different audiences to access different depths of information: executives see key points; managers see operational details; lawyers see the full text.
Early examples appeared a decade ago in South Africa, where consultant Robert de Rooy designed an illustrated employment contract for fruit pickers. Nowadays, law firms develop increasingly creative formats, from board game-style employment contracts (the Dutch chocolate company Tony’s Chocolonely) to composite or audiovisual agreements that combine comics and sound (the South African company Creative Contracts).
Are comic contracts binding? Modern contract law focuses on substance, not form. Recent Canadian cases involving emoji acceptance confirm that form evolves with practice: Achter Land & Cattle Ltd. v. South West Terminal Ltd., 2024 SKCA 115; Ross v. Garvey, 2025 BCSC 705. If comics express parties’ intent to create legal relations, there is no principled basis to deny enforcement merely because the agreement is presented in images rather than prose.
The broader movement toward contract visualization predates comic contracts and can be traced to earlier work in the 1990s by scholars such as Helena Haapio, who advanced proactive and visual approaches to contracting. Information designer Stefania Passera’s 2017 dissertation, “Beyond the Wall of Contract Text,” provided academic support for the idea of visualizing contracts.
In a broader context, examples of less radical means of visualization than comics include the following:
- Timelines: Display obligations and events along a single chronological axis, allowing the reader to see sequence, overlap, gaps and deadlines at once
- Flowcharts: Illustrate decision paths and procedural steps
- Swim lanes: Show the parties’ areas of responsibility as columns, where roles, tasks and obligations are assigned
- Delivery diagrams: Show the place, time and modality in which a delivery takes place, and when risk and cost are transferred from supplier to buyer
- Gantt charts: Show tasks as horizontal bars on a timeline, dependencies and milestones.
There is no need to be a graphic designer to visualize contracts. Resources now support this work. The WorldCC Contract Design Pattern Library catalogues visual tools, including diagrams, icons, comics and layered formats, with examples from companies such as Airbus.
Visualization in everyday work
Lawyers already use visual tools, often without thinking about them in those terms. Tables, for example, are powerful analytical instruments. A well-designed spreadsheet not only stores data — it structures thinking.
When you open a spreadsheet, you are acting as an information designer. One small experiment every so often can go a long way: a new formula, a simple automation or a shortcut you have not explored yet. Then try colour. Try merging or splitting cells. Flip rows and columns and see what changes. The table may start to speak. Ask yourself whether it would be better without borders, instead of resembling a prison for data.
When preparing a chronology or evidence summary, place everything in one table. Identify the issues and assign a colour to each. Sort chronologically using automated functions. Patterns will emerge. You may see a meeting after which the performance deteriorated. That insight can help you address the root of the dispute. In a personal injury case, you may see medical visits begin only after counsel is retained. That timing may bear on the credibility of the complaints. A colour-coded and annotated table can surface these connections and guide a focused strategy.
Simple diagrams also help. A mind map organizes arguments. A process map clarifies procedures. A Venn diagram is a simple tool to illustrate the relative scope and overlap of related concepts.
One of the most powerful instruments in practice is a system map, also known as an ontology schema or a synthesis map. Such a diagram illustrates a problem in its entirety. It shows pictograms of the actors and the objects they engage with, as well as the lines and arrows that represent relationships, actions, causes, sequence and consequences. Building a system map requires skill because it synthesizes elements from different types of diagrams. The systems thinking community at Toronto’s OCAD University provides examples of synthesis maps in practice.
Visualization in governance: Public and corporate
Public-sector experiments with visualization began decades ago. In the U.K., flowcharts were created to simplify tax regulations in 1960s.
Canadian graphic designer David Berman proposed visual reforms to the Employment Insurance Act in 2000. His white paper argued that legislation should be designed, not merely drafted. He proposed structured typography, consistent heading hierarchies and the deliberate use of white space to reduce cognitive load. He suggested colour coding to distinguish definitions, conditions, exceptions and cross-references. He also recommended a two-column layout of unequal width, with a narrow column for headings, key numbers and side notes, and a wider column for the statutory text itself. The proposal aimed to make the Act easier to navigate. These ideas remain largely unrealized in Canadian legislation.
Other jurisdictions moved further. Governments in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia and other countries established policy design laboratories to rethink how public services are created and delivered. These labs use visual tools to map regulatory processes, identify friction points and redesign citizen journeys. The Stanford Legal Design Lab, led by Margaret Hagan, has been applying visual methods to justice innovation projects, including eviction prevention initiatives that combined legal reform with visual communication tools.
In Ontario, the Government Service Design Playbook, published in open access, offers guidance on visualization in policy work. It explains how to develop visuals such as:
- Personas: Fictional characters that represent key user groups
- Journey maps: Trace a persona’s interaction with a process or service
- Service blueprints: Map front-stage and back-stage processes that support a service
- Affinity maps: Cluster research findings into themes to reveal patterns and relationships.
In the corporate context, consultancies across jurisdictions help organizations visualize policies and bylaws. Lawyers apply service design methods to clarify roles, processes and decision paths within internal governance. The purpose is practical usability, not decoration.
Visualization in litigation
Courts permit visual aids. The Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure allow charts and diagrams in factums. More elaborate demonstrative aids, such as using a whiteboard in the courtroom, may require leave of the court.
Lawyers already use maps in motor vehicle and property severance cases. Still, many hesitate to experiment, and the hesitation is understandable. Legal education rarely models visual advocacy, and few practitioners have seen concrete examples to follow.
When used mindfully, visuals are effective. Lawyers have presented video clips at sentencing to situate an offence within its broader social context. American courts have seen submissions in the form of a graphic novel.
Beyond two-dimensional visuals, virtual and augmented reality are emerging in legal practice. Courts in Florida and China have used virtual reality to allow judges and witnesses to view criminal evidence in immersive form.
In Canada, the Cyberjustice Laboratory at the University of Montreal is developing the Immersive Evidence project to explore how augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) can function in judicial settings. In Ottawa, trials have been held in the metaverse since 2022; however, yet only moot trials at the University of Ottawa.
Visualization in legal education
Public legal education often relies on visuals. Visuals such as process maps and comics make legal information accessible across languages, literacy levels and cultures.
A well-known example is the 2009 visualization of New York City street vendor regulations, which decoded rules into simple graphics and minimal text in five languages.
In India, Lawtoons presented the fundamentals of the legal system to children and youth through comics. Its sequel, Sentinels of Democracy, explained the electoral system to new voters.
In Finland, the SIRIUS project used comic-style communication to facilitate the comprehension of legal and social welfare documents. Its reliance on an international visual language proved particularly helpful in a bilingual context (Finnish and Swedish), which can be relevant to Canada.
In contrast, law schools have largely underutilized visualization. However, even note-taking can be visual. The Cambridge note-taking system divides a page into a narrow column for key terms and cues and a wider column for detailed notes, thereby creating clear information layers. A Cambridge system “plus” adds small images to anchor key cases or concepts.
Some law schools now teach visual design methods. For example, NuLawLab at Northeastern University offers a course on Applied and Critical Legal Design, in which students create personas, empathy maps and journey maps, as well as other visual frameworks borrowed from service design and systems thinking. The Higher School of Economics in Moscow offers a course on legal analytics that focuses specifically on the use of diagrams as tools of legal analysis.
The graphic novel has also entered legal scholarship. Books such as Once Upon a Time in Australia use narrative and images to explore complex topics.
Scholarship on design in legal education supports innovative methods of teaching and studying. A recent book, Design in Legal Education by Emily Allbon and Amanda Perry-Kessaris (eds), is a rich source of insights on how legal education can benefit from visualization.
Conclusion
Visualization is not primarily about aesthetics. Reductionism drives legal visualization: every colour, shape and position should serve a purpose. Decorative or topic-irrelevant images may increase engagement in the short term, but they do not improve comprehension. In fact, they can undermine it.
At the same time, visualization is powerful. As an analytical tool, it serves the author by clarifying structure and exposing gaps. As a communication tool, it serves the audience and must therefore be used mindfully. Sophisticated readers trained in traditional methods may still prefer dense text, reflecting an older approach to legal communication that prioritized formality over usability. Businesspeople, project managers and front-line staff may rely more on visual structure. In the business-to-consumer (B2C) context, visualization may be particularly effective.
Because it simplifies, visualization also carries risk. Poor design can trivialize serious issues. Oversimplification may offend readers. Overcrowded visuals may confuse rather than clarify. Most importantly, translating legal text into images may distort legal meaning.
These risks are manageable. With awareness and visual competence, most errors can be avoided. The only way to build that competence is to experiment, start small and refine your approach with each iteration.
Dmitry Shniger is a dual-licensed lawyer admitted to practice in Ontario and Russia. He holds an LLM from Osgoode Hall Law School and a PhD in civil law from a Russian university. His past roles include general counsel at electricity and construction companies, senior associate at a top-tier full-service law firm, and professor at two leading Russian law schools. He restarted his legal career in insurance defence in Ontario.
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, LexisNexis Canada, Law360 Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
Interested in writing for us? To learn more about how you can add your voice to Law360 Canada, contact Analysis Editor Richard Skinulis at Richard.Skinulis@lexisnexis.ca or call 437-828-6772.