User research - Legal UX - Clear Language
Training for judges
2022
The École Nationale de la Magistrature has been using clear legal language for a long time, has already adopted a pedagogy centered on their audiences, and has worked with a designer on certain training materials. On the strength of this experience, they asked us to go even further in the user-centricity of their pedagogical engineering, dedicated to non-professional judges.
This is in line with their approach, but is also due to the fact that most of their training courses are now online, as a result of the health crisis. Our mission was to (i) develop a methodology to make online training courses more engaging, impactful and interactive, (ii) equip them to create practical materials to ensure that their audiences continue to learn, and (iii) equip them to go even further in providing clear legal language.
As always, we began with a user research phase to identify the profiles of non-professional magistrates, their needs and the challenges of their training. Over the course of several sessions of our support, we co-created with the training judges the profiles and paths of their users. We dedicated a session to the teachings of neuroscience in order to design online trainings that take into account the limitations and cognitive biases of each individual.
Another session was devoted to clear legal language and its application to complex legal issues: the aim was to make these concepts accessible to non-professional judges, but also to give them keys when they are faced with jargon, especially in conclusions. The last session was devoted to the basics of graphic design for lawyers, who are not designers and do not intend to become one: what graphic "quick wins" can be implemented with amateur tools, once the mindset and methodology of user centricity have been well assimilated? How to best collaborate with designers?
A toolbox dedicated to magistrate trainers, to enable them to apply the user-centered law methodology independently. In less than two weeks, magistrates were already sharing their own productions with us!
The co-creation of plain-language content with magistrates, dedicated to non-professional judges, is also at the heart of ENM's mission to improve the legibility of judicial action for litigants, the media and society at large.
