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| First and last name | Erik Fontenele Nybo |
| What's your location? | São Paulo, Brazil |
| At what organization are you currently based? | Bits Academy |
| Why do you define yourself as a Legal Designer? | I design legal documents trying to improve (i) readability, by reducing text or changing legalese into plain language; (ii) usability, by checking the whole chain of potential users of the document and how each of them could interpret the document’s content and how this document could help them achieve their goals; (iii) overall experience with legal documents, since today a lot of people feel they are “business blockers”, pure bureaucracy or even unreadable or confusing. I also do a lot of research to understand if the designs created really fulfill their purpose by testing them with users or even by field research. Here in Brazil I created a contract model that was intended for public sharing that went viral since it was the first time most of the people saw this kind of document. This was how I began in this field and today my team and I render services to banks, companies and startups to improve their documents’ user experience. We also teach people on how to apply such method and create articles, researches and open documents so people can change the way they use documents. |
| Show off your work! Present yourself through one of your projects | One of our clients, a startup called Lobby.tech had a problem with their commercial agreement. Their sales cycle was a 120 days long. The problem was that their contract was too big, full with legalese and hard to read due to the “wall of text” (bad typography, lack of color, lack of blank spaces, among others). We analyzed who was the main user of the contract, and it was the commercial building’s on-site manager. This kind of persona is usually a person with a low degree of instruction, usually does not perform an intellectual work on a day-to-day basis and has a lot to do in the building to keep everything running well. Bearing that in mind, we created a new contract that (i) had better choice of fonts, colors and “breathing areas” (blank areas to improve readability); (ii) had fewer pages (from 30 pages, we reduced it to 8 pages); (iii) inserted icons that could refer to the clauses’ matter; (iv) changed the legalese into understandable language; (iv) introduced a summary of the contract in the beginning of the document. This, with some other efforts, led to a decrease of the client’s sales cycle from 120 days to 30 days. |
| Tell us a little about the work you just shared, so we understand how to present it to the community. | I told a little about a specific case that we had in our company. However, since the document has to be confidential, I am sharing a bit of our portfolio with explanation of the features we created and the resources we use to create our documents using the legal design tecniques. |
| Where can people learn more about you? | People can check out the website of my company (www.bitsacademy.com.br), can follow me on Instagram (@erikfontenelenybo) or linkedin (/erikfontenelenybo). People can also read some books I have published (unfortunately, they are still only available in Portuguese): Direito das Startups (Startup Law), O Poder dos Algoritmos (The Power of Algorithms) and Legal Design (to be published in the upcoming month). |
| Let's connect! | |
| Review process | I hope that this submission is accepted. It will be an honor to be part of this community and to have the opportunity to exchange experiences with peers. |