Stefania

IACCM Contract Design Pattern Library
Shortly said, this is a pattern library that aims at inspiring and provide examples of contract design patterns to anyone starting their simplification and redesign journey. It is an ongoing project, and we aim to document and collect more examples and patterns over time. In addition to explore the Library itself, in this blogpost we explain well how and why we are building the Library, what contract design patterns are, and why you should be using them.

Juro’s Privacy Policy
Juro‘s initial brief was to help them design the “best privacy notice in the world”, which we later reframed as “a privacy notice people may actually want to read”. The project setup was interesting, firstly because Juro’s CEO, Richard Mabey, was incredibly involved in the process in first person, and secondly because their developers, marketing people, and external counsel were also involved from the very beginning. I like this project because I discovered that many of the design patterns I have been using in contract design can also be applied to privacy notices. Moreover, working on digital rather than paper, I got to experiment with different layering solutions which aren’t available with static media. For example, we decided to create a short notice layer with just the key information, from which the readers can eventually proceed to read the full notice. Also the full notice was layered, as we used an accordion pattern to provide more detailed information (e.g. a detailed table of third parties, or the legal basis for processing) only on demand. I appreciated that, despite the demanding project timeline, the client was eager to gather some user feedback during the process. The insights we gained helped us to correct some wrong assumptions and better refine the solution before launch. And in the end, the results were pretty exciting: since launching it in May 2018, Juro’s privacy notice has been clicked on over 9000 times, and it has become the second most visited page of their website. By comparison, their old privacy notice used to be read only 0-2 times per week at most.

Buzzsumo’s terms of use
I love the Buzzsumo’s project because it was the first project I did after founding my company and leaving academia for good. So it feels like a lucky charm 🙂 The client was completely open to experimentation, and we managed to simplify and reduce the text as well as using various patterns for summarizing information.

Research Publications
I spent 8 years as a researcher, of which 5 writing my doctoral dissertation.  It was a labor of love, blood, sweat, and tears, mostly back when #legaldesign wasn’t yet a hashtag and most professors thought I was crazy. I am proud about having persevered and about the little role my research may have played in getting other folks excited in legal design.