Notice & Official Documents

These ‘official’ documents from courts, agencies, or legal actors convey crucial information about a legal case.

These improved visual designs of notices, claims, petitions, forms, and contracts can enhance people’s willingness to engage with complicated and threatening matters. They can also increase understanding and uptake of services.

Outreach Visuals

These attract the attention of people who might not otherwise know they have a justiciable problem.

These designs can be used on posters, yard signs, social media, and fliers to help attract people’s attention to rights or services. Groups can use these to build awareness & uptake of services.

Strategic Guides

These help a person understand their options and follow a complicated process.

Usually, an advocacy org, a court self-help center, or a legal aid group distributes these visuals to their client to improve their legal knowledge & capability.

We worked with a group of landlords, tenants, advocates, court officials, and other stakeholders in Hamilton County, Ohio to design a new court summons for eviction.

It is in use right now, to better inform people of their rights, services, and court appearance.

You can read more about our design choices and process at our article here.

We adapted this Ohio summons for a Montana use case. They had to have different legal information and could not include images.

As such, we preserved some of the key visual choices, like having clear instruction, abundant white space, clear alignment, and strong messaging.

We also added the help sheet onto the Summons, with self-help and form information on this second handout.

Courts often are willing to send a Help and Referral sheet along with the court and summons. This is to help the defendant understand what they can do, now that they are facing a lawsuit.

We designed this add-on sheet with our Montana partners. We have made other variations for courts across the country.

Its visual design choices include:

• clear, uncluttered design
• Strong messaging about urgency and steps to take
• Laying out 3 things to do
• Having a QR code to an online guide
• Adding in human services contacts, for people who feel overwhelmed

Eviction Process Maps & Justice Journey visuals

Our Lab has worked with many different court & legal partners to create visual help for tenants and landlords facing eviction.

Some of these lay out processes to get help and services.

Others explain how the standard court process works.

Eviction Help Step-by-Step Journey in Michigan

The above flier is a ‘Justice Journey’ guide to encourage a person to understand and participate in their eviction court case.

It was created by our Lab in collaboration with Michigan State’s RnD Law Lab, and Dan Linna’s team there, who were creating and testing new outreach strategies for the county courts. Particularly, our groups are looking at how to help divert people away from evictions, by communicating to them their options and preparation strategies after they’ve been sued by their landlord.

Eviction Process Map in Pennsylvania

We made a 1-page flier for litigants and advocates for partners in the Pittsburgh area of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. This visual guide lays out how the standard stages of eviction works. It’s goal is to make this complicated process clear, and to help people know ‘where they are’.

Eviction Process Map for Tenants and Landlords in Cincinnati

Our Lab team worked with the Hamilton County Court in Ohio to create process maps of the eviction court process — emphasizing ways to settle the case out of court or fix problems before set-out happens.

Strategic Flowchart & Justice Journey Storyboards

These visual guides include strategic flowcharts and step-by-step storyboards that users can use to understand what comes next, what to do, and what options they have.

These visuals give people a birds-eye view of what to do when appearing before a traffic court — and how to request relief from fines and fees.

The Legal Design Lab team created these open-source designs in our class Design For Justice: Traffic Court, with our partners East Bay Community Law Center and NLADA. The visual designs for posters and handouts have been piloted in Alameda County, California. They were particularly created for courts that have recently introduced ‘Ability to Pay’ procedures.

If you would like to adapt these to your court or clinic, to help litigants understand their pleading options and how to request an ‘Ability to Pay’ evaluation, please write to us.

We will be happy to help you adapt these flowcharts and visuals to your context.

Our team has been creating posters and app guides to represent options for people who have been sued for debt in state courts.

These are flowcharts, mixed also with comparison tables of options so a person can weigh their options.

Strategic Justice Journey Storyboards

Our Lab team worked on improved self-help for Californians working on getting guardianship of kids in their life. This could be due to the birth parent being in military service, having addiction issues, or being incarcerated.