Visual literacy for legal teams starts with a saddening fact. Anything a lawyer writes, they write into the void.
Linsey Krolik, senior director of AI governance and product legal at Credo AI, in a recent webinar hosted by SpotDraft, said that lawyers draft for the day a dispute lands in court, yet most contracts never get anywhere near litigation. The people who actually live with them are in sales, procurement, finance and operations. They open the document with a question, a deadline or a worry, and they get a wall of text.
The session, A Masterclass in Visual Literacy for Legal Teams, brought together the three co-authors of Visual Literacy for Lawyers: A Guide to Enhancing Your Contracts and Practice: Olga V. Mack, CEO of TermScout, Tessa Manuello, founder of Legal Creatives, and Linsey Krolik. SpotDraft COO Akshay Verma moderated. What follows is the part of the conversation that stuck with us, and the question we think every legal leader should take back to their team.
Manuello opened with research from her own community of lawyers and contract professionals. Their biggest complaint was not about drafting or negotiation. It was about what happens once the ink is dry.
Nobody reads the contract, she said. It stays in the drawer. Then something goes wrong, and legal is pulled back in to clarify, problem-solve and put out fires. The costs her respondents named were revenue leakage, damaged relationships, burnout, and getting trapped in auto-renewals nobody remembered. She was candid about the irony. The problem is a lack of understanding, and the usual fix is more legal text.
Who owns a contract? Mack called it a controversial question and offered a better one. The answer to ownership, she said, is everyone and no one: a contract is an asset of the enterprise. The test is whether the relationship is appropriate to the person's function. A contract that hands someone the entire history of what could possibly go wrong, when they need one sentence, is giving them too much. Precision is the goal: give each person what they need to do the job without missing a beat.
Plain language contracts, clear structure and the right diagram do not require a design degree. The panel's examples were small and specific.
Krolik showed a dense termination clause, one block of text with two thirty-day periods and no clear account of what happens afterward. Her rewrite split it by concept: termination for any reason, termination for breach, and final obligations. She also pointed out that a phrase like "for the avoidance of doubt" is a flag. If you need it, the sentence before it probably needs fixing.
Manuello walked through redesigned terms of use with a clickable table of contents, modular sections, bigger headings and a short plain-language summary above the legal text. No diagrams yet, she noted, and the document was already easier to scan. In her community research, she said, both lawyers and non-lawyers preferred the redesigned version.
Her rule of thumb: a timeline for sequential processes such as delivery or termination, a flowchart for conditional events, and swim lanes when two or more parties owe each other related obligations. Verma shared his own example, a contractor's timeline of start date, milestones and payments inside an eight-to-ten-page contract. It was the one page he and his wife needed.
Manuello cited dual coding theory: pairing text with a visual helps people process and remember the information. Keeping the text also helps readers using assistive technology, and it gives skeptical lawyers some comfort.
Mack's best argument was about subway maps. The London or New York map is not geographically accurate. It leaves out every turn and bump in the track. It is still how most people get around a city, because it was built to answer one question: where do I get on and where do I get off.
She applied the same logic to contract analytics. In her example, a supplier compared a customer's proposed liability cap against its own template and a comparison range. The proposal was three times the annual fee, against a range of one to two times. Reduced to a simple graphic, the gap was obvious, and so was the real question: what about this deal would make us comfortable with the extra exposure? A lawyer will still check the underlying language. The business person only needs enough to decide.
Her advice before building any chart: finish the sentence "I need you to decide ___." That sentence tells you what to show and how much detail to include.
Verma raised a point worth sitting with. A contract broken into labeled sections is easier for AI to work with, too. Krolik agreed. Much of the discussion was about writing for human readers, she said, but we now have to think about both, because AI tools are being used to surface the issues lawyers should spend their attention on. Sectioned, labeled text makes that easier.
This is where the two ideas meet. Clear structure is good for the person in procurement and good for the system reading alongside them. Teams that fix the document once get both benefits.
Manuello was direct about change. If you are the only lawyer on your team adding icons and timelines, your documents will look different from everyone else's, and that does not last. Her playbook: show the research, point to the pain you already have (the constant requests for clarification, the post-signature firefighting), run a small pilot, then upskill the team so the output is consistent. It is a strategic decision, not a personal style choice.
Krolik's version was shorter. Do one small thing, and don't get trapped in the traditional mindset.
Here is the one we would put to any head of legal: who, in your company, can explain your contracts without calling you?
If the honest answer is no one, the signed contract is not finished work. It is a document only its authors can use. The panel's argument is that this can change with plain headings, a timeline, a swim lane or a one-line summary, and that the lawyers who change it will be the ones the business keeps coming back to.
Krolik put it as an invitation to think like a business person who happens to be a lawyer. We think that is a fair place to start.
The panelists' book, along with its companion workbook, is available on Amazon.
