During the Industrial Revolution, the structure and methods of Western legal systems facilitated commercial expansion and technological innovation. But as the Information Age gradually re-shapes pre-conditions for successful innovation, legal systems generally-and contracting in particular-may be obstructing rather than enabling continuing growth. To re-align commercial and technical needs with legal methods, traditional legal systems must themselves innovate. This Chapter highlights three perspectives for imagining legal innovation: first, alternative structures for contracting, like relational/collaborative and outcome/performance-based contracts; second, information design tools like simplification and visualization, and computer coding tools; and finally, systemic measures designed to resolve the kinds of problems that have increasingly challenged traditional legal methods. Throughout, the Chapter adopts the attitudes and methods of Proactive/Preventive Law to untangle the difficult relationship between law and innovation: stronger innovation requires the law to offer diverse methods, flexibly applied, to meet varied contextual needs; and yet any new legal reform must be efficient and feasible as well as effective and just.
CITATION STYLE
Barton, T. D., Haapio, H., Hazard, J. G., & Passera, S. (2021). Legal Innovation in Contracting, and Beyond: Merging Design and Technology Tools for the Information Age. In Mapping Legal Innovation: Trends and Perspectives (pp. 159–187). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47447-8_8
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