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Consider a piece of flat-pack furniture. A person with no training and no expertise can open the box, follow a wordless booklet of diagrams, and build a wardrobe in an afternoon. Now consider a legal document of similar length. The same person, faced with a contract or a set of terms, will very likely give up before the second page.
The difference is not intelligence, and it is not the complexity of the underlying task. Assembling furniture is genuinely intricate. The difference is design. The furniture comes with instructions that are clear, visual, and logical. The legal document does not.
This gap has a measurable cost. According to Khaled Al Rashed, founder and chief executive of Oqood AI, the Gulf’s first Arabic AI-powered legal platform, the problem is not comprehension but presentation. Around 97% of internet users accept terms and conditions without reading them. Nearly everyone does it, clicking past pages of language that govern real rights and obligations, because the format makes engagement feel impossible. The information is not too hard to understand. It is presented in a way that defeats the reader before they begin.
Legal information is not the problem. Its presentation is.
In its raw form, legal information tends to arrive as dense, interlocking, exhausting text. Long sentences, nested clauses, cross-references, and archaic phrasing combine into something the brain treats as a wall rather than a path. Faced with that wall, most people disengage.
But the underlying content is rarely the true obstacle. Reorganise the same information into clear steps, a logical sequence, and visual cues, and it becomes usable, the way a wordless instruction booklet turns a complex build into a series of manageable moves. The content did not change. Its architecture did.
This is the discipline known as legal design, and it is worth being precise about what it is. Legal design is not decoration, and it is not about making documents prettier. It concerns itself with how a document works as much as how it looks, with form and function together, applying to legal information the same care that goes into any well-designed product a person is expected to use.
The questions a legal designer asks
The practice borrows its method from product and user-experience design, and asks the same kinds of questions those fields ask. Where does the user stumble or hesitate? Where do they make mistakes? What would make a decision easier to reach? What obstacles stop someone from completing a task smoothly? Are there recurring errors that a redesign could prevent altogether?
These are not questions the legal profession has traditionally asked of its own documents. The assumption has long been that legal language is necessarily dense, that impenetrability is the price of precision. Legal design rejects that trade-off. It holds that a document can be both rigorous and usable, and that where the two seem to conflict, the fault usually lies in the presentation rather than the law.
The goal is a concrete outcome: people making decisions with confidence, making fewer errors, and reaching the results they intended. When legal information is designed well, the person using it understands what they are agreeing to, spots what matters, and acts on it correctly. That is not a cosmetic improvement. It is the difference between law that functions and law that is merely clicked past.
Why this matters for legal AI
For a legal-AI platform, this principle sits at the centre of the work rather than at its edge. The market makes the stakes clear: legal technology is expanding fast. Ken Research values the GCC legal-tech sector at roughly $1.2 billion, with regional adoption rising around 15% a year, while the global legal-technology market is estimated at more than $30 billion in 2025 and projected by several research firms to roughly double by the mid-2030s. As firms rush to adopt these tools, the ones that deliver real value will be those that get comprehension right, not just capability. A tool that produces technically correct legal output a user cannot readily understand has solved only half the problem. The other half, presenting that output so a practitioner or client can act on it with confidence, is a design challenge as much as a technical one.
It is a principle Oqood AI, the first Arabic AI-powered legal platform in the Gulf, treats as core to how it is built, an approach reflected in a founder who is himself a certified legal designer. Building for Arabic and the region’s civil-code systems is one dimension of fit; presenting legal information so that it is clear, logical, and usable is another. In a market where a document’s readability can determine whether it is understood or simply accepted unread, designing for comprehension is not a finishing touch. It is part of what makes a legal tool genuinely useful.
The lesson of the flat-pack booklet is that complexity is not the enemy of clarity. Poor design is. And what can be designed can be designed better.
