Sustaining Legal Design: Designing Legal Resources With Refugee Communities

Legal design can support the resettlement of new arrivals in Australia by creating legal resources that clarify laws or policy, complex legal processes, and ultimately support their ability to exercise their rights. Legal design has significant promise, though it has been hindered by a lack of empirical research, particularly in relation to working with culturally and linguistically diverse communities. A legal design project in 2023-24 with CatholicCare’s Refugee Hub utilized the five step, participatory design process most common in the legal design literature. During the project it became clear that time, cultural considerations, and the role of service providers is an under-recognised and under-theorized role in legal design literature. This underscores that when working with culturally and linguistically diverse communities the design process must be flexible, patient, and may take more time than a typical funding cycle may allow. Further, it is essential service providers are approached as key partners in the design and implementation process to ensure the long-term success of the resulting resources. Strategies to maintain on-going relationships with service providers and engagement with the resource should be integrated into the process as the final design step - sustaining. Situating these considerations more centrally in legal design methodology and theory, and including this additional step, will help to ensure resources contribute to the broader goals of accessible justice systems.