Legal and Contract Innovation in a Corporate Environment: ContractInnovators@Airbus Defence and Space

Legal Design Thinking as a method to achieve innovation and customer centricity in a legal context is used more and more by legal departments and law firms worldwide. It can contribute tremendously to the change of how law and the legal profession are appreciated which ties in with the idea of this book and also its 1st edition to transform the legal industry into a more business savvy function. This chapter describes the way legal design thinking was used as a new method to experiment and solve detected pain points in the Commercial&Contract as well as legal areas at Airbus Defence and Space, with the first use case being to create a newly designed/visualised NDA for start-ups. Sections 1 and 2 will provide background as to why Airbus Defence and Space conducted this project and which research methods were used in the preliminary project phases. Section 3 is describing the results of the research which informed the choice of redesigning the NDA and laid the basis for our legal design thinking process, and it also describes how the project was conducted. Section 4 summarizes the lessons learnt. Section 5 illustrates the outcomes of the redesign process.