Contract Visualisation: Sketches For Generic Interfaces

Our aim is to develop general heuristics for the visualization of contracts, which may serve as guidelines for interface developments of legal technology software. We introduce three approaches to interactive contract visualisations and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. They all address the negotiation phase preceding an agreement. We believe the nature of contracts is to capture and organise potential future events and therefore introduce the concept of "possibility spaces" as a starting point for the first two visualizations. Focusing on the "modalities" of contracts seems to us the most promising approach and is explored in the third example. From a methodological point of view, we develop visualisations through abstraction and focus on the common characteristics of all contracts. In that sense, we do not "illustrate" contracts. Through these visualisations we hope to make contracts easier to understand, be it on paper or via legal technology.