Comic Book Contracts
We enter into contracts all the time, often without knowing it. When we buy a bus ticket, subscribe to free Wi-Fi, or when we shop online. However, most people will admit to not taking the time to read the fine print, which is often detailed and difficult to understand.
A collaborative team of researchers led by Professor Camilla Andersen at the Law School, University of Western Australia have found an alternative to navigating through paragraphs of legalese, which has started an exciting visual direction for legal contracts. They have created Comic Book Contracts, which include a set of pictures with some text, designed to drive behaviour and encourage better access to justice so that disputes do not arise. Illustrators, including Loui Silvestro, form an important part of the collaborative group, which also includes software experts and engineers, psychology researchers and media and communications people.
Comic book contracts include pictures and text to drive behaviour
From storyboard ideas to Comic Book Contracts
A combination of influences led to Professor Andersen creating the idea of legally binding, comic book contracts. Living in many countries with her family as a child helped develop multi-perspective views. Her involvement with the Scandinavian Think Tank in the 1990’s-2000’s challenged existing legal design; and the creation of visual “social stories” that helped her young autistic son understand complex life situations emphasized the importance of visuals and simplicity.
I was turning the complex simple in a very visual way, to try and make everything more palatable. This was a very important part of my journey.
Turning complex situations into a simple story board was fresh in her mind when in 2016, Professor Andersen was approached by colleague Associate Professor Adrian Keating, to prepare a contract to help engineering students participating in the UWA Makers Lab understand the conditions of their non-disclosure agreement, in relation to intellectual property. The purpose of the UWA Makers comic contract was to focus on the behaviour expected of students, rather than their legal obligations. The contract proved successful, resulting in no misunderstandings or breaches to date.
The UWA Makers non-disclosure agreement, as a comic
The ABC Law Report picked up the story in October 2016. Their interview included international colleague Robert de Rooy, a South African commercial attorney who had just created illustrated employment contracts for fruit pickers, many of whom are illiterate. Professor Andersen and Mr de Rooy continue to collaborate on research projects and articles that outline the efficacy of visual contracts.Since its beginnings in 2016, Professor Andersen and her team have witnessed a massive industry response to the idea of making law simple and accessible through comic book contracts. Whilst the idea of comic book contracts may not suit every kind of law, where it can be applied it has demonstrated an accessible way to communicate with clients, customers and employees, an access to justice not previously seen, and a saving of time and costs to the company.
What started as an experiment is now an established and exciting new direction of law. We’re trying to create something simple and accessible that will easily create that friendly framework around an agreement.
Changing the Aurecon spirit
Shortly after the ABC interview, John McGuire, the Chief Design Officer at Aurecon contacted Professor Andersen and commissioned the team to undertake a research project to prepare a visual employment contract for the global engineering consultancy company.
A focus of the Advancing Comic Book Contracts project (2017-2018) was to reinforce the spirit of Aurecon as innovators by changing contracts from being punitive and adversarial to being collaborative, succinct and meaningful manuals.
Non-gendered avatars were used to represent the employer and employee, including the Aurecon Bobby, which gave the company an innovative and welcoming style. The designers included the importance of timesheet keeping which has ensured billing is now generated in a more timely fashion. And, including interactive training links into the contract resulted in time saved with on boarding and training.
The Aurecon employment contract was the first visual employment contract in Australia
The Aurecon employment contract was finalised in 2017 and launched in early March 2018. It became the first company in Australia to use a visual employment contract, whilst eliminating more than 4000 words from their employment contracts. In 2019, Aurecon won a Golden Quill Award from the International Association of Business Communicators in the Publications category for the visual contract as a new and innovative way to engage with talent.
The team have continued their collaboration with Aurecon, commencing a further research project in 2019, Continuing Comic Book Contracting in Aurecon. This project considers how visual contracts might be integrated into Aurecon’s construction contracts and their core business.
We wouldn’t be here without the support of Aurecon. It was because of that support that we were able to take it seriously as a research project.
Testing the theory
Whilst anecdotal feedback from Aurecon employees had been overwhelmingly positive, comic contracts were novel and the team were keen to test their validity and reliability.
From 2017-2019, rigorous focus testing and longitudinal psychometric evaluation took place with thousands of Aurecon employees, to look at the way that visual contracts have been working. The results demonstrated significantly better scores for the visual contract, compared to a text-based version.
Employees reported that the contract was easy to understand, and reinforced the Aurecon spirit of innovation.
Comprehension
This more than doubled showing that people understood their contracts better.
Engagement
There was an increase in engagement with very large numbers reporting they were happier to engage in the comic process than the text based one.
Perception
These statistics which measured what people thought of a company that used a comic book contract, showed the biggest exponential growth.
Prior to the comic contract Aurecon was on a journey of cultural transformation. We wanted to embed a spirit of innovation and creativity in to the work that we did and particularly how we approached problems. The comic contract was a critical part of that journey. It was a physical manifestation of our innovative ambitions that was embedded in to the first document that our future employees experienced. Since its introduction it has had a profound impact on how our staff, and indeed the wider market, perceive the business.
Presenting graphic justice
Hon. Robert French depicted at the 2017 Comic and Creative Conference
Image: Stuart Medley, Bruce Mutard
In December 2017, The UWA Law school held the inaugural Comic and Creative Contracts Conference, with Aurecon as a major sponsor. The conference attracted speakers and experts in contract innovation and law from all over the world to discuss the evolution of visual contracts, their validity and future.
The conference highlight was the closing address by the former High Court Justice, the Honourable Robert French AC, who stated that as long as the meaning of the picture in contracts are clear, then they would be legally binding.
There is no reason in principle why pictorial contracts explained orally or supplemented textually or contextually could not be enforceable in the same way as any other contract,
The debate about the efficacy of visual contracts is gaining momentum. In 2020, the team addressed lawyers at the WA Bar Association to discuss the reality of interpreting these contracts when they come up for dispute. As well, the team are part of an online series of webinars run by the Altruistic Ventures collective that bring together a panel of experts on topics trending in law.
The team have presented their research internationally at research summits and have extended their talks to the Comic Arts Festival and visual artists, who are seeing this as a new niche for their profession. Professor Andersen even has an “Applied Comics for Law” think tank headed by Dr Stuart Medley at Edith Cowan University. There has been extensive media coverage in Australia and internationally including articles in The Wall Street Journal in 2019 and the Australian Financial Review in 2018.
The work of the team is also displayed at the “graphic justice: pictures worth 1000 words” in 2020. This exhibition by the Supreme Court Library Queensland exploring real-world examples of how legal practitioners, companies and advocacy groups are beginning to apply visuals to help people better navigate and understand the law.
The most important part of the team is respect for other professions and other skills sets and accommodating it and just thinking about the fact that maybe law doesn’t have the answer for everything.
A WAiS individualised contract
In September 2017, the team began to work with WA’s Individualised Services Inc (WAiS) who funded a research project to explore how the comic book approach could work in the disability and human services sector to provide access to justice for users.
The team created a sample employment comic contract that supports Western Australians with disabilities who hire their own support workers. The contract uses drawings and pictures to make the contract easier to understand.
The team worked closely with WAiS and through focus group testing, to meet the challenge of producing a visual contract that people with varying types and levels of disabilities could use with confidence. Equally important, the contract had to be easy to understand by workers.
WAiS now offer two visual employment contracts (casual and part time/ full time) as an alternative to text-based contracts based on the WA State Industrial Relation system.
Clear visuals enable people with varying abilities to use the contract
National Hardship Australia
The team is collaborating with Financial Counselling Australia to visualise the National Hardship Register, an initiative which addresses the issue of long-term and severe financial hardship experienced by vulnerable Australians. The team prepared illustrations for the Financial Counselling Australia TedX SPOT talk as an example of how to simplify the complexity of a contract for people who may already be reluctant to enter into a one. The images used in the project portray what happens when someone has no means or prospects of paying their creditors and how they can be safe from prosecution by debtors through joining the National Hardship Register.
Law doesn’t have to be alienating, law doesn’t have to be partisan. Law can be friendly and approachable.
Comics depicting the financial circumstances under which some people may be protected from their debtors by the National Hardship Register (NHR)
The newest development – Banking Terms and Conditions for Bankwest
The team has been working on the Bankwest terms and conditions of banking since 2018, and in Feb 2021 the first of these came out. Financially supported as a research project, the team have been working closely with Bankwest to prepare contracts for hundreds of thousands of private banking customers. In 2021, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) approved the research.
Initial focus group testing conducted has shown similar results to those seen in previous testing, with the user-friendliness of the contracts being appreciated. The team look forward to studying the impact of this more closely. They are now collaborating with the UWA School of Psychological Science to help the psychometric testing of these exciting new kinds of banking instruments. The first set of banking terms can be seen via the Bankwest website.
This large-scale commercial roll-out of banking documents is the first of its kind, and the team look forward to seeing where it will lead.
The law doesn’t have to be boring, it doesn’t have to be just words. It can be whatever it needs to be to provide a good, constructive and nurturing framework for legal relationships.
The team have produced comic Terms and Conditions for Bankwest, which will be rolled-out as the first of its kind.
An alternative contract
Professor Andersen’s partner since 1998, Peter Alexander Corner-Walker, worked briefly on her team in 2018 as a research assistant examining the history of images in law. Inspired by the project, and wanting to help smaller enterprises who could not sponsor research projects, he started Alternative Contracting in 2019. The company’s success demonstrates there is sufficient industry need for visual contract services.
Since inception, the two teams have collaborated on projects. They also share some of the same contractors, including Chief Illustrator Loui Silvestro. In 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, the teams responded to a call-out by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to create a video on the legal parameters of social isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s nice to see there is a sustainable commercialised version of what we’ve created, that is working.
Another perceptionality
The team’s next project is in collaboration with Carsten Ostergaard Pedersen at Neuro Design International, neuro designers and psychologists working with people to overcome mental health issues. Their research will consider the ‘perceptionality’ or psychological impact of comic book contracts and the way that the images are being perceived. It will look at the way that it changes the relationship and the mutual perception that people have with each other when they choose to use a contract that looks a lot friendlier than your standard adversarial contract.
Measuring with the highest precision