> Design Projects > DigiLaw
KEYWORDS: Champion Entrepreneurship Project, e-Governance, Website and Service Design
COURSE: EIT Digital Summer School programme Secure E-Governance at Tallinn University of Technology
DURATION: 3-14 Aug 2020
MY ROLE: Business Planning, UX/UI/VI design
The problem
Law compliance check is costing and cumbersome. Take GDPR as an example. Since May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation has been put into action, and a total worth of 176 million euros of fines has been issued. For most big companies this is not a huge issue as they have the resources to hire a lawyer to take care of this for them. However, these costs add up quickly, costing as much as 400 euros for 30 minutes of advice. Moreover, the compliance check is not a one-shot verification but rather than a consistent process that infiltrates every single data processing action in daily operation. Even unconsciously made mistake could lead to panelty. This hard truth has been shown by startups such as Seznam (a social network platform for students) and Streetlend (a tool sharing platform for neighbours) who had to shut down their businesses completely because they could not afford to comply with the GDPR.
GDPR
Project goal
We will build a service business that digitises and automates the process of law compliance audit following the concept of Rule as Code.
What's Rules as Code?
Rules as Code(RaC) is an emerging research and application field that translates the complex human language of regulations into logical code that can easily be checked by machines. It urges the laws, which are conventionally written in natural language, to be encoded and updated, thus to get adapted to the rapidly changing world. On the other hand, it facilitates the automation of administration that can utterly improve efficiency for both the government and citizen/businesses. In New Zealand [1], France [2], Australia and Singapore [3], governments are already testing projects that write regulations into codes and grant access to service through automated digital channel.
[1] ‘Better Rules for Government Discovery Report’, New Zealand Digital government. https://www.digital.govt.nz/
[2] 'openfisca'. https://fr.openfisca.org/showcase/
[3] ‘Four things you should know about Rules as Code’, GovInsider, Mar. 03, 2020. https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four-things-you-should-know-about-rules-as-code/
Interviews and validation with professionals
During the project, we had an opportunity to get in touch with a number of professionals from field of research, investment, policy making and lawyers, who had helped us completed the puzzle of service.
Our mentor, also researcher at TAL Tech GovAiLab, introduced us with the general idea of Rules as Code and pushed our team to further ideation and validation. One investor, as a business mentor, suggested that we focus on one specific area of law and policy instead of entangling with the broad idea of turning arbitrary rules into codes. Through our interview with scholars from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), they confirmed that there would be business interest as well as government interest for our idea, as the governments are positively seeking digital transformation as well and they are willing to cooperate with such agency. Two lawyers also confirmed that the law firms have the same concern over the issue. One of the lawyers emphasised that there's undeniable human factor in legal system, for example the interpretation of laws. This reminded us that we should bring law experts in as our key resources in buidling the system, or as partners after lauching.
How do we run our business?
Customers
Small/Medium size companies in urgent need of GDPR compliance auditing are our major customers. The rapid and consistent compliance auditing service is the key value that we provide to our customers. Unlike conventional law consulting, our service are delivered mainly through online channel such as self-service website, ensuring a fast and convenient access.
Our solution offers a monthly subscription plan at an affordable price of 100 euro per month. Such a subscription plan would be fitting as we are offering a service that will continuously monitor the system of the customers during their lifecycle. Still, since a lot of startups try to avoid many subscription costs, we also offer a pay-per-service model, where customers can ask for a one-time test of their software or a specific part of the regulation they are dealing with at a price of 150 euros.
Partners
Governments, both local as well as on European level, will be ensured that their rules are followed and ability to govern improved. By partnering with these governments we can become part of the rules as code movement from within, as we assist governments with the writing of new laws and regulations from a rules as code perspective.
Law firms can help us with the right interpretation of the law and we can refer customers to them for any specific cases that cannot yet be handled by our software.We also offer a licensing plan for them such that they can use our tools when working with customers on a lower budget. For this we ask them 20% of their revenue by helping a customer.
Growth roadmap
From GDPR specialist to general laws
1 Online form as MVP
The first MVP in form of an online checklist, as showed above, will be a basic translation from complex human regulations into code.
2 Automatic testing
For the next milestone, in 6 months, we will have our software automatically scanning the core software of our customers based on specific points that we have identified in the existing rules as being indicators of compliance.
3 Learning system (NLP/AI)
As the rules are naturally subject to change, we want our software to be able to learn from different versions of the rules as well as different sorts of software it encounters. For this, we can use artificial intelligence. Furthermore, using natural language processing, our tool can identify the relevant elements of the law and learn how to translate this into code. This learning system will be created after 1 year.
4 Generalised system (other laws as well)
Finally, after 2 years, we will expand to other rules and regulations outside of the GDPR, such as taxes and welfare, to be able to serve more customers and gain market share as we have been one of the first to build up such a complete tool.
Prototypes
To better demonstrate and validate our idea to the jury investors, we implemented a MVP demo and envisioned a website prototype of future service.
1 The MVP demo - a manual online checklist
As the minimum viable product, we encoded only one chapter of GDPR(Article 9) and implemented it into a checklist on which user can tick according to their own situation and check by themselves whether their business is compliant with this chapter of regulation.
2 The website prototype - an automated tool
Using Figma, we designed our second prototype where we envisioned how user will interact with our automated service.
Try with it below. If the prototype doesn't respond, please open here.
Discussion
During the pandemic, we have witnessed an unprecedented large scale of practice and experiments of remote collaboration in human society. Our project, along with the summer school, was also brought completely online. Thanks to the online communication and collaboration tools, the project was not severely interrupted except for the canceled summer beach party by the Baltic sea. We even suprisingly found that some of the communication turned to be more efficient when held online. For example, a call with a first-met expert online not only saved us time of urban commuting, but also time from greetings and chitchat, so that we can cut diretly into the topic once the call is on, exchange ideas, hang up on time and get back to work instantly. Though this may weaken the newly established connection between people without physical presence.
Achieving e-governance and digital transformation is a long-term yet imperative project involving all walks of people and organization in society. The pandemic, somehow, acted as a catalyst in this process. We would never see that many changes to people and businesses happening without this worldwide crisis. My concern raises as, once we are determined to bring certain interaction completely online, or patialy online, how can we design the experience that does not lose its essential as previously? A simple replicate of former experience might never be expected, but we as designers can move further and create novel and enhanced experience.
Award
The project finally won us the championship of pitch compitition among all the brilliant teams.
