LEGAL DESIGN

Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL) brings together design thinking, human rights expertise, and hard work to fight corporate impunity. We are a Lab because we don’t need just one solution—we need a generative space for solutions to proliferate.

To influence the vast, complex web of incentives that structure the flow and consolidation of capital, we must generate new ways to build power with workers and communities in pursuit of a more inclusive and equitable economy. In the years since our founding, corporate power has grown and become even more complex, requiring even more creative and innovative strategies.

CAL’s Legal Design Lab is a space dedicated to designing and testing strategies to address the global crisis of corporate impunity. Corporations often evade accountability for abuses like forced labor, union busting, and sexual and gender-based violence, especially when harms occur transnationally. As a result, impacted workers and communities are left without justice.

CAL’s Design Lab is a research and development hub where we incubate non-traditional legal strategies, build connections, conduct research, and facilitate strategic and collaborative spaces using design thinking processes and mindsets.

Pulling from the product design process in a commercial context, CAL’s process takes design thinking as a starting point and adapts it to generate legal strategies to solve some of the most pressing human rights and environmental issues of our time.

CURRENT DESIGN PROJECTS

  • The Idea Bank is an online platform CAL facilitates that aims to serve the corporate accountability community by providing: 1) a tool to enable, foster, and supplement in-person and online connection between colleagues in the corporate accountability community worldwide; and 2) a working space where corporate accountability lawyers and activists can share knowledge, including novel ideas and lessons learned. To ensure these ideas aren’t shared with opposition, Idea Bank members are vetted before gaining access to the platform. 

    The core of the Idea Bank is a repository of legal research based on the theory that much-needed innovation in the corporate accountability field comes from working together across experiences, perspectives, and jurisdictions. We aim to provide a dynamic space not just for polished publications, but also for memos, notes, and musings on ideas for corporate accountability on human rights that are shared for input with trusted members of our community. If you’re chewing on an innovative legal strategy or idea and want input from trusted colleagues, this is the place for you! All ideas are welcome-- no matter how undeveloped or far-fetched. All ideas are anonymous unless the author would like to be named. 

    Please note that no research included in the Idea Bank represents any organizational or personal position. Neither Corporate Accountability Lab nor any participating member recommends or endorses any specific strategy named in the Idea Bank or attests to the timeliness of the research or viability of any idea included in the repository. 


    Sign up on the Idea Bank website or email us at ideabank@corpaccountabilitylab.org!