Recognition & Press
Inkling Legal Design's work has been covered by the Financial Times since 2021 - from the FT's first profiles of legal design as a discipline to its 2026 reporting on firms building their own legal AI tools.
Inkling is a Financial Times Innovative Lawyers award winner, and our projects with clients including HSBC, ANSTO and Grampians Health have been independently researched, scored and ranked by the FT's research partner RSGI. Founder Sara Rayment has been profiled by the FT as one of the Asia-Pacific region's innovative legal practitioners.
Award Winning Work
Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Asia-Pacific 2024 — Award Winner, New Solutions
Inkling won the FT's 2024 Innovative Lawyers award in the New Solutions category for redesigning the commercial project agreements of ANSTO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. Inkling simplified the contracts ANSTO uses with its project partners — predominantly scientists without legal backgrounds — removing jargon while preserving legal compliance and handling complex scientific subject matter. The FT's researchers scored the work 25/30 and reported that the redesign improved collaboration between ANSTO's legal team and its internal and external partners
FT Innovative Lawyers 2024 — ranked, Business of Law
In the same 2024 report, the FT separately ranked Inkling's online plain-language writing course (scored 24/30), which trains lawyers to write clearly about ambiguous areas of law and benchmarks their writing, adopted by eight clients in its first year.
Our AI work, independently assessed
"The growth of 'build-your-own' legal AI tools" — Financial Times, May 2026
"The growth of 'build-your-own' legal AI tools" — Financial Times, May 2026. The FT's 2026 Innovative Lawyers report featured Inkling's AI-powered predictive drafting tool as a leading example of firms building their own legal AI. The tool draws on Inkling's repository of user-testing data gathered across multiple jurisdictions and cultures to generate plain-language consumer terms and flag drafting that won't work for a specific audience. Founder Sara Rayment explained to the FT why Inkling built its own system: existing AI products, trained on aggressive US-style drafting, couldn't be made to work for Australian, Asian and UK audiences
FT Innovative Lawyers Asia-Pacific 2026 — ranked, Digital Legal Services
The FT's researchers scored Inkling's predictive tool 24/30 — including 9/10 for originality — noting that it puts years of human user-testing insight to work inside an AI system, reducing clients' need for expensive testing from a standing start. → Read the FT case studies (May 2026)
FT Innovative Lawyers Asia-Pacific 2025 — ranked, Digital Tools
The FT ranked Inkling's AI platform launched in late 2024, at 24/30, again with 9/10 for originality. The report covered Inkling's work with Victorian healthcare provider Grampians Health on preparing the information and knowledge layer using AI solutions and executing with a chatbot (Josef AI) that helps staff assemble and negotiate contracts within set rules, significantly cutting reading time and drafting workloads. → Read the FT case studies (May 2025)
“Why legal innovators want to chat about AI” - Financial Times, May 2023
When generative AI first hit the legal sector, the FT turned to Sara Rayment for perspective. The article covered Inkling's early work advising law firms on adopting generative AI — including measuring the quality and quantity of AI-assisted output against lawyers working without it — and Inkling's founding purpose: addressing the cognitive diversity gaps in understanding between lawyers and the people they serve. → Read at FT.com
Human centred design & legal design work recognised
"How 'design-thinking' can help lawyers do a better job" — Financial Times, February 2021
The FT's landmark feature on legal design reported how HSBC's global head of digital legal selected Inkling to reimagine the bank's retail terms and conditions, and was impressed by Inkling's scientific, data-led approach — examining how neurodiverse users read the bank's terms before rigorously usability-testing the alternatives. Sara Rayment is quoted on why design without testing isn't enough: "the meat is verifying the prototype." → Read at FT.com
"Seven individual takes on rethinking legal practice" — Financial Times, May 2021
The FT profiled Sara Rayment among seven practitioners rethinking legal practice across Asia-Pacific, covering Inkling's founding in 2018, its multidisciplinary team spanning lawyers, designers, psychologists and other professionals, its work helping HSBC draft user-friendly terms for global contracts, and its social-justice projects — including a handbook supporting families detained after arriving in the US as undocumented migrants. → Read at FT.com
"Digital thinking spreads across Asia's law firms" — Financial Times, May 2021
In its overview of innovation across Asia-Pacific legal markets, the FT featured Sara Rayment, who trained at King & Wood Mallesons before founding Inkling, as an example of practitioners making the law easier to access and understand through legal design. → Read at FT.com
"Business of law: best practice in legal work" — Financial Times, May 2023
The FT's 2023 best-practice report ranked Inkling (scored 22/30, with 9/10 for originality) for its use of psychographic techniques to analyse and improve legal document design — helping financial services clients' in-house teams shape how data privacy policies, consumer terms and other legal guidance are presented so risks and obligations are genuinely understood. → Read at FT.com
Every project the FT has recognised shares the same discipline: design grounded in evidence from real users, whether the reader is a scientist signing a research agreement, a bank customer, a healthcare worker assembling a contract or, now, an AI system answering on a document's behalf.