Towards a Design Science Research Process for Legal Compliance by Design

The increasing complexity of IT-related laws and regulations pushes IS research to better in- tegrate compliance into IS design processes. One key issue is the presence of often multiple le- gal provisions relevant to the same artifact. This generates tensions that can only be resolved through legal reasoning. Building on design science research and interdisciplinary literature, we explore features of a holistic design process based on legal reasoning to support legal com- pliance. We focus on the early stages of the design process - i.e., problem identification and definition of the objectives - and introduce two novel design activities: (1) analyzing the na- ture of requirements and (2) identifying and defining design trade-offs. Thereby, we develop a preliminary guideline to engage with legal experts. Our emerging method eases the transition into the design phase by putting legal reasoning before the definition of design objectives.