Legal Engineering - Introducing legal thoughts to the design of an online learning platform

When designing systems, legal thoughts often come only after completion: The system is already in use and someone raises legal concerns, which are not or not adequately covered. In these late stages of a project changes are very expensive. While some legal requirements (e. g. informing users) can be rather easily added later, most others (e. g. privacy: access by staff or other users of the system) are very hard to add/correct if not initially included. This is even more important, as many issues are rather simple to implement at the beginning, but difficult and/or expensive to add or change later on (e. g. obtaining and storing consent pertaining to certain material). A solution to this problem is adding legal considerations to the conception/design phase of a project. The results from this approach in a project for creating an online learning platform as well as general ideas how to introduce this into software development methodologies are presented.