Jim Guterman at O’Reilly Radar has a good article entitled Teaching Design to Businesspeople. Why not teach design to lawyers? Write a blog post about this and send me the link. I would be interested in your thoughts. Here are my thoughts.
In my experience most lawyers don’t think much about design. Briefs, legal books, and contracts all tend to look the same. The fonts might be different and there might be some variation in the formatting, but there isn’t much that stands out. Is this good?
I think there’s a place for design in the legal world. I think it would improve the legal profession because design makes things more user friendly, easier to understand, and much more pleasurable. Why does a contract need to be just a bunch of words. Why not make a video contract. What about a flash presentation that explains the parties’ indemnification agreement. Overall I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in the products lawyers create and that design plays a key part in this.