Legal Features

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Why couldn’t law be designed by designers as well? Designers, humans being who love beauty and keep users in mind. It seems we’re getting there. When faced with the inner ugliness of the laws, some designers decided to put design methods to use. With a bold intent: make the existing laws simpler, user friendly and beautiful. And they invented that thing that we’ll be calling legal design from now on.

Get any group of professional services marketeers together at the moment and the conversation quickly turns to thought leadership, that rather grandiose term some people use for the publications which litter (more of that later) the websites of most major law firms.

It’s the hottest summer since the end of the Ice Age and the cold dark misery of winter seems a long way off. Try, if you can, to cast you mind forward to January 2014. A depressing month at any time, we can rely on the SRA to make January just that little bit less endurable – last January it was the COLP and COFA regime, next year it’s diversity monitoring.

It came as a major surprise to many in the industry when In-Deed closed for business. Despite a difficult trading period, with over £1m in cash on its balance sheet the company appeared in better health than many conveyancing practices. The closure marked a swift rise and fall in fortune for one of the poster children of liberalisation of the legal market.

Brands are not just for big firms. Thayne Forbes argues that they can work for smaller practices as well, explaining how to create one, where the value lies, ensuring it appeals to your target market and the risks of adopting a marketing collective’s brand instead.