I took notes at last week’s Equal Justice Conference presentation that I made with the Harvard A2J Lab crew, Erika Rickard, Jim Greiner, and Hallie Jay Pope. These notes capture the presentation that they made, explaining how they decided to take a visual approach to court outreach to litigants facing debt collection.
They used visual design, adult education principles, and psychological analysis to craft a new approach for legal explanations and court outreach. They paid attention to reducing stress, cognitive loads, and other inhibitors — and using visuals (like their now famous Blob character) to do so.
One very important takeaway: we as lawyers shouldn’t be trying to overeducate our clients or audience — drowning them in all the details and the context. Rather, we should be just getting them to the next-step.
