Episode 45: Democratizing Legal Information by Cartoons with Hallie Jay Pope

Welcome back to Legal Design Podcast! This marks the start of season 4. For this season premiere we are joined by the legendary legal information designer Hallie Jay Pope. Hallie has done amazing work making law better by designing legal information and one of her goals is to democratize legal information. As we know, legal information is often hard to obtain and even harder to understand because it’s full of legal jargon and sentences so long that publishers have to minimize the print in law books. But Hallie is here to change this. She’s known for her amazing work as a cartoonist and visualizing legal information in general. She explains the “threats and opportunities” of using comics, or images and visualization in legal communication. Hallie gives examples on projects she has been working on at the Graphic Advocacy Project and tells us about finding the Creative Advocacy Lab at the University of The University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. We talk about the bigger picture and how access (or lack of it) to legal information has an impact on big things like democracy and how we make decision makers understand how vital access to legal information is to justice systems. We also have some exciting news for you guys. We are proud to announce that for this season, we are sponsored by Precisely, the CLM platform setting a new standard for digital contracting. For more info, go to preciselycontracts.com/ldp. Hallie Jay Pope is a legal information designer, cartoonist, and educator. She is the founder and president of the Graphic Advocacy Project, a nonprofit that works with advocates and communities to share legal knowledge. Hallie is currently a visiting professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law where she runs the Creative Advocacy Lab, a legal information design clinic that re-envisions lawyers as community educators, problem-solvers, and storytellers.