Episode #44: Typography for Lawyers, with Matthew Butterick

Why should you care about typography? That’s like asking why you should practice for an oral argument or wear a tie to court. If you aren’t already using Matthew Butterick’s typography guide for lawyers, you’ll snap up a copy after you listen to this podcast.

Crowdfunding Lawsuits

Crowdfunding is all the rage, these days, and now it includes lawsuits. We’ve written about two crowdfunding efforts, LexShares and CrowdJustice, and now crowdfunding has hit the news. In Colorado, a court decided crowdfunders are subject to the same lending laws as payday lenders. And Wired wrote about the use of crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo to raise money to pay legal fees and fines.

So is this good or bad? We weigh in on today’s podcast.

Typography for Lawyers, with Matthew Butterick

Legal documents from briefs to contracts are uniformly unremarkable, but they don’t have to be — and if Matthew Butterick has is way, they won’t be for much longer. He argues that good typography is part of being professional in print, just like practicing for an oral argument or selecting a tie is part of being a professional in court.

On this podcast, Sam and Matthew talk about typography and address some of the big typographical controversies, like how many spaces you should use between sentences (one), whether you should put spaces around an em dash (if you want to), and why nothing says “I don’t care about my work product” like setting it in Times New Roman.

We also talk a bit about Matthew’s Pollen online-book software.

Whether or not you listen to today’s podcast, do yourself a favor, get a copy of Typography for Lawyers, and put it on your shelf next to the BlueBook and Black’s Law Dictionary.

Thanks to Ruby Receptionists for sponsoring this episode!

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Episode #44: Typography for Lawyers, with Matthew Butterick was originally published on Lawyerist.

Source: https://lawyerist.com/94812/94812/