by Ken Lopez
Founder & CEO
A2L Consulting
Pinterest is one of the newest of the well-known social media sites. It defines itself as “a tool for collecting and organizing things you love.” As such, it is not primarily used for business and legal topics, but there are certainly some areas in which Pinterest can help lawyers, litigators, trial technicians, and consultants find and organize relevant material.
Pinterest's format makes it ideal for sharing visual information. Let’s say you are trying to find a way to visualize data for a jury, planning your courtroom attire, looking for a video on trial techniques, or even considering a redesign for your office. An appropriate search on Pinterest may help you find what you need.
Pinterest starts with pins, its basic building blocks. A pin is any image or video that a user adds to the Pinterest site. Someone can add a pin from any website by using a “bookmarklet” or by simply uploading an image. Any pin on Pinterest can be “repinned” by another user, just as on Twitter, a tweet can be retweeted. In order to post anything on Pinterest, one must register for the site and log in, just as one does on Twitter or Facebook. Registration is free.
On Pinterest, a "pinboard" or “board” is a location where pins can be organized by topic. For example, the board at http://pinterest.com/nationals/2012-nl-east-champs/ contains six images of caps and T-shirts that commemorate the Washington Nationals baseball team’s success in winning the National League East title last year.
Several boards, taken together, can form a page. The page http://pinterest.com/nationals includes not only the caps and T-shirts but also 10 other boards related to the baseball team, including news photos of exciting moments in their games, pictures of souvenir jerseys, and so on.
Pinterest allows and encourages businesses, including law firms and legal consulting firms, to create pages designed to promote their businesses online. Such pages can be viewed as a “virtual storefront” where items can be purchased online.
Litigators and others who want to find good examples of the best possible deployment of information on the Web will find excellent work on Pinterest. Here are some good examples of Pinterest pages or pinboards.
- Justia: This page has excellent examples of trademarks, patents, and their appropriate use, as well as an interesting assortment of legal articles.
- Mitch Jackson: Here, a California trial lawyer provides videos about the best trial techniques.
- Almost Designer Infographics: This is a catch-all page, displaying the best work of some top infographics providers.
- A2L Consulting: Our own Pinterest page picks up dozens of good examples of excellent information design, including graphics that show popular pets, the world’s richest people, and how President Obama uses PowerPoint.
- Graphic Design & Infographics: A leading data visualizer comes up with some really surprising concepts, including a word map of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
- Data Visualization: Another excellent page that provides demographic and similar data in unusual applications.
- Verschatt Infographics: The rise of social media and other current trends, all wrapped up in infographics.
- Lawyer Humor: Interesting observations about the legal scene, many of them tongue in cheek.
- Twktue Infographics: What will the Internet look like in 2015 – and similar futuristic thoughts and observations.
- Business of Law: Sprightly definitions and examples of such legal terms as diversity of citizenship, standing to sue, and arbitration clause.
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