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Helena Haapio is a pioneer of the proactive approach to business contracts. This means preventing problems through clarity, rather than using legalese as a weapon in a future dispute.
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Helena Haapio is a pioneer of the proactive approach to business contracts. This means preventing problems through clarity, rather than using legalese as a weapon in a future dispute.
The Pocket Lawyer is a small doll. Squeeze him and he yells “I’ll see you in court” and “Pay up you deadbeat”. Helena Haapio has used him in talks for many years now to typify old-style lawyers who are focused entirely on litigation.
Helena’s alternative approach is called proactive law.1 Applied to business contracts, it’s about preventing problems from arising in the first place, because everyone knows what the project is about, and what their responsibilities and rights are. It’s a paradigm shift, and a genre shift.
The reader is entirely absent from the worst old-style contracts, written in archaic language and printed in a tiny font. But contracts drawn up as proactive business tools use information design principles including plain language, clear layout and visualisation of complex processes.2
The doll comes from Pocket Professionals,3 who also sell the Pocket Doctor (“Oooops! uh oh...”) and the Pocket Dentist (“We won’t need novocain for this”). So I’m wondering what the Pocket Designer would say.
1. George Siedel & Helena Haapio (2011) Proactive Law for Managers: A Hidden Source of Competitive Advantage, Gower Publishing, 2011
2. Helena Haapio, Thomas D. Barton & Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci (2021) Legal Design for the Common Good: Proactive Legal Care by Design. In Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci, Helena Haapio, Margaret Hagan & Michael Doherty (eds), Legal Design: Integrating Business, Design and Legal Thinking with Technology, Edward Elgar, p. 56–81.
3. https://www.pocketprofessionals.com/hear-dolls.php