Simon Cowell to be ‘Law for Laughs’ Czar?

October 21, 2009

juror

Is it true that Simon Cowell has been asked if he would like to be the ‘Law for Laughs’ Czar following the Lord Chief Justice’s apocalyptic vision of the future?

Lord Judge, for it is he, says that in 15 years’ time juries will be incapable of listening to oral evidence, reared as they are on the internet and social media tools such as Twitter. His Lordship fears that future generations of jurors will be unable to sit and listen to barristers, and that instead they will expect advocacy to be conducted via computer.

To avert this dread scenario a Twitter campaign has been set up to enliven the courtrooms of the future. Its primary aim is to bring a bit of X-Factor to the law. Already it is rumoured that Mr Cowell will be the ‘Law for Laughs’ Czar, and that one of his first innovations will be to make barristers compete against each other for the right to appear in court.

“Only the funniest, or the best dancers, will be allowed to represent clients,” says a source, “thereby ensuring that the law is fun and, more importantly, that jurors get something out of the experience of sitting in judgment on their fellow men.”

Pictured courtesy of Mike Zornek: a badge worn by jurors. In 15 years’ time, it will be a piece of branding.

 

Comments

Please submit comments to Swordplay below.

If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.