We had a lot of fun on Talk Like A Pirate Day. Providing legal information as pirates was an interesting project for us with all sorts of challenges. Thanks to everyone who engaged with us on Twitter and watched our videos on YouTube.
How strange was that? It was clearly unusual for lawyers to dress as pirates and provide legal information from the deck of a ship. We like to think that we’ll start a trend. Perhaps in the years to come lawyers from all over will fire up their video camera and record some legal information from the perspective of a pirate. Probably not.
One thing that concerns us is that many people are reluctant to contact a lawyer. We understand that calling a lawyer might seem frightening, but there is really no reason for that. Most lawyers are quite open, friendly and happy to discuss your problem or refer you to a colleague who can. Lawyers these days are very accessible. Our hope is that our campy videos assist people in becoming comfortable contacting a lawyer.
“As we kept coming up with pirate scenarios for videos it was obvious to us that this was a concept that worked.”
How did we come up with the idea? In the summer we had an office pirate ship trip with pirateadventures.ca and we noted that we were all fairly skilled at pirate talk. Kyla then came up with the idea of going full pirate for Talk Like A Pirate Day. As we kept coming up with pirate scenarios for videos it was obvious to us that this was a concept that worked.
Of course, we needed a bunch of stuff. Kyla found us some costumes. Lewis from Brazen Bull Creative Marketing took our notes and put together scripts. We built a ship over two days, created a gigantic green screen and over six hours on Sunday September 9 shot all of the videos. Stephanie from Brazen Bull was behind the camera making the decisions on framing each shot. And we did it all in the back of our office in Richmond.
Building the set and green screen ourselves was important. At Acumen Law we try to ensure we are hands-on and involved in as much of the work as possible in a case. It’s part of why we obtain the breath testing equipment and take the same training the police take. We want to be experts at what we do, and doing it ourselves gives us that expertise. Talk Like a Pirate Day was another way for us to become experts… even though it is in set design and green screen technology. But this could have some legal application. We won’t know until we get the right case!
Our pirate tweets will live online forever and for now we’ll leave the videos on Youtube. We hope you enjoyed getting legal information from pirates. Yar.