NIL Rights and Infographic Link Dumps

I started to write a quick post about the confusing and fast-changing world of college athlete NIL rights the other day. It was boring. There are fascinating antitrust, athlete rights, preemption, and choice of laws issues at play, not to mention the nature and history of the NCAA. But I bored myself so much trying to put together a useful overview post about the current status and recent developments that I stopped writing.

Then last night while getting my gardening tips from TikTok (its algorithm is convinced I am only interested in gardening, soccer, cooking, and dogs), a video popped up of a kid making a beautiful infographic about the turtles in his backyard pond. It seemed to take him about 5 minutes using a free website, and he linked to all kinds of cool turtle related resources.

It occurred to me that we lawyers talk a lot about learning to harness AI and new legal tech, and the power of storytelling. But most of us, myself included, haven't even mastered making a simple digital infographic. So I gave it a shot. The end product is rough. And it definitely took me more than 5 minutes to make, but not too much more. In any case, it was a lot more fun to create than the formulaic blog post I had thought about writing.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about court filings evolving to include or even consist of more things like this, but it feels inevitable--at least for context or background sections. And given that e-filing is now almost universally required, plenty of filings would benefit from more color, the use of clear and persuasive graphics, and even the convenience of live links. I'm interested in hearing what clients think!