Dealing with legal all-caps

Some lawyers think they should shout at their readers by using all-caps text — this is how they communicate the idea “this is important”. Here’s a fragment of some Apple document:

The lawyers do disservice to themselves: all-caps text is much harder to read than normal one. If you are a designer, you are responsible for this, but unfortunately changing it is often beyond your power. So here’s what you do when no one is looking:

And all-caps becomes small-caps:

The text still stands out, but it no longer looks ugly and most importantly it is noticeably easier to read. We’ve used this trick in Getwear’s terms of use and other similar pages. See also: Typography for lawyers.