I’ve written before about the problems some of us are having with a language that’s as sexist as old.

That issue returns to mind after a few recent events, the latest being a journey to the grocery store that occurred less than one hour ago.

As I was cruising the aisles of the food store looking for various items, I noticed a homosexual woman dressed as a man, doing just what I was doing — looking for things and selecting some.

We wound up in the check-out line in sequence — I, right before her.

I emptied my basket, putting the few items I selected onto some bacteria-infested conveyer belt. Then I turned to put the basket where baskets go, but the woman-as-man behind me was in the way, busy on the phone, and not paying attention.

I caught her eye, and said “Excuse me dear.”

Now, I don’t know what she heard, but it certainly wasn’t the polite, respectful request I issued.

Based on her reaction to my request, she heard something more along the lines of, “You stupid bitch. Get out of my way!”

______
The Mrs. is in the hospital. That’s where I was all morning, and I would have spent all day there, but you know how it is — the bills must be paid! And god forbid AT&T should ever have to suffer along without me and my tiny contributions to its political contributions. (Another story, I’m sure.)

The Mrs. is getting a regular stream of visitors in the hospital. They all work for the hospital and they all have different roles to play; they’re all very polite and they all need information and they all say, “we’re here to provide it,” as well.

Those visitors are women. And they all have this peculiar way of greeting the Mrs.

They all greet her first as if she were still in high school. “Well, you must be Miss Thorne,” they say when they first meet her.

They can easily see she’s a mature woman, not a school girl. They can see she’s married, and “that’s her husband.”

Still, they address her like she was Little Miss Sunshine.

And here’s my speculation — they believe it’s polite to call Mrs. Thorne Miss Thorne.

They’re wrong. Very wrong.

______
Here’s my solution to the linguistic woes of having different titles for men and for women — refer to everyone as him. Get rid of she and her; rely on he and him. Apply masculine pronouns equally to all. Treat men and women alike.

Why not?

I’m sure the woman-as-man in the check-out line in the grocery store would be happier if I treated her — spoke to her — as if she were something she isn’t — a man.

More . . . later . . . including a new unisex, unitense, unipurpose pronoun for all — men and women alike.

Here it is: *HE*

It can be used in place of she, her, their and all sorts of problematic pronouns.

It’s a rare event — summertime weather at Ocean Beach in August.

I spent all day yesterday at the races, and the weather was great. But that’s up in Sonoma: the entrance to wine country.

San Francisco is not Sonoma. Not even close, weather wise.

Except for those rare days like today, that is. And this summer, those days are even rarer than usual — a sure sign that the Sun is flaring up and causing rare weather all over the world.

Being a responsible adult who doesn’t worry much about Sun flares, I decide, “The heck with work for now. I’ll get to it later.”

______
Ocean Beach is never all that busy, even on very rare days — Beautiful Days. Not al all. It’s quite the contrast to Jones Beach or Coney Island. That’s for sure. Compared to the beaches in or near NYC, Ocean Beach is desolate even when it’s most crowded.

I’m sure you know how it is. When people thin out, they can get more intimate. It’s like this: you can’t just go up to someone on 5th Avenue and 34th Street during a beautiful day of the week and strike up a conversation. That’s crazy.

But you can do that sort of thing when the folks are few, as they are here at the beach this morning.

______
As usual, I’m looking for sea shells for the Mrs. She makes all sorts of stuff from them. As I’m doing that, a gal walks by. I take the earphones out of my ears, and we greet one another in passing.

I find something odd on the beach as a man with a big belly is walking by. “What do you suppose that might be?”

He looks at the oddity for a few seconds and then walks away, without a word. Maybe he’s a German tourist and he has no idea what I asked. Maybe.

______
In two hours time, I collect a few good sea shells. And then I get to studying what must be one of the most energetic dogs on earth.

He’s chasing ravens. And I mean chasing and chasing and chasing and chasing, up one end of the beach and then way down then other.

What an energetic critter!

He starts chasing a raven that was just cooling out on the beach. The dog’s chasing after a bird that’s flying low and slow down the beach.

Then the bird does something real smart: it flies over the ocean — about 10 feet out — and the darned dog goes out in the water and keeps chasing a bird he’ll never, ever catch.

You know how it is — a bird flying 20 feet above the waves isn’t about to let some dog that can swim but can’t fly catch it. That’s just not going to happen, but the dog 1) doesn’t get it or 2) doesn’t really care. He’s in it for the thrill of it, just like the surfers riding the waves.

I’m sitting on a log watching this non-stop dog chasing one raven after another. He chases a raven up the dunes, down the beach, and back again. After that raven flies over the ocean, the dog gives up and looks for another raving just chilling on the beach.

The dog runs my way, and then this big raven takes off in slow motion. The dog becomes frantic.

The raven floats slowly in a circle that nearly covers me, dipping closer to the ground and then up again, and the dog is going wild, as if it’s got a real opportunity to catch the bird.

And then it hits me. The ravens are messing with this fool dog, making it waste all its energy so it will cool out, settle down, and leave all other creatures alone. They’re trying to coax it into a San Francisco state of mind.

Chill, fool dog! Chill!

What in the heck are you going to do with a raven once you catch it? Have you even thought about that?

I wonder who the heck owns this dog — or, as they say in San Francisco, “Who is its his guardian?

Just yesterday, I heard that the city council board of supervisors was considering an ordinance that would require pet owners . . . I mean guardians . . . to take an hour-long class to learn how to care for critters.

Can you believe it?

“If I want to get a cat, I’ve got to take an hour-long class first.

If I going to have a child, I don’t.”

San Francisco politics yields some odd results — some at odds with nature.

Whoever owns this dog isn’t much of a bird lover, methinks.

______
Well . . . I’ve really got to go. I don’t want to, but there’s work to be done. There really is.

On the way home, I make two stops. The first is Taco Bell. I pull into the parking lot, and the car next to me is blaring foul-language music. I look at the youngster behind the wheel, and he does a good thing: he turns the ugly music down.

I’m walking right past 7-11 (on the way to Taco Bell), and another youngster — the companion of the youngster in the car with ugly music — opens a door just as I’m walking by. I stop. He continues. I say, “Thanks mate,” and he acts like I’m invisible.

I get the Mrs. some crunchy tacos because I know she’ll be hungry when I get home and this is what she’ll probably want. She’ll also want some ginger ale, so I stop at a carryout: the one closest to McAteer High School, which is where I usually go.

But it’s lunch time.

The kids are moving in waves, talking loudly, using foul language, and not caring for others.

I suspect they’re as young and senseless as me and some of my friends used to be (though we had sense enough not to curse in front of adults).

I wonder if high-fructose corn syrup can have a negative effect on human evolution. I see plenty of evidence for it. Fat, dumb kids who think high style is dressing like sloppy plumbers and chubby car mechanics. Sneakers that cost more than I spend on . . . well . . . never mind that.

I get what I need, get back in the car, and then, after a few minutes of driving, “Honey, I’m home.”

The tacos were spot on.

Yippie! The Mrs. is pleased once more.

______
Freedom of speech and expression is wonderful, but it’s not for everyone. It was designed for adults: responsible adults.

It’s a typical Sunday morning up here on the Twin Peaks that stand between the City by the Bay and the world’s largest ocean. I’ve got a cup of coffee in one hand, a keyboard in another, and I’m wondering.

I just finished watching the Sunday morning round-table discussion of newsworthy events, and I am (once again) wondering about the terms that journalists and newscasters use to describe certain groups of things — people.

Media types often speak of the Muslim World. Why don’t they ever mention the Christian World? Or the Jewish World?

OK. Jews are such a minority that they can’t have their own world, but what about Hindus? If there’s just about as many Hindus as Muslims, and they’re just about as concentrated in one region of the real world, why don’t newscasters give them their own world, just like Muslims?

Now that I’m thinking of it, let me ask you this: why do media types talk about the X Community instead of the Xs themselves?

For example, the big news around here (in the City by the Bay) this past week concerns Prop 8, Judge Vaughn Walker, same-sex marriage (which media types around here call gay marriage), and equal rights. Local newscasters don’t say, “Gays are celebrating Judge Walker’s decision declaring Proposition 8 unconstitutional.” They say, “the Gay Community is celebrating.”

When it comes to national news, anchors don’t say, “Muslims are expressing concern over President Obama’s most recent remarks about building a mosque near Ground Zero.” They say, “the Muslim Community is concerned.”

“The African-American Community is upset over Johannes Mehserle‘s sentence,” they say.

Yes, but how do blacks feel about it?

Why not call Spades Spades, rather than members of the Spade Community? Why the mild misdirection?

And why not treat all groups (I mean, the members of the group of all groups) equally? Why talk about Independents and Independent Voters, but never the Community of Independent Voters or the Independent Voter Community? Why not talk of the Community of Democrats, or the Community of Republicans? Why is it always Conservatives, and never the Conservative Community?

Why speak of one group differently than another when there’s no need to?

These are the sorts of things I wonder about on Sunday mornings.

______
Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably do what I usually do — invest some time listening to the local news broadcast by KTVU (a TV station that covers the Bay Area and some its communities — those defined by geography, ethnicity, and religion, but not those defined politics or by wealth — unless there’s a murder or a rape or a robbery in some Gated Community other than the Bay Area’s most famous gated community of all: San Quentin).

“Live!”

“Coming to you live!”

“And now we go to Claudine Wong, live in Fremont. Claudine?”

Of course Claudine is alive. If she were dead, she wouldn’t be reporting for KTVU any more, would she?

By now, don’t we all know where those KTVU news vans with satellite dishes are going and what they’re going to do when they get there? When the anchor says there was a fire last night at a middle school in Fremont, and there’s Claudine standing in front of the ruined school the next morning, do we suppose it’s old file footage? Do we need to be assured it is not? Does KTVU think we’re such idiots, or that it’s so far ahead of its competitors?

These are the sorts of things I wonder about on Monday mornings.

And then I have another cup of coffee and get back to my work.

Do you know Peter Darling? I mean, the Peter Darling who lives in San Carlos and belongs to the LMA and is always great company. Do you know him?

Well, do you know where he is and what he’s up to?

I called his office phone number the other day. I wanted to see if he was going to be at last night’s LMA Summer Mixer, but the line “was disconnected, or is no longer in sservice.”

I called his cell phone number. Nothing!

Where is Peter? What’s become of him?

______
Un Oh! My time with the LMA list server is kaput. Bummer.

And no, Ms. Flynn — I was not banned from the list server, not unless you figure Senator Byrd was banned from the KKK or John Glenn was banned from outer space. Pa-l-e-a-s-e-!!!

It’s just that I haven’t been paying my bills. After a while, they pull the plug.

I’m gonna miss it. I really am. Especially as I was thinking of posting something there this coming Sunday — something that might have started like this:

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting here with a keyboard in one hand, a cup of coffee in another, and a question about attorneys and the news.

Based on the feedback I got last night, there are those who will miss my Sunday morning messages.

Oh well. Pay my bill and I’ll be back.

I’d pay it, but the Mrs. says I’m broke right now since I spent so much last weekend at the races in Sonoma. (And little does she know I have tickets for the Grand Prix in August. Shhh . . . please don’t say a word of it.)

______
I’m worried about Peter.

Why is his phone disconnected? Why hasn’t he posted anything at his blog in six months? Why is it that no one I asked about Peter last night could say any more than this — “I haven’t seen Peter in quite a while.”

It’s a mystery.

I don’t know Peter well, but he didn’t strike me as the sort who would join a small religious cult and move to the mountains to get ready for a visit from another world.

If you know what’s up with Peter, please let me know.

______
OK. I won’t miss the list server that much. It doesn’t get a great deal of traffic, and much of the discussion is of no interest to me.

But some of it’s interesting. For instance, a week ago, a marketeer for one law firm asked the marketeers from other law firms to give her their firms’ web site stats! Seriously.

Her firm has a labor-and-employment practice, and I suppose her firm’s attorneys advise clients on employment agreements — the sort that prohibit employees from revealing proprietary info, like the company’s web site stats.

But here she is doing precisely what she should not, and the firm’s attorneys haven’t a clue, even though they advise clients to . . . .

Never mind.

______
The LMA is a very good organization. At least it is for me.

The Bay Area chapter has a meeting a month, and they’re very well done.

Of course, I’m a vendor to these people. When I go to a meeting or a social event hosted by the LMA, I’m in the midst of potential clients, and those who can influence them, which is great. It’s always good to know people, especially those who can send work your way.

Speaking of which . . . I’ve got work to do, and I suppose that’s what I should do.

Later . . . .

Busy!

Real busy today . . . and still.

I’m creating several blogs for attorneys, and I’m redesigning a law firm’s web site.

I’m also copywriting for a high-tech firm in Silicon Valley. That’s what’s keeping me so busy.

______
Surprise! Surprise!

We spent last weekend at the drag strip, a bunch of my friends, some of their girlfriends and wives, and Dino and Tony and Nate and I.

We hired a shuttle bus to take us from San Francisco to Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, California, and it was great.

We could drink Champagne, tell tall tales, and not worry a bit about the traffic.

______
We arrived Friday afternoon, about an hour before qualifying for the nitro cars was scheduled to begin.

Great! Instead of driving a half-mile away and parking in some field that isn’t marked, the shuttle dropped us off right at the front gate. The gals among us really liked that, especially as the parking lot is not flat at all — it’s here and there on a big hilly area, the sort of place you might graze cattle if the grass was green.

Qualifying started later than usual, and there were a lot of problems, mostly oil spills at the top end of the track.

Then Gary Densham made a qualifying run, his funny car exploded at 292.52 mph, and it was quite a mess. Such a mess that it took so long to clean the track that the final round of qualifying for the top fuelers was canceled, because racing is prohibited after 10:00 pm.

______
Oh yes — the surprise: In the mail today comes two tickets to the Indy Grand Prix of Sonoma next month.

Totally unexpected.

I’m reading the letter that accompanied the tickets, and it’s an apology for Friday night not going so well.

Very thoughtful, but I don’t think I’ll go. I talked to Nate about it, and it sounds like he might go.

We’ll see.

Gotta run.

The bloga firma is all excited now that it’s got something exceedingly important to yak about: Sarah Palin and her use of refudiate (which is something she refuses to repudiate*).

Well . . . I say she’s done a good thing overall if she’s inspired bloggers — especially those who write like they’re in their first week of “English for people who didn’t get the hang of it in school because of a sincere lack of interest.”

I say, if she’s inspired them to acknowledge that language skills are important, she’s done a good thing.

______
Heck . . . why shouldn’t the president — another one who has a tough time respecting the G in ING — be held to the same standard of excellence as the local evening news anchor?

Why can’t the president say going to, rather than gonna?

Is it so hard to pronounce the very last phoneme in reading and writing?

Don’t we tell young school children that each one of them has the potential to become president of the United States of America?

Well then . . . shouldn’t the president set a good example for all those children by speaking well?

I say, of course he should. And he should quit imitating the previous president — the one who told a graduating class at Yale that you can squander your education and still do very, very well.

When the president’s at work (especially when he’s on TV), he should use the same care that anchors and actors use when they’re at work. That’s what I say.

______
Chris Matthews has been asking, “What’s up with the Republicans?” As he sees it, they’ve taken to admiring ignorance and a lack of education; now their pols (like Palin) try to look and speak more like rappers and less like law professors.

It seems that’s what we want in a president — one of our own: someone who can’t name a single justice of U.S. Supreme Court; someone who can’t be bothered with certain phonemes.

I guess that’s what we want for their kids too, else why would we send our children to school dressed like miniature auto mechanics? Why would we allow a teen to have less mastery of mathematics than what’s expected of a fourth-grader? Why would we give a high school diploma to someone who lacks the capacity to speak without vulgarity?

As a people, are we not careless with our children?

______
I spent all last weekend at the drag strip. It was a major event — the Fram Autolite Nationals; all the top contenders were there (like John and Ashley Force), and so were the masses (dressed very casually, as if they were public school students).

I went to see an exhibition of old dragsters and hot rods, thinking I might catch a memory or two, and I did.

But it was tarnished: I’m standing there looking at some old dragster from the 1970s, and a man comes along with his boy, who looks to be about 10 years old. The father and I acknowledge one another, and then he turns to his son and says, “You really need some balls to drive this thing.”

“Yeah, dad . . . some big balls.”

I’m shocked! I look at the father who’s smiling right at me, and then he sees how I am definitely not finding this humorous.

Quite the opposite: I consider what he did a form of child abuse. I really do. It’s not sudden and brutal like the abuse that puts kids in emergency rooms, but it can be just as damaging.

______
Dear Mr. President —

Would you please use proper pronunciation when you address us and our children? Is that too much to ask of you?

Would you please put the Gs in your INGs the next time you appear on TV?

And would you please do something with Hillary Clinton? What a freaking embarrassment she is to the U.S. whenever she speaks.

I hear William Jefferson Hague speak, and then I hear Clinton speak, and I just can’t believe someone with a law degree printed by Yale University Law School could sound like such a valley girl. “Well . . . ya know . . . I was . . . ah . . . just . . . um . . . .”

Please make her attend Toastmasters.

Thanks a bunch.

— Thorne

______

* Ever wonder why pols on talk shows can’t admit they were wrong? They do or say this or that, and then they wind up on a Sunday morning talk show (as Joe Biden so recently did), and when they’re asked about this or that . . . why . . . you’d think all the world had gone mad, save for the person being interviewed. They blunder, but they tell us we’re mistaken. “Well, that was taken out of context,” or “that wasn’t what I said,” or “I was speaking about something completely unrelated to anything you’re now asking me about and I’m gonna spend the next few minutes talkin about something else entirely, because the audience is too dumb to know that I don’t give a shit about the things we want our schools to teach our children . . . .”

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve got a cup of coffee in one hand, a keyboard in another, and I’m wondering about something, which is this — how to keep a web site with lots of content current.

The leading web sites are always current. The Huffington Post never presents the latest news as what happened six years ago. It never lists the Next Upcoming Event as occurring two months ago.

But some law firms sure do.

Currency (it seems to me) is a basic element of good style, especially when a key goal is to keep people informed (or attract search engines so potential clients and those who influence them will think of you).

Some firms do a great job of keeping their firm’s web site current. Everything’s automated, and as soon as 11 July 2010 is done, the seminar scheduled for that day is moved from Upcoming Events to Past Events.

But most firms aren’t equipped with the latest and greatest in web management software, and the event schedule is managed by some busy person with too much to do. (Too many law firms can’t afford the help they need because they spend too much for fancy conference room furnishings and artwork.)

Here’s what I’m wondering (about most firms):

1. How often should the event schedule be updated? Daily? Monthly?
2. How important is it to keep the schedule kept current?
3. Should the event schedule be posted so just about everyone (at the firm) sees it every day?

It seems to me that if web-based event schedules were posted as prominently as the printed schedules of old, you’d never see a schedule that said the next event was several weeks ago.

Out-of-date schedules send the wrong message: they say, “We don’t pay close attention to what we do, now that we’re computerized.”

Most law firms post the e-mail addresses of their attorneys so people (especially potential clients) can easily contact them.

The typical law firm is very cautious about establishing attorney/client relationships, and likes to avoid doing anything that could be seen as establishing such a relationship without the firm’s explicit consent.

Because of that, when you go to the web sites of most law firms, and you click an attorney’s e-mail address, you get a notice like this:

While we would like to hear from you, an attorney/client relationship cannot be established until we know that doing so will not create a conflict of interest and until we reach an agreement on terms of representation. Therefore, do not send us confidential information about any matter that may involve you at this time.

I Agree

If you click I Agree, your e-mail client opens a new blank message with the attorney’s e-mail address in the Sent To field (usually).

If you don’t click I Agree, the previous page is redisplayed (usually).

This is to protect the firm from receiving something it wants no part of before the firm’s agreed to an attorney/client relationship.

But what sort of protection is it?

Anyone visiting the web site of most law firms can just copy an attorney’s e-mail address and send that attorney a message (with who-knows-what attached to it) without ever agreeing to anything.

So . . . for you attorneys out there who find such things of interest, I pose this question: if a firm posts a statement along with an I Agree button when an attorney’s e-mail address is clicked, and a potential client (or adversary) sends the attorney a message without pressing that button, what risks does the firm face (because the firm allows you to send it who-knows-what without agreeing, despite the statement to the contrary)?

And if it faces no risk, why bother with the I Agree button?

A project that’s been on the back burner is now right up front. It’s an employment law seminar, and I’m editing/producing the big book the attendees will get.

I’m talking to one of the partners about copy editing her article on “Social Media in the Workplace,” but it’s a tough sell. As best I can tell, she’s afraid that if I alter her article, she runs some risk of misstating the law, or saying something silly.

As it is, her article claims that web sites — all web sites — are public record.

So, how can she be nervous about what I might do?

Here are three simple rules I follow:

1. I don’t change anything I don’t improve.
2. I don’t change anything I don’t understand.
3. I flag those things I don’t change, but the author should.

So far as I’m concerned, an attorney who thinks a skilled and experienced editor would hurt what she’s written doesn’t know what we do. And if she writes an article (for prospective clients) saying web sites are public record, she doesn’t know just how harmful a misstatement can be.

There are all sorts of editors. There are legal editors (I’m not one of them), mathematics editors (I used to be one of them), magazine editors (I’ve never been one of them), book editors (I used to be one of them), photo editors (I work with them), software editors (I used to be one of them), technical editors (I’ve long been among them), film editors (I just love what they can do), and text editors (software programs like Microsoft Word, BBEdit, UltraEdit, Emacs, and vi).

In the publishing world, there are these types of editors:

Acquisition editors — these editors (who most often work for college and trade publishers) acquire books for book publishers. Let’s say a publisher’s marketing department wants to capitalize on the social media craze by publishing a book on (you guessed it) social media. An acquisition editor goes out and finds the author(s) to write such a book. This is the editor who reviews unsolicited manuscripts and book proposals when there’s time for that.

Assistant editors — assist other editors in various aspects of the development and production process.

Associate editors — these are to assistant editors what assistant editors are to editorial assistants: one step up the ladder.

Contributing editors — aren’t editors at all. They’re writers who contribute articles to magazines and journals.

Copy editors — this is the most common type of editor, the one with a red pen in one hand, a cup of coffe in the other, seated at a desk covered with stacks of pages and pages to review.

Developmental editors — these editors (who most often work for educational and trade publishers) work with the publisher’s maketing department and with authors to determine the content and structure of a book. In some cases, they also function as acquisition editors.

Editors at Large — like contributing editors, these aren’t editors at all; they’re authors.

Editors in Chief — these are managers, people who used to be editors but who now tell other editors what to do. They are much concerned with their publishers’ bottom lines.

Executive editors — these are also managers. In some cases, these are editors in chief. Some publishers have a number of executive editors, each focusing on a particular line of titles, all reporting to one editor in chief.

Managing editors — these are also managers. Some publishers have a number of managing editors, each focusing on a particular line of titles, all reporting to one editor in chief.

Production editors — these editors are much concerned with scheduling, budgeting, and design. They work with other editors and artists to make sure everything’s done right and on time. They are also the publisher’s main point of contact with printers and distributors.

Project editors — these are editors who have overall responsibility for specific projects. They work with authors, artists, other editors, photo editors, proofreaders, and others to get everything ready for production. They usually handle various production chores.

Senior editors — these are people who used to be editors and assistant editors. They manage the efforts of (you guessed it) associate editors. In many cases, they’re next in line to become managing editor.

____________
OK. So what’s a general purpose editor? Why, that’s a skilled and experienced editor who handles a wide range of tasks — from designing Web sites to outlining seminar materials, from editing client alerts to proofreading them, from managing artists, writers, and photographers, to writing software, believe if or not.

According to legions of “social media experts,” if your attorneys don’t get hooked up on line (with Twitter, Facebook, etc.), they can kiss their prospects goodbye. They’ll be left in the dust, like all the attorneys who kept using the telegraph after the telephone became popular.

Well . . . if you want to be a “social media expert,” you need to have accounts with Twitter, Facebook, etc. But if you want to be an attorney with lots of good clients, forget it, especially if you don’t cater to the public (i.e., you don’t do divorces or DUIs).

There are close to 24 hours in a day, and you can spend some of them playing with Twitter, Facebook, etc., or you can spend them working the phone, taking prospects to lunch, playing golf with so-and-so, or reading the news so you know what’s happening in the world beyond Twitter, Facebook, etc.

For most tall-building attorneys, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are a waste of time so far as business development goes.

For some, it can be the Yellow Brick Road. But it’s certainly not that for most, especially those who long for the days before 8-tracks were hot.

Bryan Garner is offering a new series of webinars titled Better Grammar for Lawyers.

The editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, and a highly regarded legal writing expert, Garner regularly hosts these seminars to help attorneys develop their writing skills:

• The Winning Brief
• Advanced Legal Writing & Editing
• Advanced Legal Drafting
• The Winning Oral Argument
• Advanced Judicial Writing
• Legal Writing in Plain English
• Making Your Case

The Better Grammar webinars teach attorneys how to analyze sentences and find the flaws in them. And it helps attorneys “learn to think the way a professional editor thinks, rejecting edits that unskilled editors are prone to and instead seeing where the true linguistic problems lie.”

Before the seminar, the attorneys take a quiz consisting of 50 flawed sentences and four possible edits, only one of which works. During the seminar, the flawed sentences and the edits are reviewed.

Details:

Better Grammar for Lawyers: Part Three
Friday, May 14
12:00 — 1:00 p.m. Central Time
$199.00

Click here to register.

When President Obama announced Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court, he made it clear that the reason she was chosen was, in large part, because of her sex.

He said she was the first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School, and the first woman to be solicitor general of the United States, and that her mother “had grown up at a time when women had few opportunities to pursue their ambitions . . . .”

The next day, Vice President Biden said Kagan was chosen, in part, because “she’s the right age.”

I hear these statements, and I think of Title VII, the federal law that says employers may not discriminate according to race, religion, sex, national origin, etc. I think of the EEOC, which is constantly bringing charges against employers for violating Title VII.

Something’s wrong here, right?

Doesn’t the president have to obey Title VII?

No, not when it comes to federal judges. When it comes to Supreme Court nominees, the president is free to say he’s nominating So-and-So because he’s a young, good looking white male with a degree from Harvard who claims that homosexuality is absolutely disgusting and a woman’s place is in the kitchen, or another room.

That’s not illegal.

Nor is it illegal for him to pick a nominee because of her sex, or because she’s young, good looking, and willing to have sex with the president in exchange for the nomination.

The question this raises isn’t whether the president should be bound by the law just like everyone else, but whether everyone else shouldn’t have the same freedom the president enjoys.

You know . . . the land of the free, and all that.

______
When the president said he was nominating Kagan because of her sex, the result was a very extended applause in honor of that.

In the land of Title VII, that’s odd, is it not?

You know . . . given the law, and all that.

Interested in CI methods and what they can do for you and your law firm?

Then you just might want to attend a forum (aptly named Competitive Intelligence in the Modern Law Firm) that takes place at the AMA Executive Conference Center in New York City on 10 June.

From the announcement:

Dear Colleague,

It’s no secret that the legal industry is undergoing tumultuous change – with many firms exploring new economic models in the face of changing client demands. We all have access to a wealth of information. We search for it, read it and evaluate it every day. Data itself is interesting, but not always enlightening. In reality what we’re looking for is intelligence, and even more critical today, actionable intelligence.

Despite everyone having the same big-picture purpose of improving decision-making, planning more effectively and improving outcomes – it still behooves us to better understand some of the cultural and political landmines CI has to navigate with respect to collaboration among various functions and how these functions are different, similar, overlapping and even conflicting.

The past year has forced all businesses including law firms to re-evaluate their strategic plans, market place, client relationships and growth trajectory with an eye for understanding where opportunities can be found and where pitfalls lie. Firms that emerge triumphant from the current slowdown will do so because they made informed decisions about when to exploit new opportunities and when to forego them. Having the intelligence to confidently (and quickly) act and make these decisions is more critical today than ever.

The forum will show you how to:

• Identify competitive blind spots — using data on competitors to gain an edge in the proposal process.
• Use Competitive Intelligence (along with Knowledge Management) to offer alternative fees.
• Leverage data on competitors for strategic planning to offer customers what they want — alternative fee arrangements.
• Engage attorneys and staff in intelligence gathering for lead generation.

Presenters include:

Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer, Reed Smith LLP
Brooke Haughey, Manager, Competitive Intelligence & Market Research, Hogan & Hartson LLP
Kitty Schweyer, Manager of Competitive Intelligence, Library & Research Department, White & Case
Ann Lee Gibson, PhD., Ann Lee Gibson Consulting
Adam Severson, CMO, Faegre & Benson LLP
Wendy Bernero, Former CMO, Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP and McKee Nelson LLP
Paul Gladen, President, Muzeview
Kenneth Sawka, Managing Partner, Outward Insights
Patrick Fuller, Managing Account Director, Hubbard One
Charlie Vanek, Senior Director Product Marketing & Development, Hubbard One

For further information:

Peter Franken

______
Note: some posts are written engines, not mortals.

If you’ve never been to the Harvard Club, you should go if you get the chance.

And if you’re involved in law firm marketing, or you offer legal services, or you promote those who do, then here’s a great opportunity to visit the Harvard Club for two days (11 and 12 May) next week: The American Lawyer‘s Law Firm Marketing & Business Development Leadership Forum

Key topics:

Past As Prologue for Law Firm Marketing: Where We Are, Where We’re Going and How We’ll Get There
Revving the Biz-Dev Engine: Building a Billion-Dollar Sales Machine
Making Numbers Count: Actionable Analytics That Drive Business Success
It Might Get Loud: Clients Raise Their Voice Through the ACC Value Index
Made — Not Born: Tapping & Training Your Firm’s Next-Gen Sales Stars
Your Clients Are Ready for the Next, Next Thing. Are You? The Perils and Pitfalls of Working Without a (Social) Net
The Changing Nature of the Inside-Outside Counsel Relationship
Going, Going… Gone Global? Rethinking the Worldwide Market for Legal Services
The Practice Leader As Product Manager: What Firms Sell & What Clients Buy
Past the Hype – Social Networking and Corporate America: Harnessing the Power for Your Firm

Conference chairs:

Joseph Calve — Chief Marketing Officer; Morrison & Foerster
Jolene Overbeck — Chief Marketing Officer; DLA Piper
Robert J. Robertson — Chief Marketing Officer; Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Interested in social media and what it means for marketing legals services? Then consider the results of a survey that will be discussed at the conference:

One-half of the in-house counsel surveyed agree or somewhat agree that in the future, high-profile blogs authored by lawyers will influence the process by which clients hire outside firms.

If you’re anything like me, you’re surprised by the actions of those who get into trouble right after they’ve gotten out of prison. Are these people that stupid, or do they prefer jail to freedom?

I’ve got an idea. It’s certainly not original, as Woody Allen expressed it in his film Take the Money and Run when he has a bank robber sentenced to this severe punishment: he has to spend his time in prison listening to a life insurance salesman.

“There are some things worse than death. If you’ve ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, I’m sure you know what I mean.”

I think that’s a great idea.

Consider someone who commits a violent crime, spends five years in prison, and then goes right back to prison for commiting another violent crime as soon as he’s released.

Obviously, the five years spent in prison wasn’t much of a punishment, else criminals would strive to avoid it, right?

We need to have people who would rather be prisoners than free men do something besides watching TV, working out, and hanging with the gang when they’re in prison.

Listening to some endless pitch from a life insurance salesman, or an attorney explaining the significance of some court ruling on patent law, or an eighth-grade English teacher diagramming sentences . . . that’s how perpetual prisoners should be spending their time in prison.

Then they’d enjoy their freedom enough to keep it.

What inspires attorneys to write like this?

Secondary meaning occurs when a descriptive mark acquires distinctiveness, that is, proof that it has become distinctive as applied to the mark owner’s goods or services in commerce.

Take that is very seriously; replace distinctiveness with what it is, and what you get is:

Secondary meaning occurs when a descriptive mark acquires proof that it has become distinctive as applied to the mark owner’s goods or services in commerce.

Should it be distinctive, or distinct as in . . . when a descriptive mark becomes distinct . . . ?

Or should it be distinguishes, as in distinguishes the owner’s goods or services in commerce.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you might enjoy Set in Style — a blog about attorneys as authors, and law firms as publishers.

The Trepidating Turk said what he said. And he said it at Turk’s Place, a place where word spreads quickly.

The result? He “pissed off some judges” — judges he’s bound to appear before.

What a brave young man!

What he did was this: he gave his opinion about the start of an opinion ( Dockery v Sprecher ) written by these judges. And, as he admits, his opinion of their opinion was not kind.

Their opinion begins with two whoppers.

I won’t bother to repeat them here.

I’ll just say this: if you want a good reason to scratch the back of your head, go get Turk’s Take at Turk’s Place.

Let’s suppose you want to learn what you can about an attorney who recently left some law firm.

First, you go to the law firm’s web site and see what it says about that attorney, right?

Suppose you visit the site, and it’s as if the attorney had never been part of the firm; there’s nothing about him at all — not one trace. His biography, links to his publications, etc. are all gone.

Here’s what to do: look at a copy of the site that was made before the attorney left the firm.

How can you do that?

By visiting the Wayback Machine.

An archive of the worldwide web, the Wayback Machine can be a great research tool. It lets you look at web sites as they were way back when — last month, last year, or when they went live.

It’s simple. Just visit the Wayback Machine and enter the URL of of the firm’s site, and Presto! There’s the attorney’s bio, along with a list of publications and awards and so on.

What’s up is this: The New York Times Magazine announced that Ben Zimmer, executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com, will be responsible for the “On Language” column that William Safire so often contributed to (from 1979 until his death late last year).

It’s now the season in which I find myself watching sports on Saturdays and Sundays. No, not basketball. That’s a game (in which grown men get paid gazillions for doing what neighborhood kids regularly do for free).

I’m talking about grown folks sports that can thrill and amaze: sports organized by the likes of NASCAR and, especially, the NHRA.

This past Sunday, evening news programs around the nation did what they don’t often do. They mentioned the NHRA.

Why?

The usual reason — a spectacular crash.

Here’s the intro to USA Today’s article about what happened:

By Gary Graves, USA TODAY

A female spectator died Sunday evening after being hit by a tire that broke loose from a Top Fuel dragster, causing a wreck during a first-round race in the NHRA Arizona Nationals in Chandler.

Like any good journalist, Gary Graves could use a good editor.

Why?

Because his intro, as worded, says that the death of a female spectator caused the accident, rather than vice versa.

What might a skilled and experienced editor have done with that intro?

Perhaps this:

A female spectator died Sunday evening after being hit by a tire that broke loose from a Top Fuel dragster when it wrecked during a first-round race in the NHRA Arizona Nationals in Chandler.

There. Flying tires kill people.

I’m reading this article which that was brought to my attention by a friend, another lover of language, and I just found this quote. I thought I’d share it with you. It’s from a writing instructor advising aspiring journalists for whom English is a second language:

What are your best tools? Your best tools are short, plain Anglo-Saxon verbs. I mean active verbs, not passive verbs. If you could write an article using only active verbs, your article would automatically have clarity and warmth and vigor.

It’s a right good article, and it takes aim at the pompous, long-winded, convoluted, and unnecessarily complex language adored by so many attorneys. Here’s a superb magnificent outstanding first-rate good example:

The first [sample of lousy writing] is from the president of a private club in New York. It says, “Dear member: The board of governors has spent the past year considering proactive efforts that will continue to professionalize the club and to introduce efficiencies that we will be implementing throughout 2009.” That means they’re going to try to make the club run better.

I just don’t get it. Do you?

Here’s the story:

I got a good gig producing a dozen attorney-authored articles for a law firm seminar.

The articles started coming in, and I noticed some of the them were better than five years old.

As I went through them, I revised the copy like this:

The United States Department of Labor has issued new regulations that will change the tests for the executive, administrative, professional, computer and outside sales exemptions. The regulations take effect August 23, 2004. These new tests are discussed below.

to this:

The United States Department of Labor has issued regulations that change the tests for the executive, administrative, professional, computer, and outside sales exemptions. These tests are discussed below.

Without the change, an attendee might question whether the information he was getting at the seminar was up to date.

______

There were several new articles, and it seemed they’d been written by people pressed for time, because they contained lots of verbose stuff like this:

Every employment application should have an acknowledgment to be signed by the potential employee relating to his or her understanding that employment offered is employment at will.

that I turned into stuff like this:

Employment application forms should have a place for the applicant to sign his/her name agreeing that employment is at will.

I improved things as much as I could in the time allowed (that’s what they pay me to do), not just to please attendees — mostly HR managers and business owners, people who value their time and don’t enjoy legalese — but to make the authors look their best.

______

Let me tell you about just some particular change I made. It was in an article about the questions an interviewer should ask a candidate during a job interview, and the questions an interviewer should not ask.

Among the questions to not ask was this statement:

All questions regarding religion are illegal.

which I quickly changed to this:

Don’t discuss religion.

Why did I change it?

I changed it because it’s not illegal to ask questions about religion (or race or sex) during a job interview. It might not be a smart thing to do, and it could get you in hot water (just as an attorney can get in hot water for misleading a client on what the law allows and prohibits), but it’s not illegal.

The attorney who wrote “All questions regarding religion are illegal” didn’t like how I changed that. She says there are all sorts of questions it’s illegal to ask during an interview, and just to show who’s smart and who’s not, the unedited version, rather than the edited version, will be presented at the seminar.

So, she’ll be greeting potential clients with something she wrote in a hurry, rather than something that says what it should — “This attorney is sharp.”

I don’t get it.

Why would a highly regarded attorney prefer to give attendees (potential clients) a rough draft, rather than a polished version, of her work?

I just don’t get.

PS: I especially don’t get it in this regard: I’ve edited this attorney’s material before, and she’s always been happy with my work. It’s not like she’s not used to having an editor touch her work

The Los Angeles Times (Alexa: 383) has this interesting article which that claims the big opportunities for lawyers are now with small firms, not Great Big ones.

The article discusses the success of Sagaria Law (Alexa: 1,191,058), a small, but growing, law firm based in San Jose, CA. The firm’s success is attributed, in large part, to its nimbleness, it’s ability to adapt to a changing market.

According to Scott Sagaria, the firm’s founder:

“It’s been easier for us in the sense that we were able to change focus pretty rapidly, to adapt to what work was available to us.”

Also quoted is Scott Kalt, a founding partner of Elkins Kalt Weintraub Reuben Gartside LLP (Alexa: unranked), a brand spankng new small firm in Century City, CA.

Says Kalt:

“Clients perceive that they will get more efficient legal services and more bang for their buck in the context of a small, more agile firm.”

The article’s last quote comes from Stephen Fairley of the Rainmaker Institute (Alexa: 1,065,750) in Phoenix, AZ.

According to Fairley, specialization is the key to success these days:

“The age of the generalist is dead. Our clients are requiring us to know more and more about less and less,” said Fairley, chief executive of the Rainmaker Institute in Phoenix. “Everyone wants to be treated by a specialist.”

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Wednesday was as interesting as a day in the middle of the week should be, and I was in on it, if only in a very tiny sort of way. You see, I attended the unveiling of a new gizmo from Apple at the Yerba Buena Center (downtown San Franisco).

It was classic Steve Jobs. First, a few minor announcements. Then, what we’d all been anticipating: the brand spanking new Apple iPad, introduced with Jobs’ trademark style of introducing new products.

Just as with so many of Jobs’ product introductions, the audience oohed and aahed as the features and capabilities of the iPad were demonstrated.

When it was over, some other developers and I went to LuLu’s for lunch, where we discussed the prospects this new gizmo might offer us. Our ideas floated among the sounds of a dinning room chock full of dinners. Some floated low; some, not at all; a few seemed to take off, but they burst like balloons.

Another new gizmo; another round of prospects for software developers; another potential source of great fortune for modern-day 49ers; and yes, “another bottle of Pelegrino, please.”

And then I went back to the office.

A few hours later, the Mrs. called. She was driving back up from San Jose, where she’d gone to see a friend who was suffering from some mysterious illness that had stumped some of the Bay Area’s finest physicians for months.

She suggested we meet at the Local Institution in an hour.

________
I made it to the Local Institution before her, and the customers were abuzz. It seems that some women didn’t think much of the name of Apple’s new gizmo. It made them think of sanitary napkins, they said, and it just showed what happens when women aren’t involved. Had a women been in charge of Apple’s marketing effort, then the new gizmo would never been named iPad, they said. Never!

Heather and her partner, Robin, were in high-feminist mode. They were saying that Apple couldn’t possibly have any women in authority, or this would never have happened. If there was a woman on the product-naming team, they said, she must have been too timid to point out the problem with the name, which Apple couldn’t possibly have tested with women who — according to Heather who couldn’t quite remember where she got this figure, but she was sure that women — buy 83% (not 80%, but 83%) of all consumer electronics products.

I don’t know where she got that figure, but it sounds like nonsense to me.

The Mrs. showed up, and then someone told Susie (the proprietor of the Local Institution) to turn the sound up on the TV. CNN was doing a segment on iPad, and the on-scene reporter (a woman) mentioned how so many women were thinking MaxiPad whenever they heard iPad.

After that, Heather transformed her iPhone into the signal source for the TV, and then she tuned into this movie to show us just how stupid the name was:

________
Well . . . I just didn’t see any connection between iPad and sanitary napkins. Neither did any of the guys, nor any of the other women. (Bear in mind that Heather and her partner are women only in some biological sense of the term. For all practical purposes, they’re a couple of bruisers.)

Then things got rolling.

One person said, “these women are acting like little school girls, giggling like mad because the teacher just said penis in class.”

Another quipped, “Hey, maybe NASA should come up with another name for launch pad so Heather won’t get pissed when the Space Shuttle takes off.”

Gerry asked “And so what are legal pads? Tampons for attorneys?” With that, the howls got going, as did the competition for who could generate the most howls.

“What about mouse pads? Have you ever tried to install one of those itsy-bitsy things? It ain’t easy, especially for the mouse.”

“I heard they renamed Pandora’s box because Heather and Robin thought it was nasty.”

“If a contractor pads the bill, is it a bloody mess?”

“Guess what happens when you put a bachelor’s pad in water?”

“Hey! McDonald’s just introduced the iMac — it’s a burger made from eyeballs.”

The guys were competing for howls, and so Heather and Robin got up and left, which turned out to be the goal of the whole howling thing it seemed, based on the guys’ reaction (consisting of more howls, applause, whistles, and their united call for another round).

________
I dunno. My bet is that Apple will not rename the product and that women who object to the name are going to have to learn to live with it.

Personally, I think the connection to sanitary napkins is sophomoric. But I also think Heather has a point.

Now, the spotlight’s on the makeup of Apple’s executive team, which consists of nothing but men. (Men of the worst kind: all white.) And it’s on Apple’s board, which includes none but one woman.

I’ll bet that changes pretty soon. I’ll bet diversity is now on its way to 1 Infinite Loop.

This happened several years ago when the Mrs. & I gathered with a few friends, and with a few of their friends.

We gathered at the now deceased Yet Wah, long known to the Mrs. and I and many others as The Local Institution — a neighborhood place; a Chinese restaurant with an area marked Grown Folks Only. That’s were we gathered.

We had our table, and we were served; we talked and we drank. One person spoke for a while — said this or that — and while he (or she) did, everyone else listened. It was that sort of a discussion.

Katrina came up. As a group, we decided that the U.S. really messed that up, and there’s no question about it, is there? The big shaker in Haiti reminds us of it.

______
As you know (or not), I always look for exceptions, most especially when it comes to rules. I always have, and I suppose I always will. So I offered the group this notion: saving the people of New Orleans was Louisiana’s responsibility, not the Fed’s. There was no insurrection; there was no rebellion; it had nothing to do with national security, so there was no reason for Bush to act.

My goodness! My friends and their friends just couldn’t believe I said what I said.

“Are you crazy?”

______
I don’t know about you, but I find it real hard to believe that the folks who wrote, debated, and then approved the First Ten Amendments to the Constitution meant for 20% of them to have no effect. For such a collectively smart group of people to put that much fluff in place of substance: that doesn’t make sense to me.

But, it’s the consensus. Amendments Nine and Ten have meaning, but no effect. If the president wants to meddle in public education for a bit, he can’t, but he can!

I offer this proposition: despite anything in the Constitution that clearly says otherwise, the Fed has unlimited rule over US (except for the limits imposed by Amendments One through Eight, which have both: meaning and effect).

Whadayathink?

I just can’t make up my mind. When I started this What’s Up section, I planned to use it to broadcast certain keywords and key phrases over and over again. In other words, it was to be a place for machines, not mortals. But I just couldn’t get excited about writing junk like this on a regular basis:

An attorney for a law firm writing a client alert was looking for an editor to edit the client alert and found a skilled and experienced editor who has edited client alerts for law firms, as well as articles for law firm newsletters, law firm web sites, attorney web sites, attorney blogs, lawyer web sites, web sites for lawyers, lawyer blogs, blogs by lawyers, blawgs, blogs hosted by law firms, web sites for solos and web sites for Am Law 200 firms.

Then I thought, “Aha! I’ll use it to catch the attention of prospective clients. I’ll write something about a Business Development Specialist at a particular law firm. She’ll notice it — assuming, of course, that she keeps tabs on what’s being said about her — and then I’ll come to her attention. That’s a plus.”

But I haven’t gotten excited about that.

So . . . now I’m thinking of having some fun with it. I’m not sure, but it might be about the world’s Bestest Law Firm, or the first governor of the United States, or how to make a modest income selling meteorite insurance.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

We’ll see.

The sound of a Mac starting up. That F# major chord that says all is well.

When my Mac started up this morning, I thought of the first time I heard one.

I remember: it was 1983, in Chatsworth, California just a few months before the new computer was announced at the SuperBowl.

Then I thought of my first Mac. I didn’t buy it; I worked for it — that and a LaserWriter that weighed a ton and went for a small fortune: $7,000.

About two years before I got my first Mac, I was sitting in the office of Bobby Jones, the new president of Macmillan Publishing’s school division. He was interviewing me for the position of senior software editor for the division.

Toward the end of the interview (which had gone well), Bobby wanted to make sure I understood: “We sell books, not software.” He went on to explain that he didn’t think computers would have much impact on publishing. I bit my tongue (as they say).

About two years later, I was working in a basement in Soho. I was using Macs and PostScript and LaserWriters and a Linotronic imagesetter to produce a series of textbooks in a new way, a way that would have a great impact on publishing.

Macs back then were primitive. They took forever to start, and they didn’t always start with a chime and a smile. Sometimes, there was the sound of troubled Mac with a frown. And there was the ever-present prospect of loading a program, and then swapping disks in and out of the Mac for five minutes to get the program up and running.

Things sure have come a long way in my time. A long way indeed.

I wrote about Ford just a few weeks ago. Now, he’s the subject of my words once again. This time, it’s because he did something he did once before (about a year ago): he started a fire in his apartment.

It was around 8:00 this morning when two fire trucks, two engines, an ambulance, a score of men, and a chief arrived. A few of the men hauled out a sofa that was all burned at one end. The hallway and stairwell were full of smoke.

I asked which apartment it was, and — sure enough — it was Ford’s. He’d started another good fire in his apartment, just as he did about a year ago.

Once again, he was drunk, smoking, fell asleep, and you can imagine the rest.

______
When this happened last year, Ford refused to be taken to the hospital (as he refused that again this morning). The paramedics let him from the ambulance, and I took him back to his apartment.

My goodness gracious! What a mess!

There was garbage all about: all over the floor and all over the bed. It was mostly small plastic bags, empty plastic bottles of fruit juice and gin, paper bags, and empty cigarette packs: there were plenty of those. And there were cigarette butts all over the place: some in ash trays, and some not.

Ford — an articulate and intelligent man who just fell apart after his wife died — was back to looking like a homeless man: one who’d been on the street for a while. He’d once again lost the habit of bathing and grooming and changing clothes. By the looks of him, he’d aged 20 years in the past few.

Here he was, still killing himself ever so slowly.

______
So . . . when this happened last year, I took Ford back to his apartment, saw how far he had descended from decency, and we sat and talked for some time.

I told him he could get a gun and kill himself just like that, and without bothering his neighbors at all. That would be better than sinking just a bit each day. Whether he felt like living or not, he couldn’t put his neighbors at such risk.

He understood, he assured me.

That was a year ago.

For a while, he improved, but — as I said — he was going backwards in the past few months. He looked, dressed, acted, and smelled like a homeless man.

What a waste.

______
Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to call Adult Protective Services and see if they can look into his situation.

. . . I’m on hold. “Please stay on the line. Your call will be answered in the order it was received.” Mozart. Message. Mozart. Message. Moz . . . .

I just got off the phone. I was on hold for about five minutes, and then I was interviewed for about 20 minutes. They now have an official case file on Ford.

We’ll see what happens. Nothing good, I suppose, unless Ford decides he wants to live.

Ken Oettle — senior counsel and chair of the writing program at Sills Cummis & Gross — authored this article (“In Legal Writing, Dross Disappears and Points Emerge as Groupings Improve“) for the New Jersey Law Journal. In it, he mentions a common ailment of attorney-authored articles, which is the failure to have editors review them before they’re published:

Regrettably, the kind of precise grouping that typically takes place late in the editing process (e.g., rearranging items in sentences and short paragraphs) is sometimes skipped in the rush to get product out the door.

I had some fun yesterday. It happened while I was doing my now-daily round of cold calls on prospective clients (lawyers writing client alerts, business development managers preparing proposals, practice-area directors preparing seminars, etc.).

I’ll tell you what happened. But first you need to know something of my routine.

Now . . . very few law firms bother to review the activity logs for their web sites (logs that answer questions like these: who visited the site? what did they look at? how long did they stay?). Nor do they bother to review their error logs, and so they’re not aware of problems their visitors are having.

I (on the other hand) review my logs at least once a day (on most days), and I find that useful*.

I’ve set up a monitor that watches my site’s activity log for visitors who spend more than a set amount of time at my site. After that, a chime goes off. Literally!

If I’m not pressed for time, I’ll look at the log to see what inspired the chime. If it happens to be a visit from a prospective client (gauged from the visitor’s URL), I’ll see what posts or articles or pages they saw. I find that information useful.

So . . . anyway . . . about yesterday. I was calling people on the East Coast when a chime went off.

I saw which firm it was; I visited its web site and gave it a quick review: how many attorneys? how many publications? what was the Alexa ranking of the firm’s site? etc.

After a few minutes, I looked up the names of the people responsible for the firm’s marketing and publishing effort. I selected one to call, and she was just amazed.

There she was in her office, reviewing my web site because she read something I wrote somewhere when — all of a sudden and out of the blue — I call and introduce myself.

It was a cold call, but I had her full attention from the moment I said who I was.

____________
* I know what you’re thinking. I’ve got one small web site and one blog, so it’s easy for me to review my logs because I have so few visitors and so little traffic, but — according to my Alexa ranking — I draw a much bigger audience than some firms with hundreds of attorneys.

So, I’m doing a round of cold calls every morning now — calling marketing directors and business development consultants at law firms — and it’s going pretty well.

One of the objections I regularly encounter is this: “We’d love to use you, but we don’t have money in our budget for your services.”

I counter that objection with this: “I’m not an extra expense. Heck, I save you money. How? Well, what costs your firm more — having an attorney who bills $500 an hour draft a proposal or write an article for a seminar, or having a skilled and experienced wordsmith (who charges one-tenth of what some attorneys charge) do it instead?”

The marketing folks like that, but then the attorneys have their objections: “This wordsmith you found doesn’t have a J.D., so he can’t possibly write on our behalf, nor edit our work.”

Now, that’s an objection I can counter in the most persuasive fashion.

I’m listening to the discussion on TV about the status of health care legislation. Very interesting.

Unfortunately, I’m extremely neutral as to whether we should enact either the Senate or House version, or some blend of them.

I’d like to favor passage or defeat for whatever the final legislation is, but I’ve got too many unanswered questions for anything like that at this point.

Quite honestly — I’m confused.

The CBO says the Senate version will cost the U.S. over $800 billion in ten years, but the president says it will decrease the deficit by $132 billion.

Who am I to believe? The partisans who favor passage, or those who favor defeat?

I trust neither. This whole debate about health care has been chock full of nonsense, like the rationale for a public option. Heck, why not have a public option for credit cards to promote competition?

Of course, the final legislation has to be unwieldy, and that makes me all-the-more suspicious of it. If it were elegant . . . say . . . something like medicare for the masses, I could understand it and decide. As it is, it’s a hodgepodge with just enough detail for law firms — especially those with government relations or insurance industry practices — to start hiring again.

Today, I must check in on Ford. He’s a neighbor who lives down the street from me; we’ve known each other for about 20 years.

Yesterday, I was on my way home, and when I got to the bus stop, there was Ford. I hadn’t seen him in about a month.

We rode the bus home, and he didn’t seem as well as he’d been. He was starting to regain that mountain-man look he had when he didn’t shave or bathe or cut his hair or his finger nails.

He quit being filthy about six months ago, but now he looked like he was going back to that, and he smelled like it to.

The bus stopped right in front of his building. Ford got off, but he had a hard time of it. Then he started walking, and his legs just wobbled, and then he lost his balance and fell.

Bam! His head hit the pavement.

Well, we stopped the bus and checked Ford, and he was out of it, so we called 911. In no time, Ford had this big bulging knot to the left of his forehead. By the time the ambulance arrived — about three minutes — the knot had grown to  the size of a small lemon. How could that possibly happen, I wondered.

Ford had been to the VA hospital about six months ago. I took him there on two occassions, and he was supposed to go back to see a doctor. They’d discovered that the great pain in his lower back, the reason he needed a cane and had a hard time walking, was because he had a cracked vertebrae, and it needed to be treated.

But Ford didn’t see the doctor. It’s as if he were just too lazy to keep his next appointment.

Well . . . I suppose I should tell you this much about Ford.

He’s an intelligent man, and they say he was quite a golfer, but his world fell apart when his wife died three years ago.

It seems like this is what happened. Ford came home from work one day, and figured his wife was taking a nap. He went about doing this and that — perhaps fixing a drink and watching the news.

When he checked on his wife again some time later, he realized it: she was dead!

After that, he just started drinking all the time. Then he lost his job. Then he fell and hurt his back. He was in pain, so he had that much more reason to drink to excess.

One night, he went to bed and started a fire when his cigarette lit the mattress he was on. He was living in such squalor that the fire department had to notify Adult Protective Services of his situation.

Well . . . I suppose I’ve told you enough about Ford for now.

He was taken to Fort Miley yesterday afternoon. I’ll call a bit later to see if he’s still there. If he is, I’ll go visit him.

It’s so sad what’s happening to Ford. He looks like he aged 20 years in the past three. He’s killing himself, ever so slowly.

The last few months have been pretty slow. There haven’t been too many requests from existing clients. I took on one new client, but that work (a Web site for a brand new law firm) is done.

So . . . I’ve taken to doing something I used to really dislike — cold calling prospective clients.

Now I’m into it, and it’s going pretty well.

I’ve got a short spiel:

I offer a range of services — from proofing client alerts, to writing, editing, and formatting proposals and seminar materials, to making sure on-line content looks and works OK.

I’ve got 25 years of experience as an editor, and I’ve got five years experience with law firms.

Given the work you do, I can imagine you need the services of an editor from time to time.

It takes less than 30 seconds to speak the speil, but before I get to it, I introduce myself and ask if the prospect has one minute to spare:

Good morning, Mrs. Jones. My name is Thorne; I’m a freelance editor in San Francisco; and I’d like just one minute of your time to tell you about the services I offer.

What I find is this:

1. 9 out of 10 prospects say they have a minute
2. 3 out of 10 prospects ask for more information
3. 10 out of 10 prospects agree to receive further information

That’s not bad. I’m going to do it some more, especially since I’m enjoying the effort.

____________
When I first started freelancing, desktop publishing was the big thing, and I rode it like a wave.

What I’m reminded of right now is this: my first direct-mail campaign. I created it and produced it, and I got something like a 25% response.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine — a fellow who did direct-mail for a living — and he said that was a fantastic response rate, that a typical response was 3%.

He wanted to know my secret, and so I told him what it was.

____________
Oh well . . . back to making a few more calls before lunch . . . .

You know the old saying — whoever represents himself in court has got a fool for a client.

Ditto for the attorney who serves as his own editor or imagines he’s such a terrific writer (really light years ahead of Scalia)  that he doesn’t need one. That attorney  could get credit for stuff like this:

In short what the amendment provides if a user can not find the work’s creator and they tweak the work they have cart blanc to use an artist’s work without any fees being paid even when the creating artist identifies themselves they do not even have to stop infringing.

I see this all the time: an attorney is pressed for time, so he writes something that’s too rough to show to anyone outside the firm. And it’s far too rough to give to people who paid good money to attend seminar.

I say, professional services firms (e.g., a law firms) are far better off publishing nothing than publishing crap.

If you simply must publish something and your attorneys are too pressed for time to do a decent job, find another author. Seriously.

Someone just asked if I’m a Legal Editor. No; I’m not (nor am I an illegal editor).

So, what’s a legal editor and what am I?

There are a variety of legal editors.

First, there are people like Andrew Cohen (Legal Editor and Chief Legal Analyst for CBS News), Adrienne Cook who, until recently, was Executive Editor for the American Bar Association, and Tiffany Sanders who used to write bar exam test items (whereas I write items for math tests).

For the most part, a legal editor is an attorney who works for a news organization and is responsible for stories on legal matters, or an attorney who edits legal matter written by other attorneys. But there are many exceptions.

Me? I don’t generally work on legal matter. Sure, I’ve written legal agreements and I’ve written briefs, and I’ve edited court documents written by others (several hundreds of pounds worth), but that’s not my focus. My focus is helping attorneys develop promotional materials (though most attorneys cringe whenever I refer to their work that way) — materials like client alerts, blog posts, seminar articles, etc.

I also help firms develop and produce promotional materials — client alerts, Web sites, blogs, etc.

I’m a general purpose editor whose clients are attorneys and the firms they work for. I serve as developmental editor, copy editor, and production editor. But no; I’m not a legal editor.

____________
Before I wrote this, I did a Google search on Legal Editor. One of the first results was Robert Want, head of Want Publishing Company and author of Harry Potter and the Order of the Court: The J.K. Rowling Copyright Case and the Question of Fair Use.

Which of the following two statements sounds right to you?

1. “In the past the Innocence Project has turned up evidence that resulted in overturning the convictions of 11 men, five of them on death row.”
2. “After its 10 years of existence, the Innocence Project has uncovered 11 instances of wrongful convictions that have freed men from prison, five of them from Death Row.”

The first statement is from an article written by three students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

The second statement is from a brief written by two attorneys at Sidley & Austin; they’re representing the school and one of its professors in a wrongful-conviction allegation by the Medill Innocence Project*.

The senior of those two attorneys — Richard O’Brien — was taken to task by Circuit Court Judge Diane Cannon for the smart-aleck tone of his brief (the judge called it reprehensible), which begins with this:

The State’s response brief evinces a surprising lack of comprehension of the requirements of the Illinois Reporter’s Privilege Act (the “Act”) and an equally surprising lack of affinity for the important First Amendment values that underlie the Act and the role of investigative reporting in promoting those values.

The brief is chock full of pot shots at the state’s lawyers.

Speaking to reporters after his appearance in court, O’Brien said that’s how he writes briefs, and he’s been writing them for 30 years.

____________
* The Project’s work investigating how people who’ve done nothing wrong are sentenced to death lead former Illinois Governor George Ryan to call a moratorium on the death penalty in January 2000; before he left office three years later, he granted clemency to all the state’s death row inmates, saying “I still believe the death penalty is a proper response to heinous crimes, but I want to make sure . . . that the person who is put to death is absolutely guilty.”

When I was a youngster, it was a day to remember people we didn’t know who fought in a war we couldn’t understand for a cause we couldn’t comprehend in some place far away.

Today, it’s a day to remember.

It’s a day to remember others who died fighting for all sorts of causes (from free dominion to free trade).

And, it’s a day when I can get a free meal at Applebee’s!

Computers are at their very best when they take tedious, routine, and repetitive tasks and do them for us.

To that end, Martindale-Hubble announces it has developed an app — an iPhone app — that automates the tedious task of making sure your case cites are correct.

The app is free. Among the system requirements is an iPhone, an AT&T account, and a Lexis account.

If it works well, it’s worth the requirements.

Let’s suppose you’re responsible for your firm’s Web site. You’ve heard of the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and so you hire an SEO expert* to help direct traffic to the site.

Searching for search terms

Unfortunately, after the SEO expert installs a bunch of articles (chock full of search terms) at your site, there’s no more traffic than before.

In that case, you need to see if search engines can find the articles you bought from the SEO expert.

Here’s how:

1. Copy a line from an article.
2. Put it in quotes.
3. Ask a search engine to find it.

If the search engine reports something like “no results found” or “no terms matched your query,” then the article isn’t visible. At best, you’ve bought a lemon.

Case in point: Copy the first line of this article (“Workers’ Compensation, FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act), ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), LAD (Law Against Discrimination)“) that mentions worker’s comp, FMLA, ADA, and LAD:

The above four laws provide various rights and obligations concerning four areas of laws that overlap with each other.

Then search for the line; e.g., put it in quotes and ask Google to find it.

If Google returns the following (as it does on 3 Nov 2009):

No results found for “The above four laws provide various rights and obligations concerning four areas of laws that overlap with each other. “.

Then it can’t see the article.

The articles the SEO expert sold you might make great use of SEO terms, but if Google can’t find them, what good are they?

Now suppose you search for a line (in quotes) and Google returns a number of results. Check the results to see if the article is syndicated. If it is, and you thought you were buying original content (you even put your copyright notice on those articles), then you’ve got a problem. You’d best check to see if you have any rights to the articles at all.

It just doesn’t look good for a law firm (especially an IP firm) to claim rights to something it has no rights to.

____________
* If you don’t know an SEO expert, nor do any of your friends or associates, then just get a Twitter account. SEO experts will start pounding on your door in short order.

Dear Attorney:

Do you want to learn how you can “use today’s Tweet technology to generate future business?”

Do you want to learn how “social media can help your firm identify potential relationships, produce leads, and generate new business?”

Then you simply must attend this Webinar — Bring in Business from Web 2.0

The Webinar is hosted by Adrian Dayton, author of Social Media for Lawyers. And the speakers are:

• Steven Bell, Chief Client Development Officer
  Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, PLLC
• R. David Donoghue, Partner
  Holland & Knight
• Melanie Green, Director of Business Development and Marketing
  Baker and Daniels LLP

Learn how social media can:

• Connect firms with in-house decision makers
• Build the firms’ brand while decreasing marketing costs
• Expand the attorney’s zone influence

Who Should Attend?

• Managing Partners
• CMOs
• Business Development Professionals
• Rainmakers
• New Partners
• Senior Associates

One day, typing will be gone. There’ll still be keyboards, because we’ll still be using characters (e.g., A to Z) and organizing them much as we have for millennia. We’ll still be reading, but most of us won’t be typing very much.

Long ago, typing was a career option. Who knows? In the future, it might be a career again.

Here’s what I figure: computers are going to transcribe things for us. Everything from little Tweets (or whatever is popular in a future where keyboards are less common and lots of devices don’t even have them) to law journal articles will be composed by voice. That’s what I see happening. No more itsy-bitsy keyboards used on public transport. (Then, will everyone be whispering on the way to work?)

Until then . . . .

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

1. Attorneys are writers, and writers need editors.
2. In professional publishing, professional writers regularly rely on professional editors.
3. Law firms are publishers.

___________
Have you ever worked with a professional editor? If you’re an attorney, most likely not. But it’s something to consider, especially if you write more than agreements, briefs, and contracts.

Do you write client alerts? Outlines for seminars? Articles for publication in journals or magazines?

Do you write for a blawg?

Then you need an editor. Why?

Suppose you’re going to meet a potential client — one you hope to retain. Before the meeting, you groom yourself. You bathe and shave, put on your freshly pressed clothes, and polish your shoes. Why? Because you want to look sharp; you want to make a great impression.

Now suppose you write for a blawg. If you want the blawg to attract potential clients, then you need to look sharp on-line, because what you write is going to inform potential clients’ first impressions of you.

____________
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you might be interested in the discussion concerning this recent blog post.

Some attorneys say they don’t take care when they write for their blawgs because their they’re not trying to show what terrific writers they are. They just want to put something out quickly.

Some attorneys say the effort they make writing for their blawgs has no relation to the care they take writing agreements, briefs, and contracts.

Fine! But remember: anything you publish could inform someone’s first impression of you.

My wife doesn’t like to watch the news; she says it’s too depressing.

I’d say she’s about 70% right on this. There’s the weather and the traffic, and then the war, the bomb in the marketplace, the young man sent to jail because someone died in a street race, the BART officer who shot a young man for no good reason at all, the tourist from New Orleans lured by a woman in a bar to his death by her thuggish cronies; etc.

(Side Note: When we met, I figured the woman I was going to marry was Mrs. Right. Then we got married and I discovered her first name was Always. Just kidding! She’s great, and she’s far more right than I.)

So much news is about the creepy unemployment rate. In the world of Great Big Law firms, so much news is (or has been) about layoffs, and deferred offers to Brand New Lawyers. Justice Scalia says our best and youngest minds should do something more productive than lawyering, but too many of them ignored his advice.

As I learned in the 6th grade, if you hope to maintain an excellent democracy, then you’ve got to keep up on the news. And I do.

It’s not all bad. There’s good news, even among the ranks of Brand New Lawyers, and David Becker is a fine example of it.

Before he starts work at a Great Big Law firm in November, he’s spending 40 days doing all sorts of things that he’ll be too busy to do (can’t you hear the groans of Brand New Lawyers with nothing to do) when he starts work in November.

And he’s doing something else creative and distinct: blogging about (almost) every bit of it:

I have forty days to do all the things I won’t have a chance to do when I start my upcoming job. I am challenging myself to do something new, something interesting, something I’ve always wanted to do, or something completely ridiculous every day for the next forty days. I am absolutely open to reader suggestions for activities, unless it involves self-mutilation, screaming at inanimate objects or very small children, illegal activity, aggravating a tiger in close proximity, or generally anything I wouldn’t want my Nana to read about on this blog (because I wholeheartedly expect my Nana to find a way to read this blog, even though she has never in her life owned a computer.)

In the article “Mike Dillon: Open Blog Policy” (written by Rachel Zahorsky and published in the ABA Journal), Mike Dillon, GC of Sun Microsystems, explains why he blogs, and what he gets out of it.

If you’re a GC, or the managing partner of a law firm, or a partner at a firm that focuses on employment law, give it a read.

In his most recent post, Dillon discusses a meeting with two partners from Howrey, one of Sun’s partners (as Dillon calls the firm), and how they offered a variety of cost structures for the matter they were discussing.

As Dillon notes, times are changing.

Are you onboard, or standing on the pier?

If you are, then you should know about Legal River, a service that “helps connect small businesses with interested, local, available and qualified attorneys in a time efficient manner.”

I don’t know much about it (I’m not recommending it; I’m just letting you know of it), but it has a blog on legal topics of interest to small businesses (and big businesses, for that matter) and the articles seem informative and well written.

Check it out.

No, but the defunct firm’s Web site is still going strong (much stronger than Heller Ehrman’s site).

The Wisconsin Law Journal has an interesting article (“Legal blog start-up soars to prominence”) that puts the spotlight on two attorneys: Aaron Street, publisher of Lawyerist Media LLC, and Samuel Glover, Editor-in-Chief of the popular legal blog lawyerist.com — a survival guide for lawyers.

The article describes how Lawyerist went from a one-man operation to one that now has a publisher, an editor-in-chief, and eight regular contributors: attorneys experienced in the management and marketing of small firms.

Here’s some good advice (“Marketing Malpractice Means Not Having a Website”) from Roy Ginsburg, “one of the most experienced attorney coaches in the country,” and a regular contributor to Lawerist:

If you’re a solo attorney and you don’t have a Web site, get one.

Why? Well, read Ginsburg’s article and see.

____________
Note: If you’re an attorney and you’ve got something to say (esp. about marketing or managing a small firm) consider being a guest blogger for Lawyerist.

You’re starting a new law firm, and so you need certain things: an office, a phone number, an e-mail address, a tax ID . . . and branding that helps attract clients. And you need a Web site and stationery that reflects your brand.

Now, you know the law, but you don’t know HTML, or CSS, or PHP. You’re not an artist and you’ve not studied design, so coming up with logotype for your new firm isn’t your expertise. And you don’t know printing, or how to get the finest stationery at the lowest cost.

I do. If you want a brand you can be proud of, but you don’t want to go broke getting it ready for all the world to see, call me — I’m skilled and experienced, and I do top-notch work at reasonable rates.

In an article titled “Legal Blogging: How, Why, and What’s Next?” Eric Gruis, Manager of Business and Competitive Intelligence at Howrey LLP, asks Bob Ambrogi and Larry Bodine “two leaders in the field of legal blogging, marketing, and social media” for their ideas on how firms can make effective use of blogs.

Attorney Carolyn Elefant — author of Solo by Choice, a guide “dedicated to every lawyer who ever wanted to run the show but worried that going solo was career suicide,” proprietor of MyShingle.com, “a weblog for and about solos and small law firms,” and longtime contributor to Legal Blog Watch, — announces that she’s had it: she’ll no longer contribute to the ever-so-popular blog about blawgs because she’s run out of steam.

From her last post at Legal Blog Watch:

I also have an enormous thank you to John Bringardner for his skillful editing over the past two years so that my posts always shined, and for his patience in waiting to get my material on days when I couldn’t meet my deadline

The Rainmaker Institute, which bills itself as “the nation’s largest law firm marketing company that specializes in helping small and solo firms,” announces that it will host “a two day legal marketing boot camp for solo and small law firms, in Chicago on October 16-17,” in Orlando, Florida on October 23-24, in Los Angeles on November 13-14, and in Las Vegas on December 4-5.

The cost ranges from $997 to $1977.

Session Topics:

Achieving Expert Status as an Attorney
Building a Strategic Referral Network
Creating Credibility in Your Practice Area
Secrets of Highly Successful Attorneys
Generating More Clients Using the Power of the Press
Leveraging Technology: Beating the Big Firms on the Net
Generating More Clients Using the Power of Speaking
Advanced Technology Tactics for Small Law Firms and Solo Practitioners
Creating Your Marketing System
Implementing Your Marketing System

The satisfaction of all attendees is guaranteed:

If you are not completely satisfied at the end of the first day, just let us know, turn your materials in and we will refund your money. We guarantee you will come out of these 2 days with a Step-by-Step Action Plan to make very specific changes to your marketing and how you go about building your legal practice.

Details about the Rainmaker Retreat are available on-line.

West LegalEdcenter announces that law firm professional development authority Caren Ulrich Stacy — formerly the director of professional development for Arnold & Porter LLP, a law firm that claims to be “a preeminent international law firm” (as if there could be more than one, and in violation of bar association rules regarding advertising), and now principal of Lawyer Development Strategies, a consulting firm that provides “legal organizations and governmental agencies expert guidance on building and integrating lawyer recruitment, development, diversity and advancement initiatives” — has entered into an exclusive arrangement to provide “timely and thought-provoking webcasts on innovative talent management initiatives within law firms.”

At this point, it’s not known if she’s designing or producing the Web casts, or serving as host.

Today’s quote  comes from an article (Lawyers: Lighten Up) written by Niki Black which that appeared in the Daily Record, and it’s great advice for attorneys preparing presentations. Here it is:

Studies show learning and subsequent recall is increased if concepts are conveyed in short, concise snippets. Complex concepts should be broken down and convoluted explanations should be avoided at all costs. Otherwise, the audience’s interest is lost instantly.

Today’s quote comes from Mark Herrmann, co-author of the ever-so-popular Drug and Device Law blog (currently ranked by Technorati at 55,312)

Here it is:

Legal blogs are like small businesses: Half of ‘em fail in the first year, and 90 percent of ‘em fail in the next five.

That quote appears in a recent post about an informal survey of legal blogs.

According to Career Alternatives for Attorneys: Social Media Director? a mid-sized law firm in Atlanta wants someone who can make social media worthwhile:

Director of Social Media

Medium-sized Atlanta law firm seeks candidates interested in a part-time or full-time social media position. The primary responsibility of the Social Media Director will be to actively promote our growing law firm using a variety of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and our existing web-site. Projects include: managing the firm’s Twitter, Facebook and web-site account, research current and relevant legal stories in the news and republish to social networks and firm web-site on a daily basis, communicate through social web-sites about all specific practice groups and their developments, update marketing team on a weekly basis with web-site content.

 

 

Moiré Marketing Partners — “a strategic branding and communications agency specializing in the success of professional services firms” — announces that “legal marketing pioneer Jeffrey Morgan has joined Moire Marketing Partners as a principal and head of the firm’s new West Coast operations.”

CBS News chief legal analyst and legal editor Andrew Cohen wrote this interesting article (“What Harry Reid Could Learn from L.B.J.“) comparing Harry Reid to LBJ. Very interesting stuff.

Today’s notable quote comes from this short post at the Dirt Lawyer’s Blog:

Just remember, only a lawyer can write a 10,000 word document and call it a “brief.”

Today’s quote offers good advice to anyone preparing a PowerPoint presentation. It comes from this article (“The Problem with PowerPoint” authored by Max Atkinson, author of Speech-making & Presentation Made Easy) that advocates the less-is-more method:

So remember that the more slides you have and the more there is on each slide, the more distracting it will it be for the audience — whereas the fewer and simpler the slides are, the easier it will be to keep them listening.

 

Well, if your firm isn’t a vast enterprise (yet) and your needs (and your budget) are modest, consider me. I can:

• Create an attractive, professional-looking site.
• Get it up and running in less than a week.
• Make it very worthwhile.

But if your firm is a giant, or your needs are great, consider Inherent. They’re capable of excellent work (and they get great awards for it), and they have lots of experience with law firms.

Here are a few of the sites they’ve developed:

Munger, Tolles & Olson

Musick Peeler

Fitzpatrick, Cella, Harper & Scinto

Don’t forget to tell them (Inherent) you heard about them here.

Things are picking up. I once again get calls from attorneys setting up new practices. They come to me because they need some basics, the things that any new firm needs — a Web site, business cards, envelopes, and letterhead. They come to me because I offer great value — good looking promotional materials delivered on time and for a reasonable fee.

Quite a few law firms (and solo attorneys) set up shop in the past year. They all want business cards and stationery, but most still don’t realize how essential a Web site is to any enterprise looking for new clients.

These days, not having a Web site is like not having a business card in days past.

If you set up a Web site to promote a new practice, do it right. And then promote it.

I don’t mean “promote it” like it was a concert or a fight; I mean promote its ranking: get others to notice it.

The usual method for promoting a site is called search engine optimization. It’s great for on-line retailers, but it’s not so good for law firms.

There are better approaches for law firms to follow.

Nolo’s Legal Marketing Blawg has an article (“Don’t Let the Bar’s Ethics Rules Scare You Offline”) that attorneys with blogs, Web sites, and Twitter accounts will find of some interest.

The article, written by Carolyn Elefant, publisher of the very popular My Shingle, which is “for and about solos and small law firms,” begins with a review of the ABA 2008 Technology Survey. That survey suggests that very few lawyers are promoting their practices on line:

According to the survey, 79 percent of lawyers receive information through news websites, while 59 percent subscribe to email newsletters. By contrast, substantially fewer lawyers blog (just two percent) or participate in social networks (15 percent). In fact, barely more than half of solo and small firms — just 52 percent — even have a website.

The Am Law Daily calls Brian Pass (of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP) the deal maker of the week.

Why? Because “Pass helped negotiate the ten-year Internet search and advertising deal Yahoo struck with Microsoft.” The deal is considered “one of the most significant non-M&A commercial transactions in recent months.”

The law firm of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C. recently announced that it has hired Amy M. Fowler, “a seasoned marketing and business development executive with extensive experience in the legal and professional services industries,” as Chief Marketing Officer.

Fowler was CMO of Nixon Peabody LLP from 2000 to 2007. Most recently, she was VP of Marketing and Business Development for CRA International, “a leading global consulting firm that offers economic, financial, and business management expertise to major law firms, industries, accounting firms, and governments around the world.”

I’m listening to President Obama address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and I wonder (in some way) why he’s talking about a national health care program, or about public education, or about the rights of homosexuals. After all, the man used to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Surely, then, he knows about the Tenth Amendment — the one that says:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

The Constitution doesn’t say that the national government has any role in public education, or health care, or the power to define marriage. So why should the president concern himself with these things. He’s the president, not a governor.

Let’s be fair. The Constitution says Congress has the power to provide for the “general welfare of the United States,” but the Tenth Amendment trumps that provision, right, or not? (If I ever get to meet the president, I’d like to ask him about that. I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear him say the amendment is just a truism.)

Seems as if Martha Coakley, the attorney general of Massachusetts agrees with my understanding of the Constitution, rather than the president’s. She’s filed a lawsuit against the national government to get her state out from under the Defense of Marriage Act.

The American Lawyer announces the 5th Annual Law Firm Chief Marketing Officers Forum will be held on September 15 — 16 at the Renaissance Hotel in Chicago.

Key session topics include:

• Finding the Holy Grail of Marketing: Effective Cross-Selling
• Weathering the Economic Storm
• How to Motivate and Activate Your Lawyers to Do Business Development
• Marketing Trends from Other Professional Services Companies
• How to Target and Crack a Large Account
• The Marketer as Firefighter: How to Keep a Strategic Focus When There are Dozens of Small Fires to Put Out
• Strengthening and Expanding Relationships With Your Most Important Clients

The regular cost is $1,995, but you can get a break if you register ASAP.

And the Legal Marketing Association announces the 2010 Annual Conference will be held March 10 — 12, at the Hyatt Regency Denver.

The LMA provides no information on cost, regular or otherwise.

In this article, the Am Law Daily names Peggy Brown litigator of the week for doing the improbable — buying a company (Data Domain) for EMC after it had been sold to another company (NetApp).

From the article:

Data Domain was precluded from negotiating with other parties because of its signed merger agreement with NetApp, Brown says. But that agreement did contain some specific exemptions. One was a requirement that any party Data Domain wanted to speak with had to execute a standstill agreement, which would preclude them from moving forward on an unfriendly basis.

Brown says EMC was not prepared to sign the standstill agreement, so the company’s lawyers needed to orchestrate a process that would allow it to proceed without engaging in discussions with Data Domain.

“We were working towards a goal where Data Domain would terminate its agreement with NetApp, which they could only do to enter into an agreement with us,” Brown says. “So they had to be in a position to sign an agreement with us without ever talking to us.”

 

That took some finesse. Brown says EMC had to be as direct and clear with Data Domain as possible, delivering a signed agreement to Data Domain so the company could “sign the signature page and send it back to us so we could have a deal.”

Ann Lee Gibson, a highly regarded consultant to law firms, says* that when your firm submits an RFP to a very handsome client, it needs to CREATE AN EYE-CATCHING PACKAGE:

The proposals that clients read first will probably be the ones they remember most. Fashion proposal covers and packaging that are attractive and attention grabbing. Your proposal cover should persuade reviewers to pick up your proposal (often from a stack of 20, 50 or more) and read it first.

* The quote is an excerpt from Gibson’s article in Law Practice Magazine titled “50 Tips to Help You Win Client Competitions”

Yesterday, I attended a seminar hosted by the Bay Area chapter of the LMA (Legal Marketing Association). The seminar was  titled “LEGAL PRESS: DOES IT MATTER?“

In a nutshell, the seminar focused on the value of getting an attorney’s name printed in the paper.

John Buchanan, Chief Marketing Officer for Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, served as moderator.

The panel included Lori Teranishi, Chief Operating Officer of Van Prooyen Greenfield LLP, a boutique law firm specializing in providing strategic communications counsel, Alexia Garamfalvi, San Francisco editor for the Daily Journal, Eric Young, reporter for San Francisco Business Times, and  famed securities litigator Tower Snow.

Some highlights:

According to Snow — when asked by a reporter to comment on a story — responding with “No Comment!” is like telling the reporter to “Go jump in a lake!” Never respond with “No Comment!”

Garamfalvi noted how an attorney can get upset when the attorney provides a quote, but it doesn’t appear in the story. Buchanan advised that attorneys can improve the prospects of their quotes appearing if those quotes are quotable (even controversial), rather than bland.

The panel discussed how cautious attorneys are (shying away from providing quotable quotes) and how this limits their ability to get good press (which likes quotable quotes). 

Garamfalvi said her paper wants quality stories written by attorneys, but gets too many outdated stories — i.e., stories it might have run had they been submitted a few weeks (or a few months) earlier.

Teranishi said some attorneys are “terrific writers” who can write good articles, but they tend to write “reactive” rather than “predictive” articles. They should write about what’s coming up, rather than what’s already happened.

Buchanan acknowledged the obvious — attorneys are afraid to serve as pioneers. There’s always some risk in dealing with the press. “If you want security, buy an ad,” rather than offer your thoughts.

Young said the “worst thing” an attorney can do is lie to a reporter; Snow advised attorneys to focus on their long-term relationships with the press, and said these relationships are based on mutual trust. Buchanan advised attorneys to consider that the local reporter for a small paper might one day be working for — who knows? — the Wall Street Journal, perhaps. 

Would you like to receive honorable mention for showing Sonia Sotomayor how it’s done? If so, just rewrite this clunker so it’s crisp and clear:

The Agency is therefore precluded from undertaking such cost-benefit analysis because the [best technology available] standard represents Congress’s conclusion that the costs imposed on industry in adopting the best cooling water intake structure technology available (i.e., the best-performing technology that can be reasonably borne by the industry) are worth the benefits in reducing adverse environmental impacts.

That graph comes from the judge’s opinion in Engerty Corp. v. Riverkeeper, “which,” writes Stephanie Mencimer, staff reporter for Mother Jones, “questioned whether the Clean Water Act allows the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use a cost-benefit analysis of technology available to reduce the impact of power plants on fish and other aquatic life.”

Mencimer recently wrote an article comparing Sotomayor’s writing skills to those of Antonin Scalia. Here’s the intro to Mencimer’s article (which gets the reader to wonder whether writing skills is one key quality):

As a Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor has a lot going for her: a stellar judicial record, a Yale Law School pedigree, a compelling personal history, and more trial experience than any other sitting justice. But while she’s clearly a bright and talented lawyer, she unfortunately lacks one of the key qualities of a successful Supreme Court justice: writing skills. To put it bluntly, Sotomayor doesn’t write very well. Reporters have sort of danced around this problem. The New York Times’ Adam Liptak charitably described her opinions as models of judicial craftsmanship that are “not always a pleasure to read.”

____________
Legal Writing Pro, and award-winning journalist, Ross Guberman, has just about had it with people making fun of Sotomayor’s writing skills, so he’s come up with a put-up-or-shut-up solution:

To me, though, this sort of jab carries weight only if the critic (or someone else) can make the same points much more crisply and clearly than Sotomayor did. I doubt it’s as easy as the Mother Jones critic claims, so let’s resolve the matter through a competition. Revise Sotomayor’s allegedly awful sentence, and I’ll publicize the best response.

This sounds like a fantastic opportunity for some law student looking to be noticed.

There’s a lively debate at Set in Style about recuse — is it strictly transitive, or can it be intransitive?

The discussion was sparked by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Caperton v. Massey, which was published just a few days ago.

In that ruling, the court treated recuse as a transitive verb, but Justices Scalia and Roberts treated it as intransitive.

___________
Today, comes news that the Caperton ruling, expected to have little impact, has already been cited in a case involving two judges who demanded money in exchange for sending delinquents to a privately run detention center in Pennsylvania:

[Judge Mark] Ciavarella and fellow former Luzerne County President Judge Michael T. Conahan admitted in January to taking more than $2.6 million in payments from one of the owners and the builder of PA Child Care, a private, for-profit juvenile detention center. Both have agreed to serve 87 months in federal prison. 
. . . 
In its brief, the [Juvenile Law Center] argued for a blanket expungement of records and a bar on retrial, citing heavily from Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co.

Remember the 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the one that claims:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

It seems that, like many others, Russell and Kim Hurd think it’s just a bunch of nonsense, that — no matter what the Constitution says — the federal government should decide what people may or may not do on their way to work, or school, or the grocery store. 

In this article, the Am Law Daily names Steven Bauer the litigator of the week for earning his keep.

He convinced a court that a party without standing can’t sue a company for infringing IP rights the party doesn’t have, and that buying a speculative interest in a lawsuit isn’t quite the same as having rights to the property in dispute.

In the Motion to Dismiss the suit, Bauer directs the court to consider the many issues involved in “[c]ommoditizing and selling run-of-the-mill lawsuits.”

What do I do?

I edit legal marketing materials. I write copy for legal marketing materials. I work with attorneys, lawyers, and law firms.

I work with law firm marketing departments. I work with marketing directors, directors of marketing, and CMOs — Chief Marketing Officers of Am Law 200 firms. And I edit Web site copy, practice-area descriptions, attorney biographies, client alerts, and blogs hosted by law firms.

I also write Web site copy, practice-area descriptions, and attorney biographies.

I serve as developmental editor to attorneys and lawyers planning their Web sites and blogs. Among the services I offer are copy editing (also known as line editing) and copy writing (usually set as one word — copywriting).

I have five years of experience working with attorneys, lawyers, and law firms. I help them attract clients — i.e., turn potential clients into paying clients.

I help young associates enhance their legal careers through their writings — primarily client alerts, blog posts, and articles for publication.

I am a member of the Legal Marketing Association.

I’ve written articles for several American Bar Association (ABA) journals. One of my articles appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal. I’ve written a number of articles on employment law — age discrimination, Title VII, EEOC, employment tests, and the like.

I know; I know — this is some incredibly boring copy, but it’s not for human consumption. Like I said up front, it’s for search engines.

I’m in the process of upgrading this site. 

Until I’m done, you might see some pages that look out of place. 

If you have any suggestions for improvement, please let me know.

Thanks.

Yes, law firms can increase the rankings of their web sites — make them more popular — by using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, by using certain key words and phrases in their publications: client alerts, newsletters, practice area bulletins, etc.

Now, it’s not just key words law firms need to use to attract visitors to their web sites, it’s key phrases as well.

Imagine an IP firm in San Francisco. The firm’s key clients are in biotech and pharmaceuticals. The firm is well known in the Bay Area.

But it’s not so well known in Boston or Chicago or New York. Fortunately, the law firm’s chief marketing officer (CMO) knows modern marketing methods. She knows that, if a firm in some far away city is looking for the sort of legal services our fictitious IP firm in San Francisco (Acme Law) offers, the use of key words and key phrases is likely to make all the difference in the visibility of an IP firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that focuses on patents for medical devices, techniques, and drugs.

She knows key words have to appear at the law firm’s web site, and so do key phrases. These are the phrases that people are likely to use when searching for an IP firm in San Francisco. Proper use of the phrases, and Acme Law is going to have greater visibility than any of the following:

1. Fenwick & West LLP
2. Fish & Richardson P.C.
3. Foley & Lardner
4. The Prinz Law Office
5. Swiss Tanner