Common Errors in Law Firm Publishing (#2)
Consider the following sentence, which appears in a firm’s description of its telecommunication practice:
Given the mobility of the high-tech workforce, the Firm also has handled numerous disputes involving industry leaders over the ability to protect trade secrets and to enforce nondisclosure agreements, covenants not to compete, and similar restrictive covenants.
Consider the dependent clause that starts this sentence. What relation does it have to the independent clause? Does it modify anything? Is there any relation between the ‘mobility of the high-tech workforce’ and the ‘numerous disputes’ the firm has handled?
The dependent clause is said to ‘dangle’ because it has no relation to the independent clause. It should be deleted. Either that, or the sentence should be rewritten so the dependent clause has some relation to the independent clause.
Another common error in this sentence is the way ‘Firm’ is set as a proper noun. It’s obviously not a proper noun, and so it should be set lower-case.
For some reason, attorneys think it’s good and proper to treat common nouns (and adjectives) as proper nouns (and proper adjectives). They refer to some court as ‘the Court,’ or they refer to the chairman of this or that as ‘the Chairman’ of this or that. They write about one ‘Congressional Committee’ or another, and each time they set a common noun (or adjective) as a proper noun (or adjective), they commit an error.
Note: the chairman of this or that is sure to be less notable than the president (not the President) of the United States. If ‘the president of the United States’ doesn’t get set up, why should some chairman?
