Set in Style

So much of what large law firms publish is marketing material — client alerts, newsletters, press releases, and so on. It has a purpose — pitch the firm.

Consider practice area descriptions. Properly done, these are not simply objective descriptions of what a firm does. They’re promotional. They persuade the reader that — should he or she be looking for representation in a particular area — “our firm is a most excellent choice.”

Take a look at some practice area descriptions. See how your firm describes its practice areas. Do those descriptions have frequent changes in point of view.

Point of View? It’s perspective — the relationship between the writer and what the writer is writing about. If the writer is writing about himself or his own experience, that’s one point of view: first person. If he’s writing about something or someone else, that’s another point of view: third person.

Typically, a writer describing something objectively uses third-person point of view to describe something objectively. Rather than “my law practice,” there’s “the law practice.”

Practice area descriptions can be written using either point of view. They can also be written using both points of view; but when that’s done, some care is required. Shifting between points of view without rhyme or reason tends to drive readers away.

Consider this copy:

“Alpha Baker attorneys provide our clients with expertise in all aspects of Intellectual Property law. The firm has signficant experience in this area and our clients include some of the biggest names in media and entertainment. We regularly provide counsel on patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets and the firm’s attorneys practice before government agencies to secure those rights.”

It starts in third-person, then shifts to first-person, then third-person followed by first-person, and then third-person again. Whew!

Compare this to copy produced by a good ad agency. Copywriters stick to one point of view (usually third-person for this sort of material). They don’t use two points of view in one clause or shift point of view from clause to clause, and there’s a good reason for that — they’re trying to attract readers, not drive them away.

How can an editor help produce court documents?

Consider the following statement of fact, prepared by a firm that makes a business of preparing statements of fact for law firms:

On the evening of July 20, 2000, Howard Greene (“Greene”) was watching television inside his house located in Columbia, South Carolina (the “City”).¹ At about 6 p.m. that evening, Greene saw a City police car pull over outside the house. City police officer Michael Thomas (“Officer Thomas”) got out of the car and shouted a request to know who called the police. Officer Thomas then approached three persons in the vicinity and loudly asked who was smoking marijuana. The three persons told Officer Thomas that they were not smoking any marijuana.

Hearing the commotion outside, Greene came and stood in the doorway of his house to see what was happening. Upon seeing Greene, Officer Thomas walked straight to Greene and asked him who was smoking marijuana. Like the three bystanders, Greene affirmatively responded that he did not know. Insisting that he smelled marijuana on Greene, Officer Thomas ordered Greene to turn around and proceeded to handcuff him. Once the handcuffs were in place, Officer Thomas performed a search of Greene’s person. The only thing found by the search was $500. When questioned about the money, Greene responded that he had the cash because he planned on taking his three children out to Chuckie Cheese and to buy them shoes.

Officer Thomas then ordered a cadet officer, also present at the scene, to take off Greene’s shoes and to search them. The cadet followed Officer Thomas’s directive. At that point, Officer Thomas put Greene inside the police cruiser. Officer Thomas then requested Greene to escort him into Greene’s house, which Greene refused to do. When Greene went back up to his house to close the door, Officer Thomas was already inside. After searching Greene’s house, Officer Thomas returned to the police car and drove away with Greene still inside.

It’s not clear what happened. How did Greene get back to his house after he was put in the police car? Was he still handcuffed? We don’t know. It’s not clear. Nor is it clear why Greene was “still inside” the police car after he got out of it.

An editor would collect the facts and revise the above copy so it was both shorter, and more descriptive.

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But wait! Don’t you have to be an attorney to edit court documents? Well . . . it was an attorney who wrote the statement of fact, and an editor who noted its lack of precision. So, what do you think?

What can an editor do when it comes to producing court documents?

Consider the following Statement of Fact from a Complaint and Memorandum prepared by the National Legal Research Group on behalf of a client, a law firm in Statesville, North Carolina:

In 1971, Burns established F&M Newstand at its present location. At that time, the location was within an unincorporated portion of Rowan County, North Carolina. From its establishment, F&M Newstand sold adult-oriented books and magazines. Since that time, F&M Newstand has added to its inventory adult-oriented videos for sale, rental, and for on-site viewing.

Here it is again, after an editor has touched it:

In 1971, Burns established F & M Newstand at its present location within an unincorporated portion of Rowan County, North Carolina. Since its establishment, F & M Newstand has sold adult-oriented books and magazines, and has rented, sold, and featured adult-oriented videos.

It’s shorter, but it provides the same information. (Check, and you’ll find that the edited version is more accurate than NLRG’s.)

That’s one thing an editor can do — reduce the space needed to present information by (often by 10% to 20%). That means — in a brief limited to, say, 40 pages — you get to an extra 4 to 8 more pages.

It’s one thing to be home alone. You don’t have to comb your hair or shave. You don’t have to get dressed. You can respond directly to an itch. Not so when you’re out in public, where people are watching.

Ditto, it should be, for what you publish and for how you present yourself in type. Whether it’s an amicus brief, or a memo, or an article for a law journal or your firm’s newseltter, if your name is attached to it, it should look good. It should look like it was set in style.

So quit setting your final copy with Microsoft Word.

Word is a tool to help you write your copy. It’s a word processor, and it’s good at what it does, but it’s not a tool to help you set type or layout a page. It’s not designed for that.

Go to a bookstore and look at some new release. Look at how the type is set. Chances are very good that it looks like it was set by a pro. The spaces between words are very uniform. They’re not too short in one line and too long in the next. They’re very even, and that’s very good.

Now look at a brief or a memo or a pleading or a law review article or just about anything published by a law firm. Chances are good that the type doesn’t look nearly as good as it does in the book at the bookstore.

The reason? In most cases, Microsoft Word.

Look at just about any law firm publication. Notice the right-hand side of a column of copy. You don’t see any hyphens at the end of the lines, do you? Look again at the book in the bookstore. You do see hyphens at the end of a few lines, and that’s a key reason why it looks so much more professional.

If you care about your work’s appearance, don’t use Word to set final copy. Use a professional program like InDesign, or QuarkXPress, or Framemaker. That’s what the pros use, and so should you.

Comb your hair, polish your shoes, and make your work look sharp. After all, people are watching.

Consider this:

“In 2003, Hull & Chandler, P.A., opened our doors to begin providing a broad spectrum of high quality legal services for the people of Charlotte, North Carolina and surrounding communities throughout the Carolinas.”

Note the shift in point of view. The sentence starts out in third-person (”Hull & Chandler”) and then shifts to first-person (”our doors”).

This is a very common error.

Now, you might think that since this error is so common, it’s OK.

Wrong!. Frequent shifts in point of view are a burden to your readers.

If you want your copy to read well, don’t shift point of view in one sentence. Choose one point of view and stick with it.

. . . is worth doing right. If you believe that, and you’re going to publish something to promote you or your firm, you want to do it in good style. You want it to look sharp, and you want people to read it. And you don’t want to use sloppy language.

Consider the following statements about a firm’s bankruptcy practice:

“Making it more complicated is the fact that the different districts and courts within a state may vary in its requirements and practices.”

“Bankruptcy is a system in place to aid individuals, corporation, or those who have found themselves in serious financial difficulty from which they cannot recover on their own.”

“The Chapters reflect the characteristics of the filers as well as the filer’s financial situation and intentions towards their creditors and their debt.”

“Each Chapter has its own requirements as to who may file and their financial situation.”

Whew! Despite these errors (which appear in each of the firm’s practice area descriptions), the firm claims it strives for excellence in all that it does. 

All large law firms expect their attorneys to look sharp when they present themselves to clients or potential clients. But some of them don’t care how their marketing materials look.

Take a look at this first page of an article written by an attorney at a large firm. The article originally appeared in a law journal, and then it looked just fine. But someone in marketing got his hands on it, this is what happened.

Notice the slug at the top of the page, the crop marks in the corners, and the register marks along the sides.

A law firm isn’t using good quality control procedures if something like this can happen (and go unnoticed for quite some time).

Last week, the news was full of references to Nancy Pelosi, and many well educated people referred to her as the “first woman Speaker of the House.”

Wrong! Pelosi is not the first woman Speaker of the House; she’s the first female Speaker* of the House.

These days, the news is chock full of grammatical errors. Nouns are commonly used in place of adjectives, and so many newscasters, it seems, have lost the ability to conjugate most verbs. That’s fine. Those newscasters are speaking to the public, and proper English isn’t always the best way to do that.

It’s a different story when it comes to lawyers and their law firms. They can’t afford to use sloppy language. They can’t afford to portray themselves as lacking mastery of the written word.

Take a look at what just about any law firm has to say about its diversity efforts, and you’ll find much about those nonexistent creatures called women attorneys. You’ll find very little about female attorneys. (And you’ll find absolutely nothing at all about men attorneys or male attorneys, a sure sign that sexism — the age-old practice of treating women differently than men for no good reason — is alive and well.)

The sloppy language used by some law firms can be a big deal. (Quite literally, when it comes to the practice of law, a misplaced comma can cost many millions of dollars, and you don’t want to be the first lawyer to find out what it could cost to use a noun for an adjective.) To many, a law firm’s sloppy language might suggest that the firm’s lawyers have less than stellar language skills. Or it might suggest that the firm’s most senior partners simply don’t know or care what the firm’s associates are doing.

When a law firm gets sloppy about language, it runs the risk of losing significant business opportunities. Potential clients might ask themselves, “if this firm can’t use proper English to describe its practice areas, do I want it to prepare an important agreement for my company? Wouldn’t I feel more comfortable with a firm that has a solid command of the language?”

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* Civil titles are not capitalized unless they appear before the name of the person bearing the title. For instance, “Right now, President Bush is the president of the United States; the mayor of New York is Mayor Bloomberg.” Speaker of the House is one of the very few exceptions to this rule. (See The Chicago Manual of Style, section 7.19.)

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?

Most writing instructors at most law schools do their students a real disservice by requiring them to do certain things the wrong way. For instance, they require their students to violate a rule regularly taught by 8th-grade English teachers, which is to use (most always) the serial comma. This is particularly unfortunate, as most of what most attorneys write requires great precision, and failure to use the serial comma too often results in ambiguity.

Consider the following sentence:

The rule requires tutors, teachers and coaches who are present to file their recommendations with the board.

According to most style guides, a serial comma should be set after the word ‘teachers.’ This makes it clear that the qualifier ‘who are present’ refers to tutors, teachers, and coaches, rather than just coaches.

Let’s suppose the intent was for the qualifier to apply to all tutors, all teachers, but only those coaches who are present. In that case, it’s not enough to just omit the serial comma, because the meaning of the sentence would still be ambiguous. Attorneys would wind up arguing about whether or not the qualifier referred to all tutors, or only those tutors who are present, and a court would find itself functioning as an 8th-grade English teacher.

Best it would be to rewrite the sentence so its meaning is clear to all:

The rule requires all tutors, all teachers, and only those coaches who are present to file their recommendations with the board.

Precision and clarity: that’s why 8th-grade English teachers tell their students to use the serial comma. That’s why style guides (excepting those that apply only to journalists writing for newspapers) advise writers to use the serial comma. That’s why book and magazine publishers, as well as professional writers and editors, use the serial comma.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you might want to give a read to Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a guide to punctuation that became a bestseller in the U.K.

If your success is influenced by your mastery of things like punctuation and grammar, you’ll certainly want to have ready access to The Elements of Style. And if you want to do well, you’ll give that slender volume far more consideration than most law school writing instructors.