Set in Style

There’s this attorney from China and he’s flying to San Francisco, hoping to start a good relationship. He works for a large telecommunications company that’s planning its first venture in the U.S., and he’s looking for a law firm to provide guidance in several regulatory matters.

He’s several hours into the flight when he takes this article out of his briefcase. He’s going to meet the author, an attorney at a law firm in San Francisco that also has an office in Beijing; the article should be great background.

Take a look at the article (it’s a PDF file). If you’re pressed for time, just read the first line.

Note: This is the copy for an actual article written by an actual attorney for an actual law firm (one of the biggest), and then published by the firm. I’m not kidding. If you want to verify this, click here.

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Our flying attorney begins reading the article, which offers advice to Chinese firms doing business in the U.S. But as soon as he starts, he stops. He wonders, what is repaid economic growth? What is that?

As he reads the article, his generally favorable impression of the author — formed during a phone call a week earlier — starts to fade. There are so many careless errors. The author didn’t mean repaid economic growth, he meant rapid economic growth. He wrote about Ebay, but he meant eBay. He quoted a figure of $750,000,000, rather than the correct figure: $175,000,000.

This is the flying attorney’s second impression of the author, and it’s not a good one. He wonders, who would write something like this? what sort of law firm would publish it?

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The effect of the article is the opposite of what was intended, which was to attract a potential client, a large Chinese company entering the U.S. market.

The IP attorney who put his name to this article couldn’t have meant for it to be published as is, not with that typo in the very first sentence, not with a trademark set incorrectly, not with so many careless errors in grammar.

This article does more harm than good. Rather than attract business, it portrays the firm — prominently identified as the publisher — as one that doesn’t pay attention to its associates’ work. It’s the sort of firm that lets a half-billion dollar error go unnoticed!

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Had there been an editor between the attorney and the printing press, this would not have happened. Instead the article would have been transformed into this revised article.

The author would have looked good, the firm would have looked good, and the meeting that had been planned would not have been cancelled.

Note: Click here for a Microsoft Word document that shows exactly which changes I made to the article.

Computerworld has this article about an insurance company (Chubb Corp.) refusing to cover a law firm’s (Lomurro, Davison, Eastman and Munoz in Freehold, New Jersey) blog under an existing malpractice insurance policy.

Even when they’re judges.

From an opinion issued just a few days ago in the case of Jamison v. Ford Motor Company:

The cognoscenti of federal preemption jurisprudence bestow panoramic application so as to limit state common law tort actions.

Not only that, but this:

Importantly, scholars on basic conflict preemption principles inculcate in regard to the fundamental elixir of the rule when juxtaposing federal/state constitutional analysis.

What should you be reading? How about books on business development skills for lawyers? Which ones?

Use Google’s Book Search to see what’s available.

Try the following search and see what you get.

It’s like being in a super-duper bookstore and there’s a whole section on topics like how to market legal services, and how lawyers can promote themselves; you can compare several books and decide which you should read. Google lets you thumb through the books, and — when you find that one to read — it lets you zip right over to Amazon.com to order a copy. Presto!

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A steady way to market yourself, a good way to get people to notice you and speak well of you, is to write interesting things about things that interest people.

There’s always something in the news to write about. And there’s always something coming up, even if it’s no more than a celebration of something past.

Write something topical and interesting, and get it published. Write an op-ed about Carl Rove being subpoened to testify before Congress, and get a reputable newspaper or magazine to print it. Write an article about income taxes (April 15 is near) for Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine. Write about You Tube and copyrights and Apple’s rights or some other aspect related to this spoof on Hillary Clinton.

There’s always something to write about, and there’s always a way to get published (assuming you write interesting things about things that interest people). Do a fine job of it, and prospects will be looking for you.

Someone sent me a copy of a law firm’s general brochure. This post discusses how the brochure could be greatly improved by applying some well-worn rules.

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Note: A real brochure is the focus of this post. I could have created a copy, or I could have hidden the name of the publisher, but then I’d be running into copyright issues.

What struck me first was the brochure’s unusual trim size: 8.5 inches tall by nearly 4 inches wide. What inspired the firm to create a brochure with such odd dimensions, I wondered.

I thumbed through the brochure, and found copy set like this:

To see what’s wrong with setting copy this way, download this PDF file. Read the paragraph in the upper left, which is set just as it is in the brochure. Then, read the paragraph in the lower right. You’ll notice that one is much easier to read than the other. There are several reasons for this.

For one, the copy in the upper left is set too tight. The lines are too close together. This makes it harder to read, and that tends to discourage readers.

If the copy had been set with a reasonable amount of leading, it would look like so (the paragraph in the upper right of the PDF file):

Just that one change makes the copy much easier to read, and that’s very significant, because that makes it much more likely that people will bother to read the brochure.

What else could be done to encourage people to take the time to read the brochure?

The copy was set in a condensed face (most likely, to stuff too much copy into not enough space). If the face weren’t condensed, the copy would be much easier to read. It would look like so (the paragraph in the lower left of the PDF file):

There’s at least one more thing that could be done to improve readability, and that’s this — set the body copy in a face with serifs. If the copy were set in a face with serifs, it might look like so (the paragraph in the lower right of the PDF file):

Compare the copy in the upper left of of the the PDF file to the copy in the lower right (shown above). Which is easier to read? Which is more likely to be read?

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We’re not quite done. Let’s consider the very unusual trim size of the brochure: 8.5 inches tall by nearly 4 inches wide.

This brochure is going to be printed on a sheet-fed press (unless the firm plans to print millions of them). Hence, it’s going to be printed on standard-size sheets. Unless the firm has money to burn, the trim size should be based on the size of those sheets. A very practical size would be 8.5 inches tall by 5.5 inches wide (i.e., a letter-size page folded in half).

Now, you may have noticed that the copy set in the serif face with leading takes up more space than the copy set in the condensed, sans-serif face without leading. Where are we going to find that extra space? Are we going to add another leaf to the brochure, thereby increasing the cost of producing it?

Heck no. We’re going to set the copy in a wider column (on a wider page) so that one page in our redesigned brochure contains just as much copy as one page in the existing brochure.

Compare these two columns of type. The left-hand column shows the copy as it was set in the odd-size brochure produced by the law firm. The right-hand column shows the copy as it might have been set if the brochure had been designed with readability, cost, and convenience in mind.

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That’s it, right? Now we’re all done.

Not quite. Once again, compare these two columns of type. Notice that the copy on the right has four paragraphs, rather than two.

Why? Because we want people to read our brochure; to encourage that, we need to make it as easy as we can for them to read it. That means breaking the copy into paragraphs, and there’s an age-old rule for doing that. As Strunk and White advised many millions of aspiring (as well as reluctant) writers:

Ordinarily . . . a subject requires subdivision into topics, each of which should be made the subject of a paragraph. The object of treating each topic in a paragraph by itself is, of course, to aid the reader. The beginning of each paragraph is a signal to [the reader] that a new step in the development of the subject has been reached.

Back to the basics for a minute. The purpose of the brochure is to attract business. It can’t do that unless people (e.g., prospective clients) take some time to read it. They’re not likely to do that if the copy is hard to read or if it’s not organized in a reasonable fashion.

To be effective, the brochure has to be very readable.

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We’re nearly done. Just three more things to notice.

Note: The rest of this discussion refers to this comparison of the printed brochure to our revision of it.

The first thing to notice is the URL in the bottom paragraph on the right. In the law firm’s version of the brochure, it’s just some type. In our revised version of the brochure, it’s a link. Click it, and a page listing the firm’s recent successes appears.

The next thing to notice is the series that makes up the bulk of that last paragraph. In the law firm’s version of it (the left-hand column), the elements of the series are not parallel. The first element has the form client followed by action. Most of the other elements do not have that form. The result is such odd constructions as:

• successful representation of nationwide construction litigation
  
• successful representation of nationwide counsel
  
• successful representation of national defense
  
• successful representation of national representation
  

Compare the law firm’s copy to the revised copy. In the revised copy, every element in the series is parallel to all the others, just as it should be.

Note: Given the importance of accurate writing in legal matters, a firm’s brochure must be free of all errors in spelling, syntax, grammar, and punctuation; else, it seems as if the firm doesn’t notice such errors or doesn’t care about them.

Finally, the beginning of the second paragraph on the right, which says the firm did something recently. This occurs again at the beginning of the last paragraph, which mentions recent succcesses. Turn to page 5 of the printed brochure, or page 6, or page 9 and you’ll find other references to what the firm did recently.

But how recent is recent? It turns out that this brochure was produced in August of 2005 — about a year and a half ago.

If your marketing materials are dated (i.e., they use terms like recently, soon, last year, next year, etc.), then you need to print the date of publication on those materials, else you run the grave risk of misleading people when your claims are no longer current.

The Usability Blog has this interesting post about software license agreements. The author of the post blames the outrageous complexity and incredible length of so many of these agreements on laziness:

Let’s start with the legalese. I’m aware of how and why legal writing has become so impenetrable and difficult to parse. (For more on this, check out this Wikipedia article.) Defenders of the language and style of legal writing point to the need to disambiguate as much as possible and cover all potential contingencies when writing law or a contract. But that argument is specious. Bloated, meandering legalese is created by lazy people who can’t be bothered to express their thoughts and intent clearly and succinctly.

The author of the post might want to consider another culprit — the typical legal writing class.

Pick up a copy of a court’s rules. Look at the section that gives details on how to prepare a brief. Note the requirements for typesetting a brief:

• the typeface must be at least a certain size
  
• that face can contain no more than a certain number of characters per inch
  
• it must be a serif face
  
• the width of a line of type can be no greater than the specified length
  
• there must be at least some specified distance between each line of type
  
• the type must be printed in black ink on white paper
  

There are reasons for these rules.

Compare a legal brief to a book in a bookstore. Note the similarities in the appearance of the type. The body of both the brief and the book are set in a serif face, and they’re both set in lines that contain from 60 to 80 characters per line.

There are two key reasons for these similarities: legibility and readability.

Now, take a look at this client alert published by a major law firm. Notice that the body of it is set in a sans-serif face instead of a serif face. Notice the length of the lines of type, some of which contain over 100 characters.

The client alert sacrifices legibility and readability not for any good reason at all, but because the people who produced it aren’t pros.

Does it matter? Well, yes . . . if you want to look good, if you want to appear professional, if you want prospective clients to assume that you hire professionals, then it certainly does.

This article is dated (it was published 10 years ago), but it remains oh so relevant.

It’s about Clyde Leland, a lawyer and journalist, who approached the firm of Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May with the notion of being the firm’s editor.

Other articles on this can be found here, here, and here.

David Freedman, an experienced legal and financial journalist, wrote this article titled “Four Mistakes Lawyers Make in Trying to Get Published.”

Freedman says it’s a mistake for an author to try to impress his audience. I don’t agree with that, but I do agree attorneys as authors should avoid these mistakes:

They use complex words and convoluted sentence structure. They use jargon without definitions. They talk about their successes without regard to their relevance to the topic. They make their subject broad in order to show off the breadth of their expertise, which necessarily results in a superficial article.

I certainly don’t agree with Freedman that it’s a mistake to choose a topic based on the author’s “expertise, knowledge, and experience.” If you want to write a very good article, write about something you’re familiar with, something you know about; stay away from topics that you don’t know much about. But do pick a topic that is of interest to your audience.

In this ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals, the meaning of the Second Amendment depends — in large measure — on the significance of a comma.

In the case of Shelly Parker et al v. District of Columbia, six residents of Washington D.C. complained that the district’s very restrictive gun laws prevent them from exercising the right to bear arms, and the court agreed.

According to the ruling:

The provision’s second comma divides the Amendment into
two clauses; the first is prefatory, and the second operative.
Appellants’ argument is focused on their reading of the Second
Amendment’s operative clause. According to appellants, the
Amendment’s language flat out guarantees an individual right
“to keep and bear Arms.” Appellants concede that the prefatory
clause expresses a civic purpose, but argue that this purpose,
while it may inform the meaning of an ambiguous term like
“Arms,” does not qualify the right guaranteed by the operative
portion of the Amendment.

The District of Columbia argues that the prefatory clause
declares the Amendment’s only purpose—to shield the state
militias from federal encroachment—and that the operative
clause, even when read in isolation, speaks solely to military
affairs and guarantees a civic, rather than an individual, right.
In other words, according to the District, the operative clause is
not just limited by the prefatory clause, but instead both clauses
share an explicitly civic character. The District claims that the
Second Amendment “protects private possession of weapons
only in connection with performance of civic duties as part of a
well-regulated citizens militia organized for the security of a
free state.” . . . In short, we take the District’s position to be
that the Second Amendment is a dead letter.