Set in Style

The Cornell University Law School publishes the following overview of legal writing at Wex, “everyone’s resource for law learning.”

This is a problem we’ve considered before: the problem of the pronoun without sex. If we wanted to speak of an individual without reference to his or her gender, we could refer to that person as it. It is perfect! It’s sexless, and it’s singular. What could ever be better suited to the task?

But we just can’t do it. “People aren’t things,” we declare. “Heck, we’re not even animals, which is a completely different category of creatures. You can call dogs and cats its, but not people. The correct way to speak of people these days, is as they.“

And so we read about a lawyer who must do their best on their clients’ behalf. But that just don’t sound quite right.

Here’s how that copy might have been revised by an editor:

Writing is the main tool lawyers have for expressing their analyses of legal issues and for persuading courts to rule in favor of their clients. Hence, the most successful lawyers are masterful writers.

Here’s the story.

Here’s the copy in question.

6. A method for enabling the exchange of reporting system information over a computer network comprising the steps of: receiving at one or more web servers using HTTP a user request for reporting system information from a user system; transmitting the request to a reporting server; the reporting server executing the reporting request from a the client system using and transmitting the retrieved information to the at least one web server; and converting the report to HTML or DHTML and transmitting it to the user system without downloading any executable files; wherein the web server does not perform any reporting system operations; and wherein the reporting system comprises an OLAP system.

Can you spot the error? No, it’s not the two obvious ones.

Just ran across something odd. It’s in the copy from the employment section of a law firm’s Web site.

Here’s the odd copy:

Unsolicited applications will not be considered for employment by the Firm.

Incomplete applications will not be considered for employment.

Do you suppose this firm hires completed and solicited applications? What about applicants?

I know! I know! It’s a small thing — much smaller than a decimal point that’s moved one place too far to the left or the right.

But still . . . it’s like buying ad space to let people know you don’t proof your copy. That’s not encouraging, not when a failure to proof copy can be much more expensive than a misplaced decimal point.

I just reviewed this article titled “Managing the Risk of Employee Blogging” which earned a Burton Award for Legal Writing Excellence.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

“The advent of the weblog, or “blog,” is only the latest advancement in online technology to make the risk manager’s job more difficult. Most people use blogs to post daily content, such as news and commentary, to a website. Many people use their blogs to air their opinions, and inevitably, some of these involve posting negative, harassing, hostile, false or confidential information and opinions about one’s employers and co-workers. This has created a new set of risks for corporate employers who might not be aware of how personal blogging could affect them, much less know what to do about it.”

The first sentence discusses an advancement that makes the risk manager’s job more difficult. The second sentence discusses a different topic — why people ‘use’ blogs. This violates the age-old rule that says a new topic starts a new paragraph.

Consider the third sentence:

Many people use their blogs to air their opinions, and inevitably, some of these involve posting negative, harassing, hostile, false or confidential information and opinions about one’s employers and co-workers.

What does these refer to? People? Blogs? Opinions? Another age-old rule says the relation between a pronoun and its antecedent must be clear and unambiguous.

This just goes to show what professional publishers very well know: every writer needs an editor — even those who win writing awards.

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Want to read an interesting and well-written article that won a Burton Award? Check out “Absurdist Humor and the Form-Substance Dialectic in Tax Law” written by Doug Frazer, an attorney at DeWitt Ross & Stevens.

The St Petersburg Times has this article about Victoria Dawson, the legal writing director at Florida A & M University’s law school. Seems her students are wondering how she ever got her job.

One focus of the article is a paper that Dawson wrote titled “Environmental Dispute Resolution: Developing Mechanisims for Effective Transnational Enforcement of International Environmental Standards.”

Seems the article is just chock full of nonsense like this:

He consulted with government officials and he sent his general manager of asset management representative repeatedly crossed the creek to negotiate with village leaders of Ugborodo during the women’s 10-day occupation.

This inherent conflict between economic development and environmental protection needs and interest and the focus of managing environmental disputes for sustainable results is the cause of a 10-day delay in productions and obligations.

International environmental disputes can involve parties who hold very strong feelings that they are right and other parties are wrong present unique challenges if fundamental values are in conflict.

Without doubt, the client alert can be a VERY effective promotional tool, particularly for smaller firms. But only if well done.

Client alerts that aren’t well done are just a waste of time, especially for the attorneys who write them.

In this post, we examine a client alert published by a well-known law firm – one with more than 130 attorneys. We look at what could be done to make the alert more effective (e.g., get more people to mention it).

Before we get started: here’s a link to the firm’s original client alert, and here’s a link to a revision of that alert. The name of the publisher and the names of the authors have been altered. Otherwise, the original is exactly as published.

Now, let’s get started. Review the original alert. Compare it to the revised alert. I suggest you print them both.

Let’s start at the bottom. Here’s the disclaimer from the original (which appears on ALL the firm’s alerts):

Notice anything amiss? Take a look at the copyright notice at the bottom of the disclaimer. Where there should be a copyright symbol, there’s a capital ‘O’ with an acute accent. And there’s a line break between the word Copyright and that symbol.

What else? The copy is center justified.

What else? To prevent “further transmissions” the reader is advised to click “unsubscribe above.” But there is no “unsubscribe” to click. The law firm claims it’s trying to comply with “proposed Federal legislation,” but it doesn’t.

What else? The alert doesn’t bear a date of publication, but it was published four years after that “proposed Federal legislation” became law. And that law doesn’t apply to client alerts posted at law firm Web sites.

Here’s the revised disclaimer:

Let’s go to the top. Here’s the heading of the original alert:

What’s missing? The date of publication. The future reader is left to wonder, was this published last month or last year? (Fortunately, the date of the decision appears in the first line of the body. But it’s a fluke. The typical alert from this firm leaves future readers wondering whether the alert was published ten days ago, or ten years ago.)

Notice the heading. It consists of 16 words, which is a might much for a heading. Check out the first few lines of copy. Can you tell whether the decision was issued by a federal court or a state court? In other words, can the reader decide whether this alert is even relevant? (In the original, which case is being discussed isn’t mentioned until the end of the alert.)

Here’s the heading of the revised alert:

A few observations. First, the heading is down to a more palatable ten words. Also, the reader is provided with a convenient link to the opinion, and is advised that it was an appellate court in California that published the opinion.

Compare the type in the original to the type in the revision. The type in the original is set in a face designed for headings, not for body copy. The type in the revision is set in a face designed for readability. This might seem like a tiny technicality, but it’s not (i.e., pros are always have a reason why they selected this typeface or that).

Let’s make one more visual comparison of the original and the revision. Here’s the first bullet point in the original:

Here it is in the revision:

Now, this might seem like a small thing, but the difference between a quality product and a mediocre one is often the cumulative effect of a bunch of small things. (Compare a Volkswagen to a Mercedes. You can use either one to go to the store to buy a quart of milk, but one is worth far more than the other. Why?)

In the original, underlines are used. In the revision, they’re not. Big deal? No. But the use of underlines suggests that the publisher hasn’t mastered the IBM Selectric, much less the PC. When a firm uses underlines for emphasis, tick marks for quotes, and hyphens for em dashes, it suggests that either the firm doesn’t know how to set type, or it doesn’t much care about such details.

Let’s look at a few more differences between a client alert that’s been touched by an editor, and one that has not:

• Click either one of the authors’ email links in the original. Then, click an email link in the revision. Notice that, in the revision, the subject line is automatically completed. This is a convenience not only for the potential client who wants to contact an author, but for the author as well. It lends to the notion that the firm is very concerned about client service and knows its way around computers.

• The original file is 32K; the revision is half that size. The original file contains a great deal of HTML that isn’t used, and a good bit of HTML that isn’t needed.

• If you look closely, you’ll find many other small changes between the original and the revision, including changes to the copy. For instance, in the original, the abbreviation MEC is introduced in the first paragraph, but then Medical Executive Committee is used throughout the alert. (Why introduce an abbreviation if you’re not going to use it?)
  

Like I said at the top, the client alert can be a very effective promotional tool, but only if well done (i.e., touched by an editor).

Joseph Kimble, chair of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s Research & Writing Department, received a Burton Award for his work simplifying the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Next up for simplification and clarification are the Federal Rules of Evidence.

In this complaint, Adrian Zachariasewycz, a graduate of the University of Michigan law school, and his wife accuse the school of discriminating against students who can’t type as fast as others.

Upon information and belief, the system of course examination and grading at the Law School in certain exams disadvantaged students that could not type at a sufficient speed to produce the volume of text required to produce competitive examination responses.

The Law School made no generally adequate accommodation to students with deficient typing skills that would allow them to compete on a level playing field with their manually more dexterous peers with better-developed keyboarding skills.

Had an editor been involved in this complaint, it might have turned out like this:

Upon information and belief, the system of course examination and grading at the Law School disadvantages students who cannot type as quickly as others, simply because they cannot produce the volume of text required for written examinations.

The Law School makes no accommodation for students with disabilities that limit their typing speed. This puts them at a competitive disadvantage. The school’s policy means that students with such disabilities will be economically disadvantaged throughout their careers, since students rated at the top of their class (those who can type fast enough to do well on written exams) earn more than those at the bottom of their class.

Is that not an improvement?