Set in Style

Marcia Pennington Shannon of Shannon & Manch (consultants to many large law firms) authored this interesting article for Legal Practice Magazine. It’s an interview with Ross Guberman, principal of Legal Writing Pro, a consulting firm that teaches legal writing. In it, Guberman lists the top four problems that partners have with the writings of their associates:

• Poor structure/rambling organization

• Passive voice/awkward sentences/ambiguous clauses

• Clutter/wordiness

• Grammar/usage/proofreading/ attention to detail

What does this tell us about what’s not required to enter law school?

Which is it: the President of the United States, or the president of the United States? a Congressional Committee, or a congressional committee? the State of California, or the state of California? our Firm is committed to excellence, or our firm is committed to excellence? the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or the chief justice of the United States?

In each case, it’s the latter.

The University of Chicago has announced that Joseph Williams – Professor Emeritus of English, winner of the Legal Writing Institutes’s Golden Pen Award, author of an acclaimed text on how to write with style, and the architect of U of C’s writing program — died of natural causes on 22 February.

Just discovered this blog — Lawyers['] Writing Wrongs — that focuses on unusual statements in briefs.Here’s an example:

“The Second segment of uncompensated occurs during the Plaintiffs uncompensated thirty (30) minute meal/rest break.”

From this recent article in the New York Times:

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers.    

Yipes! 

From a firm’s advertisement for an attorney:

Law firm experience is required as is excellent writing skills.

Here’s how the heading for this client alert (a PDF file) appears on a computer that doesn’t have a particular font installed:

Whoever produced the alert (probably) imagined that the heading would appear like this:

Here’s how some of the body for the alert appears on that computer:

Whoever produced the alert (probably) imagined that the body would appear like this:

What went wrong? Whoever produced the alert made a common mistake. He figured that if the alert looked good on his computer, it would look good on all computers.

How to avoid such a mistake? Simple. Just embed required fonts when you create the PDF version of an alert. How? Here’s how.

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If your firm claims a commitment to excellence in all it does, don’t blow it by publishing alerts that are so far from excellent. That makes it seem as if your firm’s staff doesn’t know how to use common computer applications; they don’t pay close attention to detail; they don’t take pride in their work; and it makes the attorneys who authored the alert seem careless — as if they don’t bother to look at published versions of their work.

Only rarely do I find a law firm with professional-looking publications — I mean publications that appear as if they were designed and produced by pros.

Take a look at this newsletter published by Weil Gotschal. Take a good look at the page layout and the type. It may not be the slickest design in the world, but it’s solid.

The body copy is set in Stone Serif, and the heads are set in Helvetica. (I would have chosen Stone Sans for the heads to better complement the body.) Italics are used appropriately, and none of the type is underlined. Hyphenation is used to break lines (almost unheard of among law firms), so word spacing is very consistent.

And — to top if off — the newsletter (a PDF document) contains links that actually work! That’s a very rare occurrence in law firm publishing.

Unfortunately not all of the links are set correctly. For instance, if you click an attorney’s e-mail address, nothing happens. Nothing at all*.

And the newsletter contains an extra-special bonus feature — it’s written for a broad audience and it’s well written.

I give it a B⁺.

Now, compare the newsletter to this Weil Briefing. Take a look at the last two pages of the briefing. And try the links on the last page.

This one gets a C ^–.

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What should happen when an attorney’s e-mail address is clicked? For the sake of readers — including potential clients — and Weil’s attorneys, clicking an attorney’s e-mail address should open a new e-mail message with an appropriate subject line. This saves readers a bit of work, and — when one of Weil’s attorneys gets an e-mail with that subject line — he already knows what it’s about. E-mails with that subject line might be routed to a particular attorney for initial review.

Note: Any firm can claim (as many do) that it makes good use of modern technology. But when it fails to demonstrate that, the claim rings hollow.

Consider this familiar statement:

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Note the singular/plural disagreement.

And consider this: In New York, attorneys who advertise a certain way are required to suspend a rule of grammar (agreement in number) when they do (advertise a certain way, that is).

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Take a look at the statement at the very bottom of this article. Does it satisfy the New York Bar Association’s requirement (which says “Any words or statements required by this rule to appear in an advertisement must be clearly legible and capable of being read by the average person . . . “)?

And what of PDF versions of this firm’s promotional materials? Don’t they need to carry the statement as well? As best I can tell, the New York Lawyer’s Code of Professional Responsibility makes no distinction between HTML and PDF versions of attorney advertisements.

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When this rule went into effect a year ago, it got some press. The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog mentioned that attorney Eric Turkewitz discovered that most big law firms were ignoring the rule. At his blog, Turkewitz wrote:

“Despite New York’s new attorney disciplinary rules on advertising going into effect today, and despite months of discussion, most major law firms have apparently failed to comply.”

As best I can tell, Turkewitz is the only attorney in New York who gets the grammatical error in the rule. The Turkewitz Law Firm Web site includes the following:

Throughout this site you will see examples of cases we have handled. Since all cases are different, and legal authority may change from year to year, it is important to remember that prior results cannot and do not guarantee or predict similar outcomes with respect to any future matter, including yours, in which any lawyer or law firm may be retained.

Emphasis added.

From this article recently published in New York Employment Law:

“The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) recently celebrated its 40th anniversary.”

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