Publishing Fuzzy Reprints
The GC for a high tech firm is looking for counsel familiar with this or that. He asks around and he hears about you. Before he takes the time to call you, he asks an associate to do some research.
What does the associate do? The first thing she does is review your firm’s Web site. She looks at your bio, and then she clicks a link to some article you wrote. What she sees after she clicks that link is going to influence her report to the GC.
Suppose she clicks this link and finds a PDF version of a not-so-legible photocopy of an article you wrote. The impression she gets is that your firm is hardly high tech. That impression is reinforced when she realizes the article could have been reprinted with this level of legibility.
Suppose she clicks this link. She’s a mite perplexed because she can’t figure out what sort of file it is. She does some tinkering and finds it’s a PDF version of a not-so-legible photocopy of an article that could have been reprinted with this level of legibility.
Suppose she clicks this link. She already knows that your firm doesn’t identify PDFs as PDFs, so she opens the file in Acrobat. Once again, she finds a not-so-legible photocopy of an article that could have been reprinted with this level of legibility.
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Sometimes it doesn’t matter how good or bad your article is. The impression people get isn’t always from what you wrote, but from what your firm produced. If your firm does a lousy job of reprinting articles you wrote, it makes you look bad. It gives the impression that you’re all-too-capable of missing what’s obvious.
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Let’s look at one more example of a firm that doesn’t much care what sort of impression its publications make on prospective clients. Click this link, and you’ll discover a firm that publishes photocopies, rather than originals, of its own newsletters!
