Law Ferms and Daredevils
Professional publishers do this: before they publish copy, they prove proof it.
This is a pretty straightforward task. It’s the sort of thing most concientious conscientious sots sorts learned in middle school (i.e., before you submit a paper, review it).
It’s a very basic, and important, taks task. Forget to proof your copy before it’s published, and you just might find people talking about you (in a not-so-good way) the next day.
Now that we’re clear on that, let’s talk about SEO: search engine optimization.
To some, it’s very basic, and incredibly important. Fail to make sure that people who are looking for you, your services, or your products can find you, and your prospects go dim*.
Now, someone’s looking for YOUR law firm. But — since you didn’t bother to review your copy before you published it — that someone can’t find your firm because he’s searching for a law firm, not a law ferm or a law furm.
And he’s not looking for a firm that specializes in intellectual proprety. He’s looking for one that specializes in intellectual property. If you bother to misspell property, but you don’t bother to proof your copy before you publish it, then . . . that’s right: your prospects go dim*.
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Why bother to mention these things? Good question.
Let’s suppose that you’re counsel for some high tech company in Silicon Valley. You’re looking for a law firm to help you with this or that. Let’s suppose you’re looking for advice regarding keyword advertising.
As part of your search, you look for references to Rescuecom Corp. v. Google, Inc. And guess what? You’ll never discover Farella Braun + Martel LLP because that furm ferm firm doesn’t bother to do what middle school students are taught to do — it doesn’t bother to proof its copy.
If it did proof its copy, you’d have found it right off the bat. But since it misspelled Rescuecom, you’ll never discover what the good folks at FB+M have written about it.
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*Due Diligence — who wants to hire a lawyer (or a firm) that doesn’t practice it, that doesn’t even bother to roof proof her (or it’s its) own copy? Daredevils?
2 July 2008 at 9:06
This makes a lot of sense. But a little more rigorous proofing of this post would have revealed that the “it’s” in parentheses in the very last paragraph should, in fact, be “its.” Oops!
2 July 2008 at 9:22
Thanks for pointing out the error.
That’s just further evidence that writers should not proof their own work (or, if they do, they should import the copy into Word first so Word can find these errors).
3 July 2008 at 14:52
I took a look at FB+M’s IP Blawg.
It’s got to be one of the worst blawgs in existence.
They need much more than a proofreader.