Set in Style

Sometimes, it’s better to be simple than perfect.
The past is one of those times.

You’re preparing a brief. Given the rules, you’re allowed 9,000 words (e.g., Supreme Court rule 37.3), or 30 pages, where the average page contains 300 words.

You write the first draft, and it contains 12,000 words, meaning you’ve got to cut (on average) every fourth word.

So, you combine two sections, cut some paragraphs, and revise some sentences, and your second draft contains 10,000 words. You’ve still got to cut (on average) one word per line.

How are you going to do that?

If you’ve got time to kill, you could comb through the draft and see which adjectives could be lost. Then you might be left with only 900 words to cut.

If you’re too busy to spend your time tracking non-essential adjectives, then you might pay a copy editor — someone who regularly reduces three column-inches to two and one-half — a fraction of what you charge per hour to identify which words to cut.

Now, you don’t want your average copy editor to touch your brief. She might cut something substantial without realizing it, and that would be a waste of your time and your money.

What you want is a copy editor familiar with briefs (merits, reply, or amicus), pleadings, petitions for cert, etc. You want someone who can tell what in your brief is substantial, and what is essential.

One of the things your editor is going to do is this: take what you cast in present-perfect or past-perfect tense, and recast it in present tense, or in simple-past tense. That’s a sure-fire way to cut extraneous words.

Let’s consider an example. Suppose you wrote this (in present-perfect tense):

“Plaintiff argues, based almost entirely upon federal law, that this section only comes into play when the responding party has established undue burden or expense.”

Then a skilled and experienced editor can quickly recast that like this (in present tense):

“Plaintiff argues, based almost entirely upon federal law, that this section only comes into play when the responding party establishes undue burden or expense.”

Bingo! A word is cut and the content is left unaltered.

Let’s look at another example. Suppose you wrote this:

However, it also recognized that generally, in order to determine whether an employer has honored a contract, a Court will be required to engage in some measure of contract interpretation.

Then a copy editor can quickly recast that like this:

However, it also recognized that generally, in order to determine whether an employer honored a contract, a Court will be required to engage in some measure of contract interpretation.

Another word is cut, and the content remains unaltered.

Of course, a skilled and experienced editor could do much more to cut words and enhance the quality of your brief.

REQUIREMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR TYPOGRAPHY IN BRIEFS AND OTHER PAPERS — a guide published by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals — is required reading for anyone following Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.

The advice it contains isn’t just for those involved in “the production of briefs, motions, appendices, and other papers” for a federal appeals court. It’s for all those who hope to produce briefs that are “more legible — and thus more likely to be grasped and retained.”

Some highlights:

• Use italics, not underlining, for case names and emphasis.
• Use real typographic quotes (“ and ”) and real apostrophes (’), not foot and inch marks.
• Put only one space after punctuation.
  
• Do not justify your text unless you hyphenate it.

Note the emphasis (mine) on putting only one space at the end of a sentence, not two. As the guide notes:

“The typewriter convention of two spaces is for monospaced type only. When used with proportionally spaced type, extra spaces lead to what typographers call ‘rivers’ — wide, meandering areas of white space up and down a page. Rivers interfere with the eyes’ movement from one word to the next.”

It’s 7:35 AM*.

I’ve got a cup coffee and I’m watching one of those morning news programs. Actually, it’s a semi-news program that leads with the fires in South Carolina and the Taliban in Pakistan, but ends up offering advice on how to choose a butcher or a mechanic or some such.

In any event . . . .

The topic is girls and eating eating disorders. There’s a video of some beauty pageant and there’s a young lady in a bikini — her bones are nearly protruding through the thinnest slice of muscle and fat there could be.

The commentator tells us how dangerous eating disorders can be, and how bad it is (i.e., how harmful it is to girls and young ladies, in  particular) that fashion cameras seek images of protruding bones.

Why don’t they seek (i.e., why aren’t girls drawn to) other images? Don’t they see beauty in the comforting curves at the center of Playboy magazine?

Back on topic — there are more videos of more movie starts and models, and so many protruding bones invoke images of those who barely survived the Holocaust.

For some, a meal at McDonald’s IS very nutritious.

The commentator tells us we’ve got to alter our ideals; we’ve got to stop telling school girls that starvation yields beauty.

That would be better, he says, because then middle-class girls in middle school wouldn’t be suffering from malnutrition right here in the U.S.

But the girls the commentator is talking about . . . where are they?

Look at a group of modern-day, middle school girls. Do they seem malnourished, or quite the opposite?

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When it comes to attracting clients, image is important. It can be extremely important.

Often enough, it is what is MOST important. And that’s because how clients select lawyers is (most usually) not a very logical process.

Most often, what prompts a client to select one attorney over another is as well reasoned as what gets a cat to meow.

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Clients do select one attorney over others (at least, in part) because of the impression that attorney makes on them, and the overall impression is influenced in the greatest way by the first impression — the one based on appearance and dress, size and demeanor, accent and tone, etc.

So . . . if the very first impression a client has of you or your firm comes from your firm’s Web site, it should look sharp.

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* Those who follow me on Twitter know I start my day early. I’m usually at work by 6:00 AM. But I take a break to catch the news and have a bite to eat.

If you want to Look Sharp Online, read the article, which appears in the ABA’s Law Practice Today. It describes what you can do to make sure your publications (client alerts, blogs, Web sites) have a professional appearance.

If you’re thinking about going solo, then you’re likely thinking of starting a blog. In that case, read Blogging Tips for Small Firms and Solos, appearing in the ABA’s Technology eReport. It discusses the distinctive characteristics qualities a lawyer’s blog needs to attract potential clients.

And if you’re an attorney dealing with type (and which one isn’t), then you know what’s in Matthew Butterick’s Typography for Attorneys. Butterick is an attorney with a background in type, and a sense of good style.

Listen to Butterick, and look sharp.

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Look, you wouldn’t show up for a meeting with a potential client wearing a jogging suit, not if you take pride in your appearance. By the same taken, you wouldn’t set the copy for your blog in Arial, or apply justification without hyphenation.

In the information age, looking sharp has less and 
less to do with what you wear.

What becomes more important is how you look,
either on line or in print.

You’re looking for a law firm to handle some “complex commercial litigation.” Someone mentions Schindler Cohen & Hochman LLP.

You review the firm’s Web site and you like what (little) you see.

You send an e-mail message asking for someone at the firm to contact you, and you send your message to the address posted at the firm’s Web site.

A few seconds later, the message bounces back to you:

     This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.      

Delivery to the following recipients was aborted after 0 second(s):

* schfirm@schlaw.com

That’s it! You figure the firm disbanded, and is no longer in service. Why else would your message bounce back?

But the firm is still in business. Your e-mail bounced back because that e-mail address doesn’t work, and it hasn’t worked for years!

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You’d be surprised how often this happens. A firm posts a Web site, and then no one at the firm bothers to see if it’s working OK. Years go by, and no one at the firm notices that its contact information isn’t quite right, or that potential clients can’t register to receive the firm’s client alerts.

The consequence? Lost opportunities!

“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”
– A. J. Liebling

If you read or write RFPs, then you might want to consider this article which discusses how you can differentiate your firm from others.

Here’s an excerpt which dismisses the notion that people are too busy to read:

The real truth is that people do read … and they read a lot. Just check the book and magazine racks at any airport in America and you’ll see that to be unquestionably true. What’s changed is that our standards have gone up. We won’t read what is boring. Irrelevant platitudes about being “innovative” or “dedicated to customer service excellence” or about how some firm “seeks to partner with clients,” are not going to keep anyone’s attention in this day and age. People will read and read … and read … if what they read interests them. As long as there is value in what we read, as long as it is compelling – no fluff, no self-serving drivel – we will read. If the content is truly interesting and valuable to its audience then you should have no fear of lost readership as a result of communicating in well written prose. Allowing bullets instead of prose to represent what makes your organization different is criminal.

It’s big news — big, it is, around all those parts of the world that have TVs and high-speed Internet hook-ups. Michelle Obama is addressing some of the girls who attend the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, “a large inner-city girls school,” in London, and the world is watching.

The First Lady inspires the girls with a tremendous heaping of hope: You are jewels, she tells them. Echoing Oprah Winfrey (when she addressed the students of the Leadership Academy for Girls she opened two years ago), and reprising her husband’s campaign slogan, she gets them to feel it in their bones: “Yes, You Can.”

Seems to me that Cynthia R. Rowland, publisher of Leadership and Women Lawyers, shares a certain something with Obama and Winfrey, and that’s an impulse to help young ladies succeed. In Rowland’s case, the young ladies are lawyers, and what they get is encouragement and the sort of advice that comes from someone who’s been in their shoes — someone who’s strived to excel at family and career.

Now, don’t get the notion that Rowland’s blog is just for, or about, young lady lawyers. It’s not. According to Rowland, it’s for “women and men who have an interest in developing and supporting women in leadership positions in law firms and law departments.”

Why bother to mention this?

Rowland’s a great example of the attorney who can shift from the daily routine of writing things people have to read, to some other process that yields engaging, thoughtful, well written articles people want to read — from the most practical advice on how to dress for success to stories that can only be written by someone who knows what it is to serve as full-time mommy and full-time attorney.

I had the opportunity to share a cup of coffee with Ms. Rowland. She offered some of her thoughts on blogging and on how new social networking tools, like LinkedIn, blogs, and Twitter are affecting client development.

If you’re an attorney and you have a blog that’s not attracting an audience, or you’re thinking of starting a blog and want it to attract an audience, listen in.

How did you select the topic of your blog, Leadership and Women Lawyers?

I didn’t want to write about my legal area (which I love, but there are many other much smarter folks blogging on the relevant topics), and there isn’t much else that I know anything about.

I needed a topic that I was passionate about, and where the space wasn’t already crowded. I did a little research and was surprised to find that nobody was writing about women in leadership positions in law firms and legal departments  other than some academic sites, and some consultants, neither of which really viewed the topic from the same perspective as a practicing lawyer. So I figured I’d give it a try and see what happened.

What’s your process? How do you decide what to write about?

When I first started, I wrote every single day, which was really helpful to me because I forced myself to come up with a new topic every day. Now I have a little more of a pattern and I only post two or three items each week.

There are several things I try to write about once a month, and if nothing interesting presents itself in my day-to-day musing, I search for current events, and always find something.

A wonderful thing that has been happening lately is that my readers are starting to send me ideas and topics. I really want it to be relevant. 

Where do you see Leadership and Women Lawyers, say, a year from now? three years from now?

I can identify three things for the next year. First, I hope my writing improves. Some of the early posts were pretty rough and it took a while to find a suitable voice, but I think it is getting better.

I also hope to generate more comments; I’d love to get perspectives from other women and men and to have it be more of a resource.

Third, I’d like to improve the layout and learn more about the things I could do to make it more reader-friendly. Some of the blogs I read are awesome in the way they present information. But I am also trying to keep a clean and easy-to-use format; I hate those sites that are so busy I can’t focus.

As for three years from now, I really hadn’t thought that far ahead! Blogs may be passé by then and everyone may simply be Twittering. A 140-character phrase is much easier to write than a coherent essay.

What’s been the biggest surprise you’ve experienced with Leadership and Women Lawyers?

There have been a lot of surprises. Initially, the biggest surprise was how easy it is to use the blogging tools. I’m also astonished at the information you can get from statistics counters (I use StatCounter) that log users who access the blog.

Every day I am surprised by something new in “Web 2.0″. Before I started writing I really had no idea what the medium was about, and now the more I know, the more I realize that there are so many amazing ways that the internet is changing our world. 

Many hold that blogging is immediate and informal, that you don’t need to dot your eyes or cross your teas. What’s your take on this?

I think blogging is like everything else you do: people will form an opinion of the kind of person you are from everything about your blog. If you are blogging about something and want to be taken seriously, the blog has to be consistent with that.

Even though I don’t think of my blog as a business development tool or a way to attract or retain clients, I am a lawyer. I know that readers have certain expectations from lawyers: we are expected to be able to write coherent sentences, to have a strong grasp of grammar and usage, and to be presentable at all times.

Blogging is immediate and informal in the way that other communication technologies aren’t, but that doesn’t mean that readers judge you any differently. If I blog about anything, it had better be as well written as any professional writing I do. 

In many ways that’s a big challenge for me: I’m often impatient and just want to hit “send” without revising the draft eight times. But my product is always better if I give it a break of a day or two and then come back and re-write the entry. I suspect that my regular readers can tell the difference when I do that and when I don’t.

You encourage people to ask, “every day, in every task, is my work the best it can be?” Does that apply just to work product, or to blogs as well?

When I was in high school, one of my teachers had a poster in her classroom that read, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

For me, that applies to everything. The “best it can be” often depends on the time and resources available, so I don’t think of it as an unattainable standard.

Sometimes, I do in fact have to do something over because I got it wrong. But I still do hold myself to a high standard, for the blog and for everything else.

Consider the attorney who isn’t a terrific writer. Can he or she take advantage of new social networking tools? How?

Try Twitter: it doesn’t require the ability to write an essay. It does require other skills: immediacy, brevity, clarity, focus.

A good Twitterer doesn’t talk too much, but talks enough that he or she develops a following.

I think it will be really interesting to see how people are using Twitter next year. In the meantime, I’m having fun with it.

If so few attorneys have them, what leads you to write that blogs are “must-haves rather than novelties?”

Look at recent history. Or even not-so-recent history. When communication paradigms shift, business, social structures, and laws shift.

I remember it quite clearly — about ten years ago, an older partner in our firm confidently announced that no one would ever hire a lawyer based on a website; that may still be true, but I doubt any serious client would hire a lawyer who didn’t have a website.

I think the same shift is happening now. It is not so much the case that blogs are the paradigm shift, but blogs and the Internet are changing the way news is reported, and how our clients communicate and business gets done.

Lawyers must understand how blogs, Twitter, and social networks work, and there is no better way to do that than to experiment with them and experience the medium. 

When it comes to social networking — Twittering, blogging, etc. — what should new associates be doing, and why? What should senior partners be doing?

Young attorneys should be very, very careful about what they post, in every forum — from emails to Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter to whatever.

Actually, everybody should be careful, but it is hard to appreciate how something can come back to bite you until you’ve experienced that sort of communication failure a few times. There is no substitute for experience.

Senior partners? If they are planning to wind up their practice in the next few years, it probably isn’t important to them. But for anyone who is still competing for new business clients, I think it is very useful — at the least — to follow a few bloggers just to keep up with the language, pace, and pattern of communication.

Even older lawyers can learn new things!

What do you see for the future of attorneys and their “on-line presence?”

More and more often, when talking to a new client or potential new client, I encourage them to google me to get to know my expertise, rather than directing them to my firm’s website. They probably will anyway. Since I find myself acknowledging that fact, I think I’d better be aware of what people find when they google me. This will be more and more often true for everyone in the profession.

Conversely, a lawyer whose name turns up few hits from a search engine other than her firm webpage is going to look pretty unremarkable to many clients. There are probably exceptions to that — some clients may want a lawyer who is not known to the world. But that’s the exception, I think, not the rule. 

You’re sharing a cup of coffee with some newly minted attorney. Talk turns to blawgs, and she tells you she’s thinking of starting a blawg. What’s your advice?

First, find out who else is writing in the area you like. It helps a great deal to have a very specific focus and to know who else is writing about the same topic.

Second, choose something you are passionate about. It doesn’t have to be about a legal subject, but it does have to be something you care about, or you won’t stick with it.

Third, write every entry as if it will be read by all of your clients, all of the associates and partners in your firm, and your parents. Probably very few of them will read it, but every word needs to stand up to that standard. 

Finally, be joyful about it. Have fun. If you do what you love, you’ll love what you do.

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I’m going to make a prediction: Leadership and Women Lawyers is going to attract an audience, and it’s going to be around for a good while. I say that because Cynthia not only enjoys writing for her blog, she’s good at it. That’s a great combination.