Providing Happiness to an Attorney
What I sometimes do is this — I spot an error, and then I bring it to the author’s attention.
Sometimes, the author appreciates it and even offers me $$$ to spot further errors so others (esp. prospective clients and future employers) never see them.
Sometimes, the author ‘cops an attitude’ and asks me who the heck I think I am.
I’m amazed when it occurs, but every blue moon, or so, an author responds with an X-rated diatribe (e.g., “How dare you use my work to promote your business, you lousy ^&&(#%#@&!”)
Sometimes, I use an error as the topic of a post. As I’ve explained over and over, I attribute the error to the author. (And, as you can imagine, I never use a client’s error as the topic of a post, because my clients are right smart — they have an editor who gets rid of any errors; so, prospective clients and future employers have no chance of seeing them.)
Why identify the author (and/or publisher)?
Well . . . in some cases, I’d have to do a lot of work to replicate the error. Consider, if you will, this annual report published by Weil Gotshal. It suffers a notable production error, which is that people can’t print the darned thing.
Now . . . I could recreate that annual report to illustrate the error (and leave Weil Gotshal out of it), but then readers would be left wondering, “Why is this guy making up these errors and then explaining how to correct them? That’s nuts!”
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Yesterday, an attorney — the author of an error I discussed in a post last month — discovered that that post appeared on the first page of results of a Google search of his name. This isn’t good, since he’s job hunting just now and fears a prospective employer will be alarmed by his poor mastery of English grammar.
He asked, “Can you please edit your post to eliminate reference to me or my blog? Not sure that would ‘fix’ the Google issue at this point, but it would make me happy.”
I’m happy to oblige. The post is gone.
