Set in Style

There’s this attorney from China and he’s flying to San Francisco, hoping to start a good relationship. He works for a large telecommunications company that’s planning its first venture in the U.S., and he’s looking for a law firm to provide guidance in several regulatory matters.

He’s several hours into the flight when he takes this article out of his briefcase. He’s going to meet the author, an attorney at a law firm in San Francisco that also has an office in Beijing; the article should be great background.

Take a look at the article (it’s a PDF file). If you’re pressed for time, just read the first line.

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Our flying attorney begins reading the article, which offers advice to Chinese firms doing business in the U.S. But as soon as he starts, he stops. He wonders, what is repaid economic growth? What is that?

As he reads the article, his generally favorable impression of the author — formed during a phone call a week earlier — starts to fade. There are so many careless errors. The author didn’t mean repaid economic growth; he meant rapid economic growth. He wrote about Ebay, but he meant eBay. He quoted a figure of $750,000,000, rather than the correct figure: $175,000,000.

This is the flying attorney’s second impression of the author, and it’s not a good one. He wonders, who would write something like this?

What sort of law firm would publish this?

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The effect of the article is the opposite of what was intended, which was to attract a potential client, a large Chinese company entering the U.S. market.

The IP attorney who put his name to this article couldn’t have meant for it to be published as is, not with that typo in the very first sentence, not with a trademark set incorrectly, not with so many careless errors in grammar.

This article does more harm than good. Rather than attract business, it portrays the firm — prominently identified as the publisher — as one that doesn’t pay attention to its associates’ work.

It’s the sort of firm that lets a half-billion dollar error go unnoticed!

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Had there been an editor between the attorney and the printing press, this would not have happened. Instead the article would have been transformed into this revised article.

The author would have looked good, the firm would have looked good, and the meeting that had been planned would not have been cancelled.

Note: Click here for a Microsoft Word document that shows exactly which changes I made to the article.

Here’s the disclaimer you need to accept to enter Morrison & Foerster’s Privacy Library:

Note that two graphic images that belong in the right sidebar aren’t where they belong. They’re obscuring part of the disclaimer.

Now, here’s how that same disclaimer looks to the people at Morrison & Foerster:

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At most firms, all the attorneys and all the administrators and all the staff use the same computers running the same operating system and the same Internet browser. Everything looks the same to them.

But visitors who might want to access the library aren’t all using the same hardware and software as the folks at MoFo. They’re using a newer version of the operating system. They’re using different browsers. They’re using Macs, or iPhones, or BlackBerries.

And they’re finding some things at MoFo’s site are out of whack.

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What to do?

When you create or revise a Web site, you could go and test it with all sorts of different combinations of device, operating system, and browser. But that wouldn’t be terribly efficient. Nor would it guarantee that the site will continue to appear correctly to those who start using a new device or operating system or browser.

Here’s what to do when you publish a site, or whenever you revise it:

Validate It.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a Markup Validation Service you can use to make sure your site produces valid output. In other words, you can use it to make sure your site looks OK to all the rest of the world.

Just feed the URL of your site to the validator (it’s free) and see if there are any errors. If there are, fix them.

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Note: At the time this was posted, the validator reported 40 errors at MoFo’s Privacy Library, including a variety of margin errors.

More interesting reading from Mark Hermann – Blogging About Blogging:

Zach Lowe, over at AmLawDaily, did the kind of thing that reporters do: He called the managing partners of the high profits-per-partner firms and asked why they didn’t sponsor blogs. Jonathan Schiller, managing partner of Boies Schiller, was blunt:“I think the lawyers here are just too busy,” he says. “I’m too old to blog. I’d rather play golf if I have a bit of free time.”

It’s a shame that Zach didn’t ask the follow-up question: Does that go for all business development efforts, or just for blogging?

That is: “Jonathan, you’ve been solicited to write a by-lined piece in the Wall Street Journal. Do you accept, or shall we tell the Journal that you’d rather golf than write?” Or: “Jonathan, you’ve been invited to give the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel on Saturday morning. Do you accept, or will you be keeping your tee time?”

Debra Bruce, president of Lawyer-Coach, offers some sound advice for recently laid-off attorneys: write!

Write, she says, “an article on a legal topic you are interested in” — not for some law review — but for “industry magazines, legal newspapers, business journals and online publications.”

Regarding popular publications:

They need new articles every month or even more frequently, and most don’t require blue book citation. Many employers are more likely to read articles in such publications than in law reviews.

According to Bruce, writing an article is an opportunity to contact some potential employer — not to ask for a job — but to ask for a quote for the article.

Here’s a related article (A Formula for Shy Attorneys) that gives attorney-authors some tips on how to use their writing skills to advance their careers.

Current events — that’s what people are interested in. And the news that California is, once again, issuing IOUs in place of checks means it’s high time for a law firm to issue a client alert about registered warrants.

Consider the intro to this client alert:

The State of California normally pays its obligations with regular warrants issued by the State Controller’s office, which are akin to checks and are payable on presentment to the State Treasurer’s office.

There’s a problem. The relative clause (after the comma) is supposed to modify “regular warrants,” but the author put it in the wrong place. Where he put it, it modifies “the State Controller’s office.”

This is an example of the misplaced modifier.

Note: In the hands of an attorney drafting an important contract, such an error can bring disaster.

Had an editor touched it, the intro might have turned out like so:

The State of California normally pays its obligations with regular warrants issued by the State Controller’s office. These warrants are akin to checks and are payable on presentment to the State Treasurer’s office.

Had that editor the freedom to make the author look good (to busy readers who value their time and who don’t like attorneys to waste it), it might have turned out like this:

The State of California normally pays its obligations with regular warrants, which are like checks.

Lawyers in Scranton, PA might want to steer clear of Scranton Lawyers, a new site that looks like the precursor of a referral service for Scranton lawyers.

This recent post indicates why:

Consider a recent attorney-authored article titled “Judgments for Defendants Continue in Stock Drop Cases”

Here’s the intro:

In June, the Northern District of Illinois issued two decisions dismissing employer stock drop claims in favor of defendants, one after an eight-day bench trial in Brieger v. Tellabs, Inc., 2009 WL 1565203 (N.D. Ill. June 1, 2009), and the other on summary judgment in Lingis v. Motorola, Inc., 2009 WL 1708097 (N.D. Ill. June 17, 2009). Both decisions continue the trend of judgment for defendants when stock drop claims are decided on the merits. 

If there’s nothing wrong with that intro,
what could be done to improve it?

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To improve the intro, you could:

• Hyphenate stock drop.
• Offer links to the decisions.
• Drop the Westlaw citations.

Here’s the result:

In June, the Northern District of Illinois issued two decisions dismissing employer stock-drop claims in favor of defendants, one after an eight-day bench trial in Brieger v. Tellabs, Inc., and the other on summary judgment in Lingis v. Motorola, Inc. Both decisions continue the trend of judgment for defendants when stock-drop claims are decided on the merits.

Hyphenate phrasal adjectives

The first change is a small aid to readers — it’s a convention to make the author’s meaning crystal clear.

The audience for this piece isn’t going to wonder whether the author was writing about employer-stock drop claims or employer stock-drop claims or employer stock drop-claims. Still, it’s best to use the convention regularly. Doing so helps portray the writer as one who pays close attention to detail.

Serve Your Readers

Offering links to the decisions has benefits. It shortens the whole thing, so readers have less to read (and if they’re busy, they like that). And it lets them access the decisions right away — without having to Copy & Paste a Westlaw number.

In addition, it portrays the firm (the publisher) as a master of common technology.

Look Sharp!

Given the links, why bother with Westlaw?

Don’t produce a PDF just like a memo printed on paper. Use the features that PDF offers.

Use the opportunity to demonstrate that your firm understands technology, and uses it well.

You’re a corporate counselor and you’re doing some research. Along the way, you read an abstract of a client alert (published by a firm you’ve been thinking of contacting) that seems very pertinent.

You click the link to the alert, and then you get a message saying something like this:

Your time has been wasted, and your first impression of the firm isn’t the best (though it might be the last).

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Revising a Web site is one thing — you need to be able to associate old documents and their original links. If you’re trying to impress potential clients, you can’t ask them to hunt for something you hid.

And if you’re not revising your site, you need to be aware that — as links change over time (Entropy of the Internet) — there’s something you can do to find the ones that are no longer working. It’s called trolling for errors.

It’s regular maintenance.

Your firm’s site has an access log listing those who visited the site, and when, and what they accessed. It also has an error log that keeps track of errors (including those generated by hacksters trying to pry into the site).

Review the error log regularly. Look for broken links, and beware of making errors that could leave visitors (esp. potential clients) with a bad frist first impression.

If your firm pays close attention to detail, don’t let its Web site say otherwise. Track the site’s errors, keep them to a minimum, and be prepared to respond to any unusual activity.