Set in Style

You’re an attorney and you just finished writing a client alert for your firm.

Now, all that’s left to do is to send it to marketing, right?

Wrong!

That’s your work, with your name on it. So, you want to make sure it looks right after it’s published.

You sent the marketing department a Micrsoft Word file, but that’s not what was published. The folks in marketing did a few things to the alert in production. They may have altered it in some way. It happens.

If you want to make sure that what clients and potential clients see is what you suppose they see, review the published alert.

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Anything you put your name to can form a potential client’s (or prospective employer’s) first impression of YOU.

So, take a few minutes to make sure the impression will be favorable.

Some things can be measured, and some can’t. When it comes to law firm marketing activities and their costs, ROI can be measured in some cases, but not in others.

At least, that’s my opinion of it.

Years ago, when I was writing direct mail pieces, I measured response, and it made sense: there was a direct correlation between the quantity and the quality of what I mailed, and how many responded.

But now I’m pitching services, and there’s no practical way to measure the value I add in most of what I do. And that makes my job (of selling services, not of providing them) more difficult.

I can’t tell a firm that if I get $15,000 to revise the copy for the firm’s web site, then the firm can expect $150,000 in new business in a year. There is a correlation (at least, that’s what I believe) between that copy and the firm’s business, and it’s direct, but its coefficient is indeterminate. That, plus it’s just part of a much larger effort.

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Still, we may as well take certain measurements of progress, and the very end of the year is as good a time as any.

Here’s what you do: review the activity logs for your firm’s web site. Does the site get more traffic now than last year? Less?

Review the site’s News or Events section. Does the next upcoming event occur three months ago? Is the latest news nearly a year old?

Then look at the site’s error logs. Has the site been generating hundreds of errors a day, or just a few?

And ask Whois for the site’s stats:

1. Enter the URL for the site in the Whois Lookup field, and hit return.
2. When the Whois Record appears, click the Site Profile tab.
3. Scroll down to see the site’s Alexa rank.
4. Note the number of visitors the site gets per month.
5. Compare that to some other sites, like the sites of other law firms.
6. Click the Complete Rank number (#488,216 in the image below), and look at the site’s rank over time.

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Now, if you’re selling legal services and you want prospective clients to notice, then the more popular your site is, the better off you are.

And the better the site (including the copy, the graphics, the usability, and so many other aspects of it), the more popular it will become.

I can’t put a number on it, but I’m sure there’s a correlation.

Let’s say you’re a law firm. You have a web site and it has lots of links — hundreds of them — to things your firm has published: client alerts, newsletters, bylined articles, etc.

A key reason you publish these things (and provide links to them) is so people (esp. prospective clients) can learn about your attorneys: they can read their bios and what they’ve written.

Now, it’s time for a change. Either you’re redesigning the site, or revising it, or the IT department is changing things in such a way that the links to all these publications is going to change.

There’s a problem: a sizeable one at that. You see, other web sites contain some of those links too, which is good for you: it raises your visibility.

Suppose the National Law Journal (or the Wall Street Journal) mentions (and links to) something you published. Good.

Until the change comes along, that is. Then all the links to everything you’ve published stop working. When a reader clicks a link to your article (mentioned in either Journal, or any link to any of  your articles mentioned anywhere), a page-not-found error is displayed.

So far as readers can tell, the article no longer exists. And that does you no good at all.

This happens at large law firms all the time. All the links to all the firm’s publications get changed for a web site redesign or some IT project, and no one at the firm does a thing about it. The authors of those articles don’t even notice it.

What a waste.

Here’s a good example that shows why law firms need editors. Written by “one of the country’s most well-known art lawyers,” it discusses orphan works, copyrighted works whose owners cannot be found:

In short what the amendment provides if a user can not find the work’s creator and they tweak the work they have cart blanc to use an artist’s work without any fees being paid even when the creating artist identifies themselves they do not even have to stop infringing.

From the same article:

The copyright office sought comments to address this issue they laid out the issue as they saw it as follows (their complete statement can be found in the Federal Register Volume 70, Number 16 or at, http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr3739.html).

Now when you catch an infringer, they know they are caught, have exposure and they will generally negotiate a settlement, if this amendment becomes law you can be sure every infringer caught will claim the work they copied had no name on it so it is an “Orphan Work” so they are not liable. Instead of coming to a compromise it will be “so sue me.”

While we strongly encourage registering you copyright for many reasons having a registration might be of little help if your name has been removed by the infringer (or earlier) because you can not search the copyright office for images.

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The potential client who reads that will undoubtedly doubt the firm’s claim to a commitment to excellence.

An editor can help make sure that everything the firm publishes supports the claim.

Here’s a portion of something published by a law firm. What’s wrong with it?

If you work for a publisher, the problem is obvious. If you work for a law firm, the problem is (most likely) a mystery.

The problem, in this case, is all-too-common among those who don’t know publishing, and it is this: the lack of space between the text and the image.

There should be at least one pica of white space between the text and the image, like so:

Why? What’s a pica?

You needn’t concern yourself with why. Not that it’s not important, but you’re busy; you don’t have the time to learn about layout and design.

Rather than spending your time learning 1000 whys, just imitate the pros.

“An actor playing an attorney doesn’t go to law school to learn his part. No, he just sits in a courtroom and observes how real-life attorneys do whatever they do. Then he imitates them.”

So, how to imitate professional publishers (as an actor imitates attorneys)? By going to the bookstore or the magazine rack, seeing what they do, and then doing the same.

Go ahead; grab a magazine from the rack and look at the pictures in it. What you’ll find is white space between images and text.

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Here’s some advice from a skilled and experienced editor: the next time you publish something on behalf of your firm, imitate the pros if you want it to look professional.

Here’s what I find surprising — a large law firm claims excellence in all it does, but there’s a typo, or a misspelling, or a grammatical or logical error in the first line of type on the home page of the firm’s Web site. And it stays there for quite some time, as if no one at the firm looks at the home page, or cares much about errors.

Oh well. Perhaps most corporate counselors who hire large law firms don’t really care if those firms are sincere about their commitment to excellence.

Perhaps I’m more fussy than most, but I won’t hire a lawyer who can’t write well (esp. one who doesn’t even try) to write a license agreement or a contract. No way!

And I’m not alone. There must be corporate counselors out there who are just as fussy as I. There must be those who are not willing to spend $600 per man-hour for attorneys who makes too many obvious errors.

If you want to impress fussy corporate counselors, you need to dot all your eyes and cross all your teas, or they’ll notice, and that’s because they look for small details, the way drill instructors do.

“Does this firm really pay attention to detail? If it does, its Web site won’t say it doesn’t.”
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If you are sincere in your commitment to excellence, then, in addition to the regular attention you pay to detail day in, day out, you’ll find an annual review of your firm’s publishing effort’s central nervous system — your firm’s Web site — worthwhile.

Here’s what I recommend. Each year, check the following:

1. Activity and Error Reports — These reports help you see what visitors are looking at, and what they’re not; they also show what visitors are trying to see, but can’t.
2. Content of Top-level Pages — If it’s been a year since anyone at the firm has read this material, it’s time to review it again, especially for timeliness.
3. Date-sensitive Content — Does the site say your next event happened six months ago? To visitors, that says you’re not on top of things.
4. The Site’s Popularity — Does the site have a better Alexa ranking than last year?
5. The Site’s Functionality — How does the site look on a BlackBerry or iPhone?

This article discusses my recommendations in greater detail.

I’m reviewing the activity log for Set in Style.

I’m surprised to find that a two-year-old post got lots of hits yesterday. I wonder why.

I review the old post, which is about not wasting readers’ time — it’s good advice for attorneys who tend to use far more words than necessary.

The old post contains this link to a client alert published by O’Melveny & Myers LLP, but the link is outdated and no longer works. Click it, and you’re presented with this fruitless message:

The page you requested was not found. Please check the URL path and try again.

Well, you can check the URL all day if you like, but it won’t help you find what you want.

The problem?

The firm revised its Web site last year, but a piece of engineering was left undone.

(more…)

The big news is how someone at the Transportation Safety Administration published the entire contents of a confidential security manual (supposedly redacted), and how a blogger spotted the error.

Here are instructions from Adobe Systems on how to redact (permanently erase) text and images from a PDF file.

Your car isn’t acting quite right and you need a mechanic.

So . . . you describe what’s wrong with the car to two mechanics, and they speculate like so:

Mechanic #1:

“The polarized input capacitor of the voltage regulator might be allowing too much variation in potential, and that’s causing the negative feedback servo control loop to malfunction.”

Mechanic #2:

“It’s either the alternator, the regulator, or the battery gone bad.”

Now . . . which mechanic gets to work on your car?

If you’re like most, you’ll choose the one you can understand.

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Consider the following copy*, the opening paragraph to a short article describing a recent court ruling:

On November 10, 2009, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District ruled that any maintenance due a former spouse as part of a divorce decree terminates upon the remarriage of the party receiving the payments so long as there is no express agreement otherwise. The Court went on to hold that the use of the word “only” was insufficient to show this express agreement. See the opinion here.

That was published by an attorney “dedicated to helping victims of personal injuries and representation of individuals facing divorce and/or child custody disputes including child support, spousal support/alimony, paternity claims, adoptions, and other domestic issues.”

But it works against the attorney, a solo who helps people with the legal aspects of divorce. And that’s because it’s so danged formal and long-winded.

Who would you rather call if you needed a divorce lawyer — an attorney “dedicated to helping victims of personal injuries and people dealing with divorce, child support, alimony, adoptions, and other domestic issues,” or the one who wrote the intro above?

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If you’re an attorney and you want to tell prospective clients about some court ruling that affects them, use their lingo, like so:

An appeals court in Missouri ruled that a husband doesn’t need to pay maintenance (alimony) to his former wife after she remarries even though the divorce decree says he does.

The intro to a story shouldn’t weigh readers down with details, the way the intro to a brief does. It shouldn’t contain lots of facts. All it should do is this: encourage the reader to continue reading.

If you’re writing to a very broad audience (e.g., middle-income people who might need a divorce lawyer), don’t be so formal. You’re not writing a brief, and your audience doesn’t know the law.

Before you start writing, imagine a mechanic, or a doctor, or anyone who might need a divorce lawyer.

Write for that person, not a judge.

Write in such a way that each paragraph encourages readers to continue reading.

Unlike a brief, nobody has to read your story, and if it’s not interesting, they won’t.

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* That copy was revised shortly after I posted this.

I’m reviewing a cover letter to a proposal. The 24-page proposal is from a law firm that wants to offer legal services to an insurance company. The 650-word cover letter was drafted by an attorney who worked on the proposal.

It’s awful (the cover letter) — two pages of hype that belongs in a brochure. In a cover letter, it sounds insincere and phony. And those are not the adjectives that describe the cover letter of a winning proposal.

My job is easy. All I have to do is call the firm’s marketing director, and say this:

Why don’t we use the cover letter we used on the last three proposals. Each of those proposals turned out to be winners, so why not follow a proven path?

Then he gets to talk to the attorney. If he can persuade her to use the proven cover letter, great! I can get it ret and set in no time. If he can’t, . . . .

Here’s my advice to an attorney writing a cover letter to a proposal: Keep it short. It’s not a brief. It should consist of nothing more than the following:

1. Attached is the proposal you requested;
2. Please call me if you have any questions/concerns about the proposal;
3. I look forward to being of service to your organization.

That’s it. Anything more than 250 words is — in most cases — too much.

And listen to your marketing director. You’ve got your talents, and he’s got his.