Set in Style

I recently asked John Gillies, the director of practice support at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, for his thoughts on lawyers, how they write what they write, and what attorneys — especially the least experienced among them — can do to improve their writing skills.

If you’re a young associate, listen up. John’s been at it for a while, and he’s got style.

Tell us a bit about the work you do.

The primary focus of the work that my colleague and I do is to help lawyers practice more effectively and efficiently by finding ways to eliminate the barriers that prevent them from doing that. So, while a part of our work involves traditional knowledge management (KM), it’s broader than that. (Our concept of “practice support” is, therefore, quite different from how that term is used in U.S. firms, where I believe the term is used more in connection with practice group support at the tactical and logistical level.)

Our KM activities have, until recently, focused on two primary activities: developing precedent banks and creating repositories of annotated lawyer work product. (There is often an expertise location aspect to KM activities as well.)

The major drawback to this approach, in my view, is that it focuses on a just-in-case model of content delivery, where time and effort are devoted to capturing content without knowing exactly who might use it or under what circumstances, as well as how valuable it might be to the ultimate user.

While there is still a role for these traditional activities, our focus has been much more on trying to address the obstacles that lawyers actually face in getting their work done effectively and efficiently.

The first thing I did when I arrived at my firm was to hold focus group meetings with a large number of lawyers, paralegals, students, and assistants to ask them what those obstacles might be. (We ended up talking to about one third of the lawyers at the firm.) From their responses, we developed a practice support strategy, aligned with the firm’s strategic plan (obviously!), to address the priority items we discovered from that process.

Given the rise of social media, will writing skills be more or less important in the future?

On the one hand, I would like to be optimistic and think that the proliferation of writers, particularly on the Internet, means that readers have greater exposure to a wider variety of articles. The quality of that writing is going to vary from excellent to execrable. That should mean that high quality writing can distinguish itself more easily from the dross. So, assuming that readers will tend to migrate to well written content, that might imply that the good will tend to drive out the bad.

On the other hand, if I’m pessimistic, then we’re actually moving towards a “twitterization” of communication, so that what is valued most is brevity. It’s almost impossible to demonstrate your superior writing skills if you’re limited to 140 characters. If that’s the case, then readers won’t be able to distinguish the good from the bad because it will all look the same.

Having said that, I know from experience that there are always those for whom good writing and proper use of grammar is important; for them, the bad stuff is an immediate turn-off. (I know; I’m one of them.)

I would like to think that discerning readers will tend to be more highly concentrated among decision-makers, so the investment in good writing that impresses them can potentially pay dividends.

Having said that, I must acknowledge that I have absolutely no scientific basis to back up my speculation.

Law firms, especially the larger ones, function as publishers. Why do so few firms have editors?

For starters, lawyers (and the firms they work in) tend not to see the business development benefits of writing for a non-legal audience. Even the business development benefits of traditional personal marketing (such as joining the Lions Club) are hard to quantify. So a perhaps unstated question is, what’s the payoff for my doing this sort of writing?

As well, most non-professional writers (not just lawyers) can be extremely prickly about suggested editorial changes to their drafting, perhaps because of insecurity about the quality of their writing.

So, if the payoff for writing for a non-legal audience is far from obvious and the clearest result of hiring an editor would be that you’re being told that your writing isn’t good enough, why would you choose to add another person to the payroll (in other words, the editor) to perform that role?

Why are so many lawyers such bland writers?

I should clarify that, while there may indeed be bland writers amongst lawyers writing for a general audience, there are a good number of very accomplished writers who write for a legal audience.

From the first day of law school, the focus of one’s career is, in fact, on legal writing, which is clearly a different beast from “normal” writing. The audience for legal writing is other lawyers, whose writing (not surprisingly) is in a similar style.

So, just as different magazines (like The New Yorker or The Economist) have their own house style, lawyers too have developed a house style, except our “house” extends to all lawyers who have ever existed (“together with all those who may from time, now or in the future, exist, including without limiting the generality of the foregoing,…”).

When those same writers turn to writing for a non-legal audience, though, it becomes more difficult to turn off the house style. As well, it is easier to write about legal issues using the same intellectual framework and language that you use to analyze those issues.

Finally, as any good novelist or non-fiction writer will attest, good writing is just plain hard work. Since there are no clear incentives to writing for the non-legal market, it’s hard to justify spending the time going through numerous drafts to arrive at something that reads well for that market, particularly if you don’t do it on a regular basis.

What can a lawyer do (what should a lawyer do) to further develop his or her writing skills?

There are several possible steps. It’s most important to realize that writing for the general public is fundamentally different from writing for an audience of lawyers. In other words, the style and approach of writing a legal update is nothing like what is needed when drafting a contract, a litigation document, or a law journal article. To help get there, it’s very useful to read and analyze business-related articles in leading publications that cater to an educated readership (such as The New York Times or The Economist).

It will be very quickly apparent that the authors for those sorts of publications don’t do all sorts of things that lawyers are used to doing in their legal updates, such as using case citations, having large numbers of Capitalized Terms for even the Most Obvious Things, or using convoluted language. Those authors take pains to make their points clearly, concisely, and logically.

Next, I would recommend reading good quality content of any type that interests you. If you like novels, then read good novels. If your preference is more for non-fiction, then read good-quality biographies or histories, or periodicals such as The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly. Pay particular attention to especially well written passages; take some time to analyze what makes them work.

Finally, there are books that can help guide you, and several legal drafting blogs, like Ken Adams’s Adams Drafting, and Ben Oppipari’s Literary Legs.

What about law schools? What could they do to better equip their students for the real world?

Their focus is on an academic discipline, to turn out law profs, and only incidentally to graduate people who choose to practice law.

I’m not sure most law schools are interested in developing writing skills so their graduates will communicate clearly. (Indeed, if you took a cross-section of academic writing generally, I don’t think you’d conclude that academics strive for clarity and comprehension in their writing!)

You say many lawyers are insecure about their writing skills. How does that affect their work?

Most people enjoy working at developing the skills they are strong at and tend to avoid what challenges them and makes them feel inadequate. Writing good, “pure” legal content (such as contracts or pleadings) is something on which we focus a huge portion of our energies. But good writing is hard work. And, as I said, writing for a non-legal audience is significantly different from legal writing.

Particularly with so many other needs pressing on their time, it’s a tall order to ask lawyers to devote time to doing something that many know they don’t do well.

Does it do a lawyer any good to write a client alert or an article for a newsletter? Does anyone really read that stuff?

Absolutely! It’s valuable to write for a non-legal audience, for at least three reasons. First, writing for that audience forces you to understand your content well enough that you can explain it to someone who doesn’t have your legal background. Ironically, it can end up making you more knowledgeable about your subject matter.

Second, the skills that you develop in improving your writing for this audience will necessarily transfer over to your legal drafting. The goal in both cases is to make your writing clear and understandable.

Third, and this addresses your second question, surprisingly, people do actually read this stuff. The increasing reliance on Internet search to find relevant content means that the potential scope for your item is much broader than in the “old days,” when print was the only way to reach your audience. Plus, as I’ve said elsewhere, while clients and potential clients are unable to judge the substantive quality of the legal documents that we produce, they can judge how well we write the articles addressed to them. So, your good writing gives potential clients a good reason to choose you over someone else.

I think that it’s very easy for lawyers to get trapped by their legal writing, which they generally do very well, and end up writing everything as if it were for a legal audience. In a sense, those writers assume a very high level of understanding and analysis on the part of the reader, but it’s often over the heads of the general audience, who have not generally gone to law school.

You said earlier that good writing is hard work. What do you mean?

If you read interviews with people who write for a living, they almost all say that good writing is hard work. They will devote hours to ensuring that they have chosen the right words, put together the best way they can, to bring to life some sort of a picture in words.

Certainly there are some exceptions, but as a rule, particularly if one accepts the premise (described most recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers) that it takes at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to develop expertise, most lawyers have not been able to devote that amount time to this activity. That shouldn’t stop you from trying, though, but you need to recognize that skillful writing does not simply come from writing a few legal updates.

What’s your advice to those now entering the profession? Should they be blogging to increase their visibility, or are they better off working the more traditional business development avenues?

I wouldn’t start a legal blog if I were just starting to practice law. I think a legal blog should pick a niche and focus on providing useful information to people who are interested in the topic and then engaging readers. When you’re starting out, you won’t know enough about a particular niche to speak about it with confidence and authority.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to wait years before you start writing. On the contrary, you should seize every opportunity that presents itself to write for a general audience (and create as many additional opportunities as you can). Hone your craft while your writing is still under the radar, as it were. Then as your technical legal skills have developed to the point where you can start blogging about your particular passion, you will be much further along in your writing abilities.

The two most important things, though, are to write in a way so that readers will want to come back, and to engage with your readers. (Kevin O’Keefe has written a lot about engaging with your blog readers.)

Fundamentally, you are doing the same thing if, say, you join the Lions Club: meeting with people, finding out what they’re interested in, and doing what you can to give them some general advice that they might find helpful. You need, of course, to respect the rules of professional conduct that govern communications by lawyers and, if you’re with a firm, whatever your firm’s social media policies are. But all the successful legal bloggers are able to do that.

What you will find is that, over the long term, your blog will serve as your own personal knowledge management repository. Doug Cornelius, who runs the KM Space and Compliance Building blogs, has written about how his first blog was simply a way to catalogue his own thoughts and content. It grew from there. That’s an important aspect that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Not everyone is cut out to write, though. But I think that those gregarious individuals who feel compelled to reach out to others will see blogging as an ideal medium to do just that.

So, do you have a blog?

Ha, I’ve been caught out! “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Despite what I believe, I have fallen prey to what is probably the most common excuse, namely, “I don’t have the time.” Not that other bloggers, like Mary Abraham and you haven’t encouraged me to start. Let’s just say that it’s something that I plan to do.

Any last words of advice?

Sure: focus on writing well every day, and the benefits will start to become more and more obvious to you. And good luck!

Note: this our last in the series on setting logotype — how to set your firm’s logotype so it displays properly on line, on all devices under all conditions. But don’t fret. We’ve got another series coming up on setting display type on line.

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In our last installment on setting logotype, (Setting Logotype — Part II), we examined why logotypes are usually stored as graphics, rather than text.

Now, let’s see how popular viewers (like web browsers) treat graphics and text differently.

Consider the two words below. The one on the left is text; the one on the right is a graphic (of the one on the left).

One

Zoom way in one this page. As you do, note how the text continues to have smooth edges, but the graphic starts to have rough and fuzzy edges.

Zoom way out of this page. As you do, you can notice the graphic takes on a better appearance than the text; i.e., it has smoother edges than the text.

And the point of all this zooming in and out?

It’s just so you can appreciate my secret recipe for setting good looking logotype, and here it is:

Set your logotype four times larger than it will appear on-screen, and then have the browser shrink it down to size.

That way, it will look it’s best on the greatest number of devices (desktops, laptops, BlackBerries, iPods, iPads, and who knows what’s next) under the greatest range of conditions.

That’s it.

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Oh . . . one more thing — consider large, well known companies, outfits like Coke and Apple and Ford. Look at examples of their logos and logotypes, which appear in many more places than those of law firms. Notice the consistency, and the quality wherever they appear.

There’s a reason for that — big, successful companies really care about how they appear, and for good reason.

If you want to be set in style, your logotype must appear professional. You should be sure it is, especially if you want to seem as one who takes pride in your work.

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Now . . . that’s it! (Unless someone asks “Which graphics format do you use to store the logotype? GIF? PNG? JPEG?”)

In our last installment on logotype, (Setting Logotype — Part I), we noted that logotypes are typically stored as images, rather than as text. Because of that, font smoothing — the process used to make type look good at all sizes — can’t be applied to logotype.

Now we ask, “Why?” Why store logotypes as images rather than as text?

Well . . . there’s a darned good reason for that, and we’ll get right to it.

Previously, we saw this lousy looking logotype from Venable:

Now we’re going to create a good looking version of Venable’s logotype:

In the process, we’ll discover why we can’t store logotypes as text (yet).

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Let’s get started.

To begin, Venable’s logotype is set in Times Roman, in a text style known as caps and small caps.

So, we start by setting the logotype that way:
.

VENABLE

Next, we stretch the type vertically by 50%:

Then, we adjust the spacing between the characters:

Finally, we add the trademark symbol and the LLP:

So, there’s our logotype set to spec.

Why not use the logotype as set. Why store it as an image?

Because we want a browser to display the logotype at the firm’s web site, but browsers — unlike typesetting programs — can’t do all the things we did to set the logotype as text. (Though they will be able to do such things in the near future.)

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Now, zoom way in on this page. As you do, note that the one instance of Venable set as text is the only one that remains nice and smooth at any level of zoom. All the others, being images that can’t be smoothed, look fuzzier and fuzzier the more you zoom in on them.

In our next and final episode, we’ll see what we can do to improve the quality of the logotype at all levels of zoom.