Set in Style

Consider the beginning of this press release:

EpsteinBeckerGreen Ranked Among Top Firms for Diversity by MultiCultural Law Magazine

7/22/2010

NEW YORK (July 22, 2010) – National law firm EpsteinBeckerGreen is pleased to announce that the Firm has been ranked among the leading law firms for diversity by MultiCultural Law magazine.

EpsteinBeckerGreen ranked 3^rd in the magazine’s listing for the “Top 50 Law Firms for Partners” and ranked 6^th in its “Top 25 Law Firms for African-Americans” listing. The Firm also ranked 21^st in its “Top 100 Law Firms for Women” listing.

“Our Firm is committed to maintaining a diverse workforce and fostering a work culture that promotes diversity in which our attorneys and staff members can develop to their fullest potential,” said Douglas Hastings, Chair of the Board of Directors and a Member of the Firm’s Health Care and Life Sciences practice in the Washington, D.C. office.

The reader’s eye is drawn to the second paragraph because of the greater spacing between the lines than in the surrounding paragraphs. The extra spacing is due to the use of superscripts in the ordinals (e.g., 3^rd).

Is there a better way of presenting the information?

Let’s see:

EpsteinBeckerGreen Ranked Among Top Firms for Diversity by MultiCultural Law Magazine

NEW YORK (July 22, 2010) – National law firm EpsteinBeckerGreen is pleased to announce it has been ranked among the leading law firms for diversity by MultiCultural Law magazine.

EpsteinBeckerGreen ranked:

#3 in “Top 50 Law Firms for Partners”
#6 in “Top 25 Law Firms for African-Americans”
#21 in “Top 100 Law Firms for Women”

“Our Firm is committed to maintaining a diverse workforce and fostering a work culture that promotes diversity in which our attorneys and staff members can develop to their fullest potential,” said Douglas Hastings, Chair of the Board of Directors and a Member of the Firm’s Health Care and Life Sciences practice in the Washington, D.C. office.

The advantage?

There are several:

1. It’s easier for readers* to parse a list when it is set as a list.
2. Setting this list as a list gives it greater emphasis — it’s likely to be the first thing a reader reads.
3. It looks more professional.

Of Special Note: The latest issue of Multicultural Law magazine was published in Fall of 2008.
Here’s the complete list of the Top 100 Law Firms for 2010; the list was ‘announced’ in May, 2010.

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* It’s a very good thing to serve readers, to make it easier for them to read what you’ve published, especially when you hope to convert those readers from potential clients to the sort that pay.

You’re an attorney, not a typesetter.

You’re concerned with the wording of agreements, briefs, or contracts, not the details of how those words are rendered.

But — if your goal is to persuade — you should be concerned, and that’s because appearance matters: first impressions do too.

Let me say it again — the first impression someone has of what you wrote isn’t what you wrote; it’s the appearance of it.

If you think first impressions are important and good looks are good to have, then take my advice and apply it to whatever you’re producing — a brief or a client alert.

Set Heads in Sans-Serif Type, Like This

Type can be classified as Serif or San-Serif.

Sans-Serif type doesn’t have small strokes at the end of characters.

Serif type does.

Don’t Set Body Copy in Sans-Serif Type

For the sake of your readers, set your heads in Sans-Serif type, and set your copy in Serif type, like this.

Set the Heading of the Table of Contents with One Word

The correct way to set heading of a table of contents is with just one word — Contents

Hyphenate Justified Copy

Go to a book store. Grab a new hardcover book, and look at the copy in it.

I’ll bet you the copy’s justified. In other words, each line of type is the same length.

And it’s hyphenated. Look at the ends of lines along the right margin. Every so often, a line ends with a hyphen that breaks a word in two.

If you want your copy to look as good as can be, set it justified and hyphenated. Concern yourself with the consistency of the spacing between words, and don’t set the lines too wide or narrow.

If you hope to persuade, don’t forget how helpful small courtesies can be.

Put Just One Space after a Period — Not Two

Look at hardcover books, or magazines, or newspapers, or advertisements. Look at textbooks.

What you’ll find is one space, not two, after any type of stop. Using two instead of one now appears old-fashioned.

Use an Indent or Vertical Space to Indicate a New Paragraph — Not Both

You’re still in the book store looking at those hardcover books — the ones vying to be on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Find one that strikes you as especially attractive.

What you’ll find is that the table of contents is set with one word, heads are set in sans-serif type, copy is set in serif type and it’s hyphenated and justified, there’s just one space after a period, and each paragraph begins with an indent OR a space between it and the paragraph above it.

Imitate the Pros

Just go to a book store and see how the pros (those who sell print) do it. And then imitate the ones that look best.

Postscript

If you prefer to hear this from an attorney rather than an editor, visit Matthew Butterick’s  Typography for Lawyers.

If you’re responsible for the content at your firm’s web site, take my advice — do regular maintenance on the site, like it was a car that needed its oil checked every so often.

A web site — a site with lots and lots of content — is the sort of appliance that needs regular maintenance to keep doing it’s thing — attracting potential clients and leaving them with a favorable impression of your firm.

Let’s say a potential client is looking for some information on copyrights, and he discovers this page that looks to have just what he’s looking for.

He clicks this link on the page and gets nothing in return. Ditto when he clicks this link, or this one, or this one.

That’s not good, because this potential client isn’t likely to form a favorable impression of the firm, simply because the firm’s web site isn’t working right.

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Here’s what you should do if you’re responsible for a site with lots of content: establish a regular maintenance schedule that includes a daily, weekly, or monthly review of the site’s error logs.

If you don’t know how to do that, call me.

I can help you prevent potential clients from getting a bad impression of your firm just because everyone’s too busy to keep track of the web site — and that does happen.

You join a new law firm, and a few days later, they arrive: your brand new business cards. You open the box they came in, withdraw one card, and study it. And then you discover an error!

A mild case of excitement becomes a small disappointment.

This is an error that MUST BE FIXED!

You are not going to hand out business cards with your name misspelled. Who would?

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Attorneys should apply the same sort of reasoning to their firms’ web sites — those electronic billboards posted along the information super highway. And every attorney, I say, should examine his bio. An error there could be just as intolerable as an error on a business card.

Note: I am still tracking an attorney whose bio (for the past three years) claims he graduated from Hardvard. What does that say of the attorney?

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There are others who serve attorneys, and one of them should make sure his firm’s web site is working OK.

Here are a few things you (if you’re the one responsible for such things) should do regularly:

Check the site’s activity and error logs at least once a day

How many visitors did the site get yesterday? How does that compare to one year ago? Are the errors significant? Are they brand new, or have they been there forever?

Make sure Google is including the site in search results

Copy a line from something that was recently posted at the site. Ask Google to find it. If it does, fine. If not, you may have a serious problem on your hands. It just might be that someone’s hacked your firm’s web site.

Ouch!

Check the site’s latest content

Did someone just post something he should not have? A former staffer who still has administrative access? An associate who has no idea that you can’t just republish news articles?

Check the site’s oldest content

Are you advertising an event that happened a year ago? Why? Does that make a bit of sense? Oh . . . I see . . . you’re caught up in the SEO craze — publish anything and everything on the assumption that more traffic means better results.

Check other sites for your site’s content

Grab a string from some of your site’s new content and from some of its old content. Do a search on both. Does either string show up on some other web site? Which site, and why? Did you give permission?

There’s much more you can do to make sure your site is working OK, that it’s not been hacked in recent days, that others aren’t appropriating your content without your consent, that Google hasn’t stopped reporting results from your site, etc.

PS: If you don’t have the time or the wherewithal, consider commissioning a Webitor’s Audit of your firm’s site.

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An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
– Benjamin Franklin

Consider this statement from a draft of an article authored by an attorney:

“Business associates” are individuals or entities that provide services for covered entities needing access to protected health information.

What we have here is an example of the misplaced modifier.

The modifier — needing access to protected health information — is supposed to modify business associates, but it’s too far away.

Where it is, it reads like it modifies covered entities.

When things wind up the in wrong place.

If the attorney/author was a stalwart practitioner of due diligence, she’d do what authors typically do: she’d submit her copy to an editor for review before publication.

Had she done that, the statement could have turned out like so:

“Business associates” are individuals who, or entities that, 1) provide services for covered health care providers and 2) need access to protected health information.

Or like this:

“Business associates” are those that 1) provide services to covered entities and 2) need access to protected health information.

Or  this:

“Business associates” provide services to covered entities and need access to protected health information.

Or  this:

“Business associates” are those needing access to protected health information in order to provide services to covered entities.

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An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
– Benjamin Franklin

One of the things I do is respond to emergencies. A newsletter has to go to the printer, or a proposal has to be submitted by the end of the day, and I’m called in to drop everything else to make sure the author or the publisher or both look their best.

I might be asked to edit an issue of a firm’s Federal Circuit Patent Decision Summaries that begins with this intro:

If a defendant, which seeks to defeat jurisdiction, has purposefully directed its activities at a particular forum, it must present a compelling case that the presence of some other considerations would render jurisdiction unreasonable.

I put everything else aside and set to work.

(more…)

Seems as if some law firms are going against the flow.

While companies around the world are following Apple’s lead in making everything simple and easy to use, law firms touting their deep and abiding commitment to excellence are, to some extent, treating their clients like machines rather than people.

When a company (or law firm) really cares about excellence, it shows; and it shows in very many things. If a customer has a question, the company that really cares responds promptly and in suitable style; that is, the answer isn’t just delivered quickly, it makes sense.

And the company that really cares doesn’t confront the layperson with highly technical information.

Here’s an example. If you download the QuickTime 7.2 User’s Guide from Apple.com, you get a file named QuickTime_7.2_User_Guide.pdf.

That makes perfect sense. The file name says the file contains the user guide for version 7.2 of QuickTime. That’s quite a convenience.

Now, download some files your firm’s web site. Download some client alerts, or newsletters, or press releases.

Do they have descriptive names like karvelas-on-US_steel-v-Shell.pdf

or meaningless names like 70c40efd-86ef-4d27-90b5-8d818b15f2fc.pdf?

If the latter, then your firm isn’t really serious about offering superior client service.

And neither are the firm’s leaders.

If they were truly serious about client service, if they had Steve Jobs’ passion for superior service, it would show; it would show in big things, and it would show in the little things*.

As it is, the managers of so many firms are far too busy to really worry about little things.

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* Sure, how you name the files you provide to clients and prospective clients seems trivial, but it’s important. Imagine someone doing research. He collects a folder full of files he wants to review. If the names of the files from Firm A are meaningful and the files from Firm B are meaningless, guess which firm the researcher likes best.

Let’s look at four web sites that use Flash to cycle through comps.

Click a comp to visit a site and watch the show:

Which sites were hard to read and which sites were easy to read?

Which made a good impression, and which seemed inferior?

Did you have enough time to read the copy before it cycled out?

How long did it take to figure out how to control the animation at each site?

Did you notice how the communications company used much less type than the law firms?

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Note: If you enjoyed this post, you should review a recent series I did on Type & Image.

I want to ask you a question. Before I do, I’d like you to read three paragraphs.

Here they are, just as they appear at Morrison & Foerster’s web site:

Those paragraphs are set in Arial bold.

Now look at those paragraphs set in Verdana regular.

Here’s the question: Which do you prefer to read: Arial bold, or Verdana regular?

Here’s the answer: Verdana regular. It’s much easier to read.

Here’s another question — why in the world would this firm set copy so it’s hard to read?

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Here’s an experiment: zoom out of this page (by pressing CTRL –).

Zoom out several times, and you can see how the copy looks on devices with smaller displays.

If you want people with iPhones and Blackberries and such to visit your site and be pleased with the experience, make sure they can read your copy without strain.

And if you’re not a designer, but you need one, get one.

Ditto for copywriter, artist, or UI specialist.

If you need one, get one.

Note: A web site is like a house — if you build one but you don’t know how, the neighbors are sure to notice (and talk).

Have you ever seen a photograph that got fuzzier the closer you looked at it?

If you use the Internet, you have.

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Let’s play Make Believe: Make believe you’re an attorney who charges clients between $500 and $800 per hour. You take considerable pride in your appearance. You wear expensive clothes that look brand new.

And you’re smart. Before you meet someone who might consider paying you $600 or $700 an hour, you tend to your appearance. If you’re about to make a first impression before a very attractive client, you want it to be terrific. Right?

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Forget it!

The very attractive, potential client already has some impression of you.

How is that possible?

Curious about you, this potential client does some research. Before he contacts you, he wants a good idea of who you are, what your experience is, and who you know.

So . . . he sees your firm’s home page, and that makes an impression. Then he looks at your bio page. He quickly focuses on your visage — a photo of you taken when the firm’s web site was revised a few years back.

And that — along with the info in your bio — makes his impression of you much more definite.

That’s how it works. (People form their initial impressions of others in the blink of an eye.)

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Let me ask you this (and remember, it’s still make believe) — does your photo resemble any of these? I mean, in terms of quality.

If so, the potential client’s early impression of you just took a deep turn for the worse, because it seems you don’t pay attention to detail, or don’t bother to fix obvious errors. He’s disturbed by the poor quality of what he sees, and he figures, “Any attorney who accepts such sloppy work can’t be worth $600 per hour.”

You might take great pride in your appearance, but your photo says you don’t. Just for that, you might not get the call; you might not get the opportunity to show the potential client just how sharp you are.

Don’t ever forget the potent power of first impressions.

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That’s it for now, and make believe is over.

Tune in next time, and learn how to make sure photos of your attorneys don’t portray them as fuzzy attorneys.
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