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16 August 2010
You’re the managing partner of a law firm, and you’re a lawyer, not a publisher.
Oh . . . Just a minute . . . You are a publisher!
Your firm publishes your firm’s web site, right?
Since you’re the firm’s managing partner, you’re the firm’s publisher as well, right?
Wrong?
Well . . . if not you, then who is responsible for what your firm publishes?
Someone in marketing? How quaint!
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29 July 2010
Ask any good writing instructor what’s important, and you’re likely to hear about introductions, and how critical they are to attracting readers.
That applies to blog posts published by law firms seeking clients.
Consider the intro to this blog post:
Insurance Coverage for Food Contamination Recall
by Karen Kimmey
Recalls of food believed to be contaminated can be massively expensive for the companies required to implement them, and the availability of insurance coverage for such expenses is often disputed.
One recent complaint to raise this issue is . . . .
The blog post goes on to explain a recent ruling.
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A skilled and experienced editor has two issues with this intro. Well, three issues:
A headline has a purpose, and it needs a subject AND a verb to achieve it — to give readers some idea of what happened. How else can they decide if the article’s worth reading?
The first line starts the discussion, and it shows what the writer assumes: Busy People Have Time to Spare.
It sounds like the post might be about the availability of insurance coverage, but it’s not.
Busy people want to know, as soon as they can, whether an article’s worth reading.
The beginning of the second paragraph refers to this issue. What issue? food contamination? The expense of recalls? The availability of coverage? Disputes about availability?
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Here’s the intro after it’s been touched by a skilled and experienced editor:
Insurance Coverage for Recall of Contaminated Food Disputed
by Karen Kimmey When the FDA orders a recall of food products, it can be very expensive for the companies involved, and disputes about insurance coverage can arise.
Consider the complaint recently filed . . . .
That’s better.
It uses fewer words, so it takes readers less time.
It says the topic of the post is disputes about insurance coverage, so those interested in that sort of thing can decide to continue reading.
And it makes the attorney seem like a more skilled and thoughtful writer. That can only be to her advantage, right?
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Oh! One more thing. People searching for information regarding disputes about insurance coverage are more likely to discover the edited version.
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21 June 2010
Like cats to mice in motion, tragedies, catastrophes, and oddities grab our attention. And they make us think, at least for as long as it takes a cat to realize, “that wasn’t a mouse; that was a just a maple leaf dancing to the breeze.”
Someone sent me a link to this striking video that shows what happens when you try to extinguish a grease fire with water: quite the opposite of what you might expect.
Not only is the 30-second video a real eye grabber, it’s a great reminder to to all — be careful!
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2 June 2010
At the beginning of 2007, Larry Wescott, an attorney with a strong IT background, started the Electronic Discovery Blog as a forum to discuss, in part, court rulings related to electronic discovery. Last week, he shut it down after an attorney from LexisNexis threatened legal action to stop Wescott from violating its copyrights.
Before he started the blog, Wescott asked LexisNexis for permission to post cases concerning electronic discovery. He was told he could post 10 cases in one year.
After that first year, Wescott continued posting cases: 10 a year. It’s not that he meant to take more than LexisNexis was willing to give — the time limit slipped his mind. And it must have slipped the mind of the good folks at LexisNexis because — until last week — he’d heard nothing from them at all.
All of a sudden, Wescott is contacted by attorney for LexisNexis telling him to knock it off (in very stern fashion). Wescott looks back at the original authorization and sees that he has exceeded his authority to post cases published by LexisNexis. So, he pulls the plug.
That’s especially unfortunate, as the award-winning blog was very popular with those interested in legal developments in electronic discovery.
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This got me to thinking (once again) about the way some law firms use copyrighted material (especially news stories) without permission.
Take a minute to compare this post to this post to this post. Notice any similarities? That’s right — they’re all based on this story.
And — via their copyright notices — they claim they own the rights to the story. That’s a far cry from fair use, is it not?
This happens a lot, and not just with small firms. Some great big law firms do it too — even firms that specialize in IP and advertise their enthusiasm for finding and prosecuting those who violate their clients’ copyrights do it!
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I suppose it just might bite one of them one day, and I suppose it’s very likely to be the firm of Hayman & Kirshenbaum, a firm that republishes entire news articles (some owned by such familiar names as USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and Knight Ridder) verbatim.
When that happens, lawyers will be scrambling to review their web sites (which they never, ever do, I can assure you). They’ll write volumes of alerts and such advising clients that using what belongs to others for promotional purposes requires permission. Otherwise, it’s illegal.
Who knows? One of these days, the AP might decide it’s had enough and set about making an example of someone. And what could make a better example than some great big law firm with a large IP practice?
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3 May 2010
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:
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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.
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2 April 2010
April Fool’s Day was great fun for some. Even the Pope participated, washing 12 pairs of feet with water plus a solution that made those feet itch like mad 10 minutes later.
The Turk participated in a big way, fooling the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (go, Eric, go) with this interesting story.
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A few law firms participated, but the vast majority acted like it wasn’t a major holiday.
One firm that participated in bad style was Henderson | Franklin, which published this Piece of Work authored by Suzanne Boy:
“Miss Blu’s Workplace Policy #101: Drinking at Company Party”
The piece contains a sophomoric set of sarcastic instructions for employees to follow. For instance, if you vomit at the party, or you start taking your clothes off, you should get a ride home, and not drive.
Ha! Ha!
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I say it’s bad style for a firm with an employment law practice to publish this; and it could be regrettable.
The firm would have been much better off with a spoof based on some news that seemed incredible, yet plausible, like it was being bought by General Motors because GM planned to open law offices in old car dealerships.
I say that if you’ve got a good spoof, one that makes us laugh, then go for it.
If not, don’t bother.
That’s what I say.
The question is — does anyone care what I say?
Do You?
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22 February 2010
I recently asked John Gillies, the director of practice support at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, for his thoughts on young lawyers and what they 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure: focus on writing well every day, and the benefits will start to become more and more obvious to you. And good luck!
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12 February 2010
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?”)
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18 January 2010
Your law firm probably doesn’t have a logo. Few do. But it very likely has a logotype, which it uses in place of a logo.
What’s the difference between them?
A logo is an image; a logotype is stylized type.
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| Logo | Logotype |
Both logo and logotype (and other elements) distinguish one entity (e.g., person, business, agency) from all others, and these visual cues are so effective that most any substantial business or organization has a logotype; the larger the outfit, the more likely it is to have a logo as well.
And most outfits, regardless of size, have a style guide – a guide that describes lots of things, including the visual identity for an entity, like how its logo and its logotype should appear.
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13 January 2010
Before you start writing that client alert, grab a newspaper and a cup of coffee.
If you can, get a widely read paper: The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Chicago Tribune. If not, find a paper that carries AP stories.
Read a few stories. At least, read the first few paragraphs of a few stories.
Now, here’s my good advice: when you write your alert, write like a journalist.
You’ll be glad you did.
