Set in Style

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!

Who Shall We Blame for This Tragedy?

(more…)

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?

Today’s quote comes from an article titled “Why Is Business Writing So Awful?”

The article, which discusses the copy at law firm web sites, was written by Jason Fried, co-author of Rework, a highly regarded book that talks about how to do things effectively, rather than conventionally.

From the article:

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying, “Our products are like everyone else’s, too.”

If you care about your product, you should care just as much about how you describe it. In nearly all cases, a company makes its first impression on would-be customers or partners with words — whether they’re on a website, in sales materials, or in e-mails or letters. A snappy design might catch their attention, but it’s the words that make the real connection. Your company’s story, product descriptions, history, personality — these are the things that go to battle for you every day. Your words are your frontline. Are they strong enough?

Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions. Words are treated as filler — “stuff” that takes up space on a page. Words expand to occupy blank space in a business much as spray foam insulation fills up cracks in your house. Harsh? Maybe. True? Read around a bit, and I think you’ll agree.

Fried’s comments apply to law firms looking and acting so much alike, as do his comments about words for the sake of words:

Why, just consider this example from Morrison & Foerster:

Innovation is what drives our people. In our world, innovation begins with listening. We listen acutely to our clients’ aspirations. We value the opportunity to work with amazing clients in an atmosphere that encourages the kind of creativity that is only achievable when lawyers from diverse backgrounds approach their work with intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm. Although diverse, in certain respects we think as one.

Can you find the topic sentence in that paragraph?

No, this isn’t a series of lessons I’m running — it’s a webinar Bryan Garner is running tomorrow.

The editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, and a highly regarded legal writing expert, Garner regularly hosts seminars to help attorneys develop their writing skills:

• The Winning Brief
• Advanced Legal Writing & Editing
• Advanced Legal Drafting
• The Winning Oral Argument
• Advanced Judicial Writing
• Legal Writing in Plain English
• Making Your Case

The Better Grammar seminar is brand new. It teaches attorneys how to analyze sentences and find the flaws in them. And it helps attorneys “learn to think the way a professional editor thinks, rejecting edits that unskilled editors are prone to and instead seeing where the true linguistic problems lie.”

Before the seminar, the attorneys take a quiz consisting of 50 flawed sentences and four possible edits, only one of which works. During the seminar, the flawed sentences and the edits are reviewed.

Details:

Better Grammar for Lawyers: Part Three
Friday, May 14
12:00 — 1:00 p.m. Central Time
$199.00

Click here to register.

Note: Let me say this once more — every writer needs an editor, and the best writers usually demand the best editors. Only amateurs go without.

Not to fear.

I haven’t abandoned you (faithful readers).

But I’ve been so danged busy.

That’s why I haven’t posted anything for so long.

Say . . . have you ever noticed how some attorneys fight themselves for no good reason at all?

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Check back next week for tips on:

1. caring for copy,
2. responding to RFPs,
3. making your firm look good on line
4. producing top-notch seminar materials,
5. setting display type so it looks good to all
6. making it seem like your firm really does have a commitment to excellence; and
7. how to make your attorneys look sharp in print and on line

Some of you who keep up with Set in Style use RSS and such.

You should know that — very often — my first cut at something isn’t my last cut.

Sometimes I’ll post something. Then, after it’s posted I’ll spot an error.

And I’ll wonder — Did some RSS contraption send that post before I fixed it?

I hope not.

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Sometimes I’ll correct something, or I’ll rewrite something.

Sometimes the changes are minor; other times, the last cut is so different from the first.

Thought you should know.

Eric Turkewitz, a New York attorney who operates a personal injury law firm in midtown Manhattan and who is the proprietor of the oddly named (but soon to be renamed) New York Personal Injury Law Blog, a blog known to insiders as Turk’s Place, wrote in his first blog post:

Too many attorneys not only write in a stilted and pretentious manner, filled with arcane Latin phrases, but also do so in convoluted run-on sentences.

The Turk recently alerted us to an opinion (Dockery v. Sprecher) from the Second Department of New York’s Appellate Division.

Here’s the first sentence of the opinion:

When applicants for U.S. citizenship were given a test in which they had to fully diagram this sentence, many were stumped; others were lost; most decided to pack up and go home.

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.

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:

I’ve got three recommendations.

The first is a list of blog posts you must read. The list is published by the three intrepid law geeks who run3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

Here’s an excerpt from the #1 post, written by Chuck Newton, the man who first claimed that, “information becomes the main material for workers, each of which are only loosely affiliated”:

By these measurements, traditional law firms are designed (intentionally or by happenstance) to handle a certain degree of capacity.  In other words, it can handle so many cases or clients with the infrastructure it has.  If the cases and clients are increasing, a law firm can find itself running to catch up.  This would represent undercapacity.  You see this a lot in Big Law on the grow. 

The second and third were authored by Honorable Gerald Lebovits; both appeared in the journal of the New York State Bar Association.

In these two articles, Judge Lebovits advises attorneys on the basics of typesetting and page design. He likens the importance of looking good in print, to the importance of looking sharp in court.

Document Design: Pretty in Print — Part I

Document Design: Pretty in Print — Part II