Set in Style

Review the Standards of Review published by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. From a production standpoint, this is pretty scary stuff. And if you wonder why, just compare them (those published standards) to these published standards.

Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck — a firm that boasts “you can rest assured that you’re being represented by a team of seasoned attorneys with the knowledge, relationships and legal skills to help you mitigate even the most complex environmental risk” — says wood is a fossil fuel.

California recently enacted a landmark global warming law, Assembly Bill 32 (AB32), whose goals were to establish state-wide programs designed to combat greenhouse gases and promote the development and use of energy-efficient technologies. Carbon dioxide is the main focus of AB32. Carbon dioxide is produced by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, petroleum, natural gas, or wood, and is discharged primarily from exhaust pipes and industrial smokestacks. Because greenhouse gas emissions are directly related to the use of energy, measures designed to conserve energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions are key, but surely not the entire picture.

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This is a classic example of why law firms (functioning as publishers) need editors. Having an editor review copy before it’s published is nothing less than the application of due diligence.

Note: without an editor, readers might be left with the impression that the firm’s expert attorneys think that most of the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere comes from exhaust pipes and industrial smokestacks.

In a sense, what Brownstein, et al. is doing with its publications is demonstrating to all (including prospective clients and adversaries) that it doesn’t apply due diligence to all it does, and that’s not good, especially since the firm claims (believe it or not) that due diligence is one of its specialties.

Winstead PC — one of the largest law firms in Texas — does what so many other large law firms do. It advertises that it uses technology — including its “unique data and software applications” — to increase efficiency and to provide “[u]nsurpassed access to critical business and legal information.”

Sounds pretty good, right?

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The GC for a high tech firm is looking for counsel familiar with this or that. He asks around and he hears about you. Before he takes the time to call you, he asks an associate to do some research.

What does the associate do? The first thing she does is review your firm’s Web site. She looks at your bio, and then she clicks a link to some article you wrote. What she sees after she clicks that link is going to influence her report to the GC.

Suppose she clicks this link and finds a PDF version of a not-so-legible photocopy of an article you wrote. The impression she gets is that your firm is hardly high tech. That impression is reinforced when she realizes the article could have been reprinted with this level of legibility.

Suppose she clicks this link. She’s a mite perplexed because she can’t figure out what sort of file it is. She does some tinkering and finds it’s a PDF version of a not-so-legible photocopy of an article that could have been reprinted with this level of legibility.

Suppose she clicks this link. She already knows that your firm doesn’t identify PDFs as PDFs, so she opens the file in Acrobat. Once again, she finds a not-so-legible photocopy of an article that could have been reprinted with this level of legibility.

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Sometimes it doesn’t matter how good or bad your article is. The impression people get isn’t always from what you wrote, but from what your firm produced. If your firm does a lousy job of reprinting articles you wrote, it makes you look bad. It gives the impression that you’re all-too-capable of missing what’s obvious.

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Let’s look at one more example of a firm that doesn’t much care what sort of impression its publications make on prospective clients. Click this link, and you’ll discover a firm that publishes photocopies, rather than originals, of its own newsletters!

In addition to making sure that the articles a firm publishes are free from spelling and grammatical errors, an editor can help make sure those articles are free from factual errors.

Let’s look at a few real-world examples: several articles describing the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in LaRue v. DeWolff, Boberg & Associates, Inc.
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Which is it: the President of the United States, or the president of the United States? a Congressional Committee, or a congressional committee? the State of California, or the state of California? our Firm is committed to excellence, or our firm is committed to excellence? the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or the chief justice of the United States?

In each case, it’s the latter.

Here’s how the heading for this client alert (a PDF file) appears on a computer that doesn’t have a particular font installed:

Whoever produced the alert (probably) imagined that the heading would appear like this:

Here’s how some of the body for the alert appears on that computer:

Whoever produced the alert (probably) imagined that the body would appear like this:

What went wrong? Whoever produced the alert made a common mistake. He figured that if the alert looked good on his computer, it would look good on all computers.

How to avoid such a mistake? Simple. Just embed required fonts when you create the PDF version of an alert. How? Here’s how.

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If your firm claims a commitment to excellence in all it does, don’t blow it by publishing alerts that are so far from excellent. That makes it seem as if your firm’s staff doesn’t know how to use common computer applications; they don’t pay close attention to detail; they don’t take pride in their work; and it makes the attorneys who authored the alert seem careless — as if they don’t bother to look at published versions of their work.

Only rarely do I find a law firm with professional-looking publications — I mean publications that appear as if they were designed and produced by pros.

Take a look at this newsletter published by Weil Gotschal. Take a good look at the page layout and the type. It may not be the slickest design in the world, but it’s solid.

The body copy is set in Stone Serif, and the heads are set in Helvetica. (I would have chosen Stone Sans for the heads to better complement the body.) Italics are used appropriately, and none of the type is underlined. Hyphenation is used to break lines (almost unheard of among law firms), so word spacing is very consistent.

And — to top if off — the newsletter (a PDF document) contains links that actually work! That’s a very rare occurrence in law firm publishing.

Unfortunately not all of the links are set correctly. For instance, if you click an attorney’s e-mail address, nothing happens. Nothing at all*.

And the newsletter contains an extra-special bonus feature — it’s written for a broad audience and it’s well written.

I give it a B⁺.

Now, compare the newsletter to this Weil Briefing. Take a look at the last two pages of the briefing. And try the links on the last page.

This one gets a C ^–.

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What should happen when an attorney’s e-mail address is clicked? For the sake of readers — including potential clients — and Weil’s attorneys, clicking an attorney’s e-mail address should open a new e-mail message with an appropriate subject line. This saves readers a bit of work, and — when one of Weil’s attorneys gets an e-mail with that subject line — he already knows what it’s about. E-mails with that subject line might be routed to a particular attorney for initial review.

Note: Any firm can claim (as many do) that it makes good use of modern technology. But when it fails to demonstrate that, the claim rings hollow.

You’re a lawyer and you want to write about the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the “Act”) or the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”), so you define some abbreviations up front. That way, when you write, “The SEC is investigating so-and-so for some violation of the Act,” people know exactly what you mean (without doing more reading than necessary).

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A bit over a year ago, I was reviewing this piece about diversity at Wilson Sonsini’s Web site. What struck me was the reference to women “who belong to a racial, ethnic, or gender minority group.”

I wondered: “What is a gender minority group and who are women who belong to such groups? Hermaphrodites? Androgynes? Genderqueers?”

I couldn’t be sure (either what they were or why Wilson Sonsini was putting the spotlight on them), so I asked some of the good people at the firm, and guess what? Not one of them could (or would) say.

Well, by golly! I think I’ve figured it out. They’re fuzzy women, like Page Maillard.

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OK. Where did I get that picture of Ms. Maillard? I got it from this newsletter published by the firm. Take a look at it. It’s chock full of pictures of fuzzy women.

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Honestly, I don’t know what a gender minority group is or why Wilson Sonsini is so interested in their members or so reluctant to say who or what they are.

But I know this: 1) whoever produced that newsletter did a lousy job (and probably doesn’t know the difference between GIF and TIFF), and 2) the firm doesn’t seem to care (else it would hire someone who understands print production and cares about quality).