Set in Style

This white paper discusses a method for “editing a legal document collaboratively.”

In English, as in Law, there are accepted ways of doing things. If you deal in both subjects (English and Law), you should find out what those accepted ways are, and then adhere to them (unless you have one heck of a good reason for deviating from them).

Consider the following intro to this client alert:

Six federal agencies have jointly issued final rules imposing identity theft-related requirements on financial institutions, creditors, credit and debit card issuers, and users of consumer credit reports (the “Rules”).

What’s out of kilter is the hyphen in identity theft-related requirements (as well as the placement of (the “Rules”) and the lack of hyphens in credit- and debit-card issuers).

How should the phrase identity theft-related requirements be set? One good way to answer that question is to see what a reference like the Chicago Manual of Style has to say about it.

Here’s what it says:

A phrasal adjective (also called a compound modifier) is a phrase that functions as a unit to modify a noun. A phrasal adjective follows these basic rules: (1) Generally, if it is placed before a noun, you should hyphenate the phrase to avoid misdirecting the reader {dog-eat-dog competition}. . . . (6) If a phrasal adjective becomes awkward, the sentence should probably be recast.

The production editor of this alert (if you publish alerts, you do run them by a production editor before they’re published, right?) shouldn’t have missed this one at all, especially since the alert makes repeated reference to an “Identity Theft Prevention Program.”

What he or she should have done is follow the Manual’s advice to recast the sentence, perhaps like so:

Six federal agencies jointly issued final rules (the “Rules”) imposing requirements on financial institutions, creditors, credit- and debit-card issuers, and users of consumer credit reports to identify possible instances of identity theft.

Do you trust Word (the word processing application)? Couldn’t it be wrong about the spelling of a word? Couldn’t it make a grammatical error?

The following appeared while Word was checking grammar:

That’s one bulleted point in a list that begins with the following:

An editor can help you avoid:

Recently, I’ve had a number of conversations about typography, and typesetting legal documents. Some (e.g., Kenneth Adams and Si Daniels) dispute the idea that serif type should always be used for body copy because it is more legible than san serif type.

The United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, has sided with the traditionalists by adopting this comprehensive set of rules for typesetting briefs.

According to the court:

Studies have shown that long passages of serif type are easier to read and comprehend than long passages of sans-serif type. The rule accordingly limits the principal sections of submissions to serif type, although sans-serif type may be used in headings and captions. This is the same approach magazines, newspapers, and commercial printers take. Look at a professionally printed brief; you will find sans-serif type confined to captions, if it is used at all.

The Supreme Court of West Virginia goes in a completely different direction with these rules:

Except by leave of Court, all pleadings and briefs, including footnotes, must be in at least 14 point type, must use Courier, Arial, or Verdana font, and only one side of the paper may be used.

Go figure!

I just discovered this blog that focuses on readability.

Here’s a post that discusses the Flesch readability formulas.

Should you be interested in such an arcane subject? Well, if you write or edit attorney-authored articles meant to attract business, then yes — you need to know what promotes and what hinders readability.

What can an editor do for a law firm?

Consider the intro to this newsletter published by a law firm that specializes in employment law:

A popular, and altruistic, employee benefit some employers provide is a leave-sharing program. An employer-sponsored leave-sharing program allows an employee to donate accrued hours of paid vacation, or personal and potentially sick leave for the benefit of other employees who are in need of taking more leave than they have available.

What’s wrong with this intro? There’s that very curious phrase: potentially sick leave. A comma is missing (right after the curious phrase). The careful reader can wonder how leave-sharing programs are so popular if they’re only offered by some employers, and every reader can wonder how a benefit can be altruistic.

What might a skilled and experienced editor do with this? Given the freedom to do a heavy edit (which is needed here), an editor could transform that intro into this:

More and more employers are offering leave-sharing programs to their employees. These programs allow employees to donate earned vacation time, as well as personal and sick days, for use by other employees who need more leave than they have earned.

Let’s consider the changes and the reasons for them.

1. The edited version contains 20% fewer words than the unedited version. (Why write who are in need of taking more leave when you could write who need more leave?)
2. The edited version is more readable than the unedited version. The edited version scores 55.4 on the Flesch Reading Ease scale; the unedited version scores 23.3.
3. The edited version is properly punctuated.
4. The edited version doesn’t claim that benefits (rather than the employers who provide them) can be altruistic.
5. That curious phrase (potentially sick leave) is gone.

That’s a good example of what an editor can do for a law firm: improve the quality of its publications.

A few weeks ago, a friendly reader asked:

What’s up with the new tendency to hypenate all modifiers, including (and especially irritating) the hypen-forbidden ”ly” words (e.g. family-friendly policy = WRONG)  The lawyers and marketers definitely need a little schooling on this!

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Consider this intro to a blog post written by a well-known professor of economics:

The growth of large government managed funds during the past few years has been spectacular.

Can you spot the problem with this sentence?

(more…)

Consider the following snippet from this recently published Intellectual Property Update:

Notice the spacing between the words in the next-to-last line.

Now, grab a newspaper, or a magazine, or a book: anything published by a professional publishing company. Scan the right-hand side of a column of fully justified type. Notice that hyphens are used to break some lines. This eliminates giant gaps between words (which tends to annoy readers).

If the firm that published the Intellectual Property Update relied on a production editor to produce the update, the above snippet would have been set like so:

A big deal? No. Just another detail. And a convenience for readers.

Ariana R. Levinson, a professor of law at the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, and author of the column Effective Legal Writing, has written an article titled “Editing Tips for the Busy Attorney.”

In it, she cites an article published by USA Today titled “Tax cheat escapes $100M repayment.”

Here’s the intro to the article:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Poorly written Justice Department documents cost the federal government more than $100 million in what was supposed to have been the crowning moment of the biggest tax prosecution ever.

Now, ask yourself this simple question: wouldn’t you rather play it safe than sorry?

If you can’t get your colleagues to review what you write, get an editor to do it.

And remember, an ounce of prevention can be prevent a costly (and embarrassing) error.

If your firm is like most large law firms, then your client alerts, newlsetters, and advisories aren’t doing all they can to help attract new business.

Why? Because they’re not making it convenient for potential clients to contact the authors of those publications, to learn more about them, or to learn more about your firm.

Consider a large law firm’s most recent Consumer Products Marketing newsletter.

Now, suppose this newsletter comes to the attention of a potential client. She wants to learn more about the firm — let’s say she wants to know whether the firm has an office in San Francisco — so she clicks the firm’s logotype at the top of the newsletter. Nothing happens.

What should happen is this: clicking the logotype should bring up the firm’s home page. To the interested reader, that would be a nice convenience.

Let’s say the potential client wants to contact either of the newsletter’s two editors. Their e-mail addresses are displayed at the bottom of the first paragraph, but they’re not set as links ( like this ).

So, rather than just click an e-mail address to fire off a quick query, the reader has to:

1. copy an address,
2. go to her e-mail client,
3. start a new message,
4. paste the e-mail address in the new message,
5. write a subject for the message, and then
6. write the message.

That’s not a big deal, but it’s not as convenient as it could be.

Why not make it easy for potential clients to contact your firm or learn more about it? Why not set links in your PDF files? That way, a reader can just click a link to contact your firm.

It’s so easy to do. And it’s so worthwhile, because potential clients are more likely to contact your firm if you make it convenient for them. (You want your firm’s on-line presence to attract inquiries from potential clients, right?)

And it shows that your firm — unlike so many others — knows how to use features that have been available since the turn of the century: a potential factor in a potential client’s first impression of your firm.