Angry client comes to lawyer. Angry client had big dreams of holding his own outdoor concert series. He thought it would be epic. And like Wayne Campbell and Roy Kinsella years before him, he believed that if he built it, they would come. So he set to work building his concert facility. But alas, the cops shut him down over security concerns, thereby dashing his dreams.
So he did what people do: He went to a lawyer. Lawyer is moved by angry client’s story. “We will draft such a lengthy and powerful complaint that it will force them to relent!” Lawyer says. “Hoorah!” says angry client. Lawyer then grabs his Dictaphone and sets to work spewing forth every lurid detail. Somebody types it up. Who? We don’t know. The lawyer then files it. But alas (yes, a second alas), he either failed to proofread it or was so jacked on Aerosmith tunes that he must have just plain missed all the typos, punctuation and grammatical errors. The defense moves to dismiss—“What does any of this even mean, your Honor…?”
But of course, district court judges are loath to kill dreams so easily. The judge gives the dreamers a second chance, and then apparently a third chance to amend. But it seems the story was just too good to leave any of it on the cutting room floor—or at least clean up its punctuation and grammatical errors. The district court tossed it. Enough is enough.
The dreamers were not done—they never are when it comes to litigation. They appealed to the Seventh Circuit (Stanard v. Nygren, 658 F.3d 792 (7th Cir. 2011)). Surely that court would see the merit in their cause. But the Seventh Circuit was unmoved. It affirmed the dismissal; calling the third amended complaint nearly incomprehensible, lacking in punctuation, and riddled with grammatical and syntactical errors. In the process, the court felt compelled to acknowledge (at n.7) “the unfortunate reality that poor writing occurs too often in our profession[.]” The takeaway: Raise the bar, write well, be thorough yet concise, proofread, and then rock on.
The takeaway: Raise the bar, write well, be concise, proofread, and then rock on.