Tag: editing

Bad Writing Kills Client’s Big Dreams

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.

Accepting Criticism: The Declaration of Independence

If there was one thing Thomas Jefferson loathed, it was criticism. Thus, he was not at all pleased with the edits forced upon his draft of the Declaration of Independence. In this scene from the excellent HBO series John Adams, we see Franklin and Adams working over Jefferson’s prose.  Franklin’s edits were modest, but included one of the most memorable phrases in the document.  He took Jefferson’s original language, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” and changed them to: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

As a group, lawyers—litigators in particular—refuse to seek out and accept criticism. That is a mistake. Whether it’s editing a brief for tone and clarity, testing an opening or closing argument, or whatever. Your goal as a lawyer is to persuade. The persuasive impact your work has is solely determined by the reader. Thus, seek out and accept criticism from others. Bring different points of view and experience to your work product. Don’t work in a silo. As we learned from Jefferson’s experience, the result typically ends up better than what you could have done on your own.

The Tenth Rule

The great Elmore Leonard’s Tenth Rule of Writing should be every lawyer’s first: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

Editing Your Own Work

It’s after hours. You just finished drafting your brief and you’re feeling pretty good about it.  You’ve read it numerous times, caught a few typos and errors, and cut out some of the fat. But you’ve lived with this thing for too long. You need a fresh pair of eyes on it because we all know that after that many times reading the same thing your brain sees what it expects to see.  And besides, you still need to cut a few paragraphs to comply with the rules. So you wander the halls of your office to find someone to put eyes on this thing. But alas, your colleagues don’t share the same commitment to work (or skill at procrastination) that you do and have long since left for home. Pop quiz, hot shot: What do you do now?

Go back to your office and change the font of your brief to something different than Times New Roman (or whatever you’re using): try Courier or Palatino Linotype.  Then print it out and read it again. Yes, print it. Don’t review on the screen. This is like putting a fresh pair of eyes on the text. It slows down your review, you see things you missed before and end up quickly spotting and cutting the expendable.  Make your revisions, convert back to standard font, good to go.