John Grisham never wrote a book called The Demand Letter. But if he had, then perhaps the main character would be Bret Rappaport. Bret has written a fine article on how to write an effective demand letter, A Shot Across the Bow, which you can read in HTML or PDF. Bret’s article explores everything from the psychological aspects of an effective demand to the timing and mode of physically delivering the letter. (Hint: FedEx delivery is an attention-getter.)
Who better to advise lawyers about document design than a lawyer trained in typography and graphic design, one whose pre-law career included typeface design? Meet Matthew Butterick, proprietor of Typography for Lawyers. And if you agree that presentation matters, bookmark his site for future reference. (Hat tip to Slaw.)
Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner has been known to use contractions (gasp!) in his opinions. Well, just as marijuana leads to meth (right?), contractions lead to smiley faces. (Hat tip to Howard Bashman.)
(p.s. 9/16/08: It looks like I scooped Snopes on this one. But I must tip my own hat to Urban Legends.)
Maybe you’ve seen the viral e-mail titled “Twenty-Eight Reasons Why English Teachers Die Young.” It purports to list 28 similes found in high-school essays. The e-mail has taken in many bloggers, including this one. Actually the content of the e-mail comes from the Washington Post Style Invitational’s outrageous-analogy contests in 1995 and 1999. Here are some of my favorite entries (this time with proper attribution):
In an opinion piece for the National Law Journal, Ken Adams examines what’s wrong with the usual process of drafting contracts, and he suggests some paths to improvement.
Ken Adams should enjoy this Dilbert strip. (Hat tip to Futurelawyer.)
“If any bill, answers, replication, or rejoinder, shall be found of an immoderate length, both the party and the counsel under whose hand it passeth shall be fined.”
— Sir Francis Bacon
Source: Tom Goldstein and Jethro K. Lieberman, The Lawyer’s Gide to Writing Well 102 (2d ed. 2002). Hat tip: The RAB Experience.
Prof. Paul Horwitz offers new 1L’s some advice worth of consideration. I like what he says about legal writing:
Legal Writing is Not a Course. Well, OK, it is a course. But it’s not just a course. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it is something separate and apart from your substantive courses—or worse, that it is less important than them. Effective legal writing is effective legal practice—both because good legal writing is good legal analysis, and because most of what you do as a lawyer will involve communicating clearly to others, either in written or oral form and regardless of whether you’re communicating with an adversary, a client, or someone on the other side of a corporate transaction. Moreover, mastering good legal writing is the best “strategy” there is for mastering your substantive exams: a great legal exam, in my view, is just a great legal memo written under unusual time pressure. So treat legal writing as one of your most important courses, whether or not it’s pass/fail, and do your best to internalize the form of the legal memo so that you can use it on your exams.
Hat tip to Daniel Solove at Concurring Opinions, who adds his own valuable 2¢:
[P]ractice writing as much as you can. This advice is best heeded long before you go to law school. Take writing classes in college. Or take a non-fiction writing class outside of college.... Or, if you can't take a course, get books about how to improve your writing. And practice writing on your own. Basically, write, write, write!
Writing is one of the most crucial skills in law school, and it is the one that I find many students could greatly improve.... Many of the problems I see on exams and in student papers stem from general writing issues—inability to write clearly, poor organization, badly articulated concepts, and so on. You can never get enough training in writing. So work on improving this skill, and you'll likely improve your success in law school.
Hat tip to Brian Hollar at Thinking on the Margin for all the above.
If you bill by the hour, then the most important writing you do for your own career are your time entries. A time entry can inform the client about what you’re doing and how it’s helping to accomplish your client’s goal. Or not. For an example of the not, read this excellent post by Donna Bader on An Appeal to Reason. Donna’s post is about a lawyer’s fee statement submitted for judicial approval. The court was so unimpressed that it cut the bill by over 90%, from over $250,000 to $21,300. To see some of the things the lawyer did wrong, read Donna’s post.
Donna concludes with this advice for submitting motions for court approval of attorney fees: “Pay attention to providing adequate details of your services, and avoid duplication of efforts when more than one attorney is performing services. But, above all else, protect your credibility with the court.” I would add: Do the same thing when submitting a bill for your client’s approval. Write time entries that protect and enhance your credibility with your client.
Yesterday’s installment of Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day carried this quotation. As I read it, I couldn’t help but think of people whose “primary business” is practicing law:
The writing of literate Americans whose primary business is not writing but something else is pretty bad. It is muddy, backward, convoluted and self-strangled; it is only too obviously the product of a task approached unwillingly and accomplished without satisfaction or zeal. Except for the professionals among us, we Americans are hell on the English language.
—Donald J. Lloyd, “Our National Mania for Correctness,” in A Linguistics Reader 57, 57-58 (Graham Wilson ed., 1967).
