Legal News

Advice from the Corner Office: Use Google; Avoid Grammar Gaffes

By Jamie Heller

We recently talked with Drew Berry (pictured, right), chairman of McCarter & English, about succeeding as an associate. He should know, as he’s worked his whole career at the 400-lawyer firm, which he joined after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1965. Here are three bits of advice.

Read Justice Scalia’s New Book on Advocacy: It’s “important and entirely accurate” says Berry, who’s read a meaty excerpt from the ABA Journal and is currently reading the actual book. The justice is “just right” about what it takes to persuade judges, says Berry, a litigator himself. Among the points that stood out to Berry: Write well. It’s okay, for example, to use synonyms in briefs, within limits, though the same rule wouldn’t apply with contracts.

Though Berry feels pretty strongly about new lawyers’ reading the book, he feels really strongly about its importance for summer associates. About summers, he says: “if you don’t read Antonin Scalia’s book, you shouldn’t bother coming back for your next year at the law firm.”

Get Yourself Smart on a Subject, Fast: When they get assignments, he says, self starters “contextualize” the issue by “Googling stuff for fifteen minutes.” Lexis and Westlaw, he says, are fine for focusing on a point of law. But the peripheral vision provided by a Web search is also invaluable. It can yield relevant law journal articles, blog posts, plaintiffs’ lawyers sites, law-firm newsletters and the like.

In a way, he says, see-what-I’ll-find Internet research is akin to the old hard-cover legal research methods which, he says, are more than powerful electronic search engines “give a feel for the evolution of the common law.”

Make Grammatical Mistakes and Typos at Your Peril: “Do not ever for the second time give your senior a piece of writing with a typo or a grammatical mistake,” says Berry. “I will take it once and I will tell the junior my set speech.” But if it happens again? Well, find out for yourself.
What is Berry’s set speech? A lawyer’s job is “to force the reader’s mind in a direction, to move a mind forward through the ideas.” A grammatical error or typo “derails the train of thought.”

He says every first-year lawyer at McCarter gets a copy of Strunk & White.

Photos: iStockPhoto, McCarter & English

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).