Legal Writing

Providing Happiness to an Attorney

What I sometimes do is this — I spot an error, and then I bring it to the author’s attention.

Sometimes, the author appreciates it and even offers me $$$ to spot further errors so others (esp. prospective clients and future employers) never see them.

Sometimes, the author ‘cops an attitude’ and asks me who the heck I think I am.

I’m amazed when it occurs, but very blue moon, or so, an author responds with an X-rated diatribe (e.g., “How dare you use my work to promote your business, you lousy ^&&(#%#@&!”)

Sometimes, I use an error as the topic of a post. As I’ve explained over and over, I attribute the error to the author. (And, as you can imagine, I never use a client’s error as the topic of a post, because my clients are right smart — they have an editor who gets rid of any errors; so, prospective clients and future employers have no chance of seeing them.)

Why identify the author (and/or publisher)?

Well . . . in some cases, I’d have to do an enormous amount of work to replicate an error. Consider, if you will, this annual report published by Weil Gotshal. It suffers a glaring production error, which is that people can’t print the darned thing.

Now . . . I could recreate that annual report to illustrate the error, but that would take one heck of a lot of work.  And then readers would be left wondering, “Why is this guy making up these errors and then explaining how to correct them? That’s nuts!”

____________
Yesterday, an attorney — the author of an error I discussed in a post last month — discovered that that post appeared on the first page of results of a Google search of his name. 

He asked, “Can you please edit your post to eliminate reference to me or my blog?  Not sure that would ‘fix’ the Google issue at this point, but it would make me happy.”

I’m happy to oblige. I’ve removed the post.

____________
PS: This attorney is a litigator. Something tells me that — should I ever be sued, and this attorney represents the plaintiff — any appeal I might make to get him to quit writing nasty things about me would be ignored.

“It’s nothing personal.”

Full post as published by Set in Style on June 11, 2009 (boomark / email).