Legal Writing

Why Do Law Firms Need Editors?

There’s this attorney from China and he’s flying to San Francisco, hoping to start a good relationship. He works for a large telecommunications company that’s planning its first venture in the U.S., and he’s looking for a law firm to provide guidance in several regulatory matters.

He’s several hours into the flight when he takes this article out of his briefcase. He’s going to meet the author, an attorney at a law firm in San Francisco that also has an office in Beijing; the article should be great background.

Take a look at the article (it’s a PDF file). If you’re pressed for time, just read the first line.

____________
Our flying attorney begins reading the article, which offers advice to Chinese firms doing business in the U.S. But as soon as he starts, he stops. He wonders, what is repaid economic growth? What is that?

As he reads the article, his generally favorable impression of the author — formed during a phone call a week earlier — starts to fade. There are so many careless errors. The author didn’t mean repaid economic growth, he meant rapid economic growth. He wrote about Ebay, but he meant eBay. He quoted a figure of $750,000,000, rather than the correct figure: $175,000,000.

This is the flying attorney’s second impression of the author, and it’s not a good one. He wonders, who would write something like this? What sort of law firm would publish it?

____________
The effect of the article is the opposite of what was intended, which was to attract a potential client, a large Chinese company entering the U.S. market.

The IP attorney who put his name to this article couldn’t have meant for it to be published as is, not with that typo in the very first sentence, not with a trademark set incorrectly, not with so many careless errors in grammar.

This article does more harm than good. Rather than attract business, it portrays the firm — prominently identified as the publisher — as one that doesn’t pay attention to its associates’ work. It’s the sort of firm that lets a half-billion dollar error go unnoticed!

____________
Had there been an editor between the attorney and the printing press, this would not have happened. Instead the article would have been transformed into this revised article.

The author would have looked good, the firm would have looked good, and the meeting that had been planned would not have been cancelled.

Note: Click here for a Microsoft Word document that shows exactly which changes I made to the article.

Full post as published by Set in Style on July 23, 2009 (boomark / email).