Legal Writing

Sorry, Whatley, But You Should Have Looked

You’re in-house counsel, and you’re looking for information about hiring summer interns. That’s what your company is planning on doing, and management wants your advice before it moves forward.

You could take a crash course on employment law (your client is a high-tech firm, and your specialty is IP law), or you could look for someone who knows this area of employment law.

Of course, you can and will ask friends and associates for suggestions, but before you do that, you do some cursory research to help you know what to look for.

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Your research leads you an article titled “Department of Labor has rules on employment of interns, teens” which seems promising.

Right away, you notice something amiss: the body copy is one gigantic link! As curious as anyone, you click the link to see what happens, and then this page appears, telling you the page you were just looking at may have been removed. It offers this advice — go to the site’s home page.

But you can’t. You click the link to the home page, and nothing happens. You try several links, and none appear to work at all!

So . . . the busy attorney you are, you just leave the site.

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The next day, an associate calls and suggests Nathan Whatley of McAfee & Taft. “He’s very sharp; he really knows his stuff.”

You do what just about anyone might do — you review Whatley’s bio.

As you do, something about Whatley strikes you as vaguely familiar; you wonder if you’ve ever met him. And then it hits you: Whatley authored that article you saw the night before, the one that amounted to some disconnected copy, a giant link, and Whatley’s name and photo.

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Well . . . it’s Whatley’s misfortune that he never bothered to look at his article once it was published (as most authors are so eager to do), and that’s because you just can’t bring yourself to rely on someone who allows his name to be put to obvious errors.

Sorry, Whatley, but your failure to exercise due diligence may have just cost you a great client.

Full post as published by Set in Style on May 20, 2010 (boomark / email).