Legal Writing

Have You Read 70c40efd-86ef-4d27-90b5-8d818b15f2fc.pdf?

Posted on May 10, 2010
Seems as if some law firms are going against the flow. While companies around the world are following Apple’s lead in making everything simple and easy to use, law firms touting their deep and abiding commitment to excellence are, to some extent, treating their clients like machines rather than people...

Type Image & Motion

Posted on May 03, 2010
Let’s look at four web sites that use Flash to cycle through comps. And let’s do this: let’s look at each home page for one minute. (Set your computer’s clock to display seconds so you can easily meaure one minute.) When we’ve looked at all four, we’ll compare notes...

Even More Less is More — Example #4

Posted on April 29, 2010
This post is one in a series on cutting verbiage in things like proposals for legal services. In the last three episodes, we cut substantial amounts of copy from all sorts of things written by attorneys ? from proposals to pleadings. Why bother to do that? Because the audience for these things is busy...

More More Less is More — Example #3

Posted on April 28, 2010
This post is one in a series on cutting verbiage in everything from briefs to proposals. In our last episode, we cut one sentence of a legal memo in half. In the episode before that, we cut one sentence of a proposal for legal services in half. Why? Because (1) we?re trying to persuade, either directly (the proposal) or indirectly [...

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More Less is More — Example #2

Posted on April 27, 2010
This post is the third in a series on cutting verbiage in legal writing. Today, our goal is to cut the fat out of the following sentence:* Secondary meaning occurs when a descriptive mark acquires distinctiveness, that is, proof that it has become distinctive as applied to the mark owner?s goods or services in commerce...

Less is More

Posted on April 26, 2010
When it comes to proposals, attorneys need to do just the opposite of what many believe they should: they need to be brief. And this is generally so*, whether lots of firms are submitting proposals, or just a few. Very often, the shortest proposal has a distinct advantage over all others — people tend to read [...

Less is More — Example #1

Posted on April 26, 2010
This post is the second in a series about proposals to provide legal services. Consider a proposal to handle IP matters for some new company planning to do business around the world. The proposal describes the firm’s trademark practice. Here’s a snippet of it: By virtue of the breadth and depth of the firm?s trademark practice, we have [...

Busy, Busy, Busy, But . . .

Posted on April 22, 2010
Not to fear. I haven’t abandoned you (faithful readers). But I’ve been so danged busy. That’s why I haven’t posted anything for so long. Say . . . have you ever noticed how some attorneys fight themselves for no good reason at all? ______ Check back next week for tips on: caring for copy, responding to RFPs, making your firm look good on line producing [...

Busy, Busy, Busy, But . . .

Posted on April 15, 2010
Not to fear. I haven’t abandoned this blog. But I’ve been so danged busy with too many projects all at once.  Check back next week for tips on producing top-notch seminar materials (Joe Beachboard, you really should pay attention), responding to RFPs (Rose Ors, are you listening?), making it is easy for visitors to read [...

First Cut and Last Cut

Posted on April 15, 2010
Some of you who keep up with Set in Style use RSS and such. You should know that — very often — my first cut at something isn’t my last cut. Sometimes I’ll post something. Then, after it’s posted I’ll spot an error...

Type & Copy ? Giving Readers What They Want

Posted on April 06, 2010
Read the following three paragraphs, and then I’ll ask you a question. Innovation is what drives our people.  In our world, innovation begins with listening.  We listen acutely to our clients? aspirations.  We value the opportunity to work with amazing clients in an atmosphere that encourages the kind of creativity that is only achievable when lawyers [...

Today’s Blooper of the Week

Posted on April 02, 2010
April Fool’s Day was great fun for some. Even the Pope participated, washing 12 pairs of feet with water and (who knew?) a solution that made those feet itch like mad 10 minutes later. The Turk participated in a big way, fooling the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (go, Eric, go) with this [...

Down with Fuzzy Looking Attorneys — Part I

Posted on March 30, 2010
Have you ever seen a photograph that got fuzzier the closer you looked at it? If you use the Internet, you have. ______ Let’s play Make Believe: Make believe you’re an attorney who charges clients between $500 and $800 per hour. You take considerable pride in your appearance...

More Type & Image ? Responding to Readers

Posted on March 26, 2010
This is part of a series titled Type & Image. It’s about how you can set type on an image so it looks good and is very legible. The whole discussion began with this comp I found at a law firm’s web site: Since the firm’s site uses variable text on a variable image, we set a lofty [...

Absurd Opinion Baffles Millions

Posted on March 22, 2010
Eric Turkewitz, a New York attorney who operates a personal injury law firm in midtown Manhattan and who is the proprietor of the oddly named (but soon to be renamed) New York Personal Injury Law Blog, a blog known to insiders as Turk’s Place, wrote in his first blog post: Too many attorneys not only write in [...

Type & Image — Some Samples

Posted on March 22, 2010
This is part of a series titled Type & Image. ______ Some firms truly realize how important it is to look sharp — especially when the goal is to charge clients $600 per hour. When it comes to setting type on a real image, Luce Forward is one of them...

Image & Text ? Review

Posted on March 17, 2010
This post is one in a series of posts on how to set type on an image. The target audience for this series of posts includes those who want a web site or a blog to serve as an effective marketing or branding tool. Let’s review what we’ve covered so far (in the previous four posts)...

Type & Image ? Part IV

Posted on March 11, 2010
Yesterday — in our search for a way to set very legible type on a real image — we went from this: To this: We did much to improve legibility, but we had to use more space. Now the question is this: can we set the type so it’s legible and compact? That’s our goal...

Type & Image ? Part III

Posted on March 10, 2010
In our last episode, we continued our discussion about combining type with a real image — an image you could capture with a camera. The starting point for our discussion (Type & Image) was this combination of type and image, which simply doesn’t work: What we’re going to do next is see how to set type on [...

Type & Image ? Part II

Posted on March 04, 2010
Yesterday,  we examined at this comp (below) in which copy (foreground) was knocked out of a photo (background). Obviously, the comp’s a dud: thin white type on a light yellow background is hard to read, and that’s not good. Compare that to this comp from the same site: Much easier to read, is it not? Before we get into it, let me [...

Type & Image — Part I

Posted on March 03, 2010
First, study this image with a snippet of copy knocked out of it; it appears at the home page of a law firm?s web site. If you have a recording of a Super Bowl broadcast, gt get it and cue it to the start of halftime. If not, turn on your VCR or DVD and record some commercial [...

Write Like the Best

Posted on March 02, 2010
My experience is that many attorneys are dead wrong. They think the best writing is what most people (including other attorneys) can’t follow, so they turn out the sort of convoluted, long-winded constructions that make professional writers wince, like this nonsense: The term of this Agreement shall commence on the date hereof as first written above and [...

Q & A with John Gillies — Knowledge Manager

Posted on February 22, 2010
I recently asked John Gillies, the director of practice support at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, for his thoughts on lawyers, how they write what they write, and what attorneys — especially the least experienced among them — can do to improve their writing skills...

Setting Logotype ? Part III

Posted on February 12, 2010
In our last installment on setting logotype, (Setting Logotype ? Part II), we examined why logotypes are usually set as images, rather than text. Now, let’s see how popular viewers (like web browsers) treat images and text differently. Consider the two V’s below...

Setting Logotype ? Part II

Posted on February 01, 2010
In our last installment on logotype, (Setting Logotype ? Part I), we noted that logotypes are typically stored as images, rather than as text. Because of that, font smoothing — the process used to make type look good at all sizes — can’t be applied to logotype...

How to Write Stuff People Won’t Read

Posted on January 29, 2010
There are several ways to write marketing materials that save readers time, and this introduction to the firm of Bereskin & Parr LLP embodies a few of them: Bereskin & Parr LLP is a leading Canadian intellectual property (IP) law firm serving clients of all sizes, in a variety of industries, domestic and international...

Fuzzy Type in PDFs

Posted on January 26, 2010
I notice that quite a few law firms publish PDFs in which the type isn’t rendered properly. Instead, it looks bold and rough unless you zoom in on it, in which case it looks just fine. Consider the following block of type. The left side is from a PDF published by a Great Big Law Firm; [...

Setting Logotype ? Part I

Posted on January 23, 2010
In an earlier post, we made the distinction between logos (images) and logotypes (stylized text). Now let’s focus on the latter. If you want your firm’s logotype to look good to everyone — including those with iPhones and Blackberries and who-knows-what’s-next — then make sure it looks good at a range of sizes: the more, the better...

Law Firms are Publishers

Posted on January 19, 2010
The largest law firms tend to be very active publishers, attaching a copyright notice to a new publication just about every day. And they have an army of authors at hand ? hundreds of attorneys. Though they function as publishers, most law firms don’t do many of the things that professional publishers (of books, magazines, or [...

Setting Logotype — An Intro

Posted on January 18, 2010
Your law firm probably doesn’t have a logo. Few do. But it very likely has a logotype, which it uses in place of a logo. What’s the difference between them? A logo is an image; a logotype is stylized type. Logo Logotype Both logo and logotype (and other elements) distinguish one entity (e...

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