Legal Writing

Law Firms are Publishers

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 newspapers) do as a matter of course.

One of those things is this — most law firms don’t have editors review what their authors write. In fact, the whole notion of having an editorial review process is an alien concept to most attorneys (including those managing very large law firms).

That’s too bad, because those firms are able to publish things that can drive business away, rather than attract it.

Case in Point

Consider the following, the intro to this article “On The Enforceability Of State Bars To Discretionary Clauses.”

In 2009, several courts considered whether state laws that bar discretionary clauses in plan provisions governing the administration of benefit claims were preempted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (?ERISA?) and, if so, whether they were saved from preemption by virtue of ERISA?s savings clause.

If an editor reviews this article before it’s published, he can’t help but notice a problem in the logic of the intro. No court is going to rule that a state law is both preempted and saved from preemption, now is it?

This simply has to be fixed — for the sake of the author as well as the firm. And here’s why. It portrays the author as a careless writer, and that’s a liability for the author, described by the firm as “a prolific writer on cutting-edge ERISA litigation issues;” and it portrays the firm as one that can’t possibly be sincere about its commitment to excellence — not if it doesn’t even review what it publishes.

So, what would a skilled and experienced editor do with this?

Very likely, he’d revise it like so:

In 2009, several courts considered whether state laws that bar discretionary clauses in benefits plans were preempted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (?ERISA?) or whether they were saved from preemption by ERISA?s savings clause.

After that, readers won’t have a good reason to question the author’s skills, or the firm’s commitment to excellence (or whether it even reviews its associates’ work).

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Of course, most attorneys aren’t used to working with editors. By and large, those who haven’t worked with skilled and experienced editors express fear — fear that an editor might make a mistake and reword something that shouldn’t be reworded.

Well, that’s just not so. Good editors don’t turn good copy into bad; they save busy attorneys from letting others see the mistakes that busy attorneys make.

Full post as published by Set in Style on January 19, 2010 (boomark / email).