Andy Mergendahl negotiates and analyzes contracts for a national commercial bank. This gives him lots of opportunities to rant about bad legal writing. Andy worked as a Certified Student Attorney at the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office, as a Judicial Law Clerk in Minnesota's 2nd District, and as a solo practitioner in Wisconsin and Minnesota. He admires effective trial lawyers and acerbic songwriters. Before law school Andy served in the U.S. Army, worked in hazardous waste management, and spent 10 years as a graphic artist. His favorite typeface will always be Garamond. He lives in Hudson, Wisconsin, with his wife, two kids, and two cats. Follow him on Twitter at @andymergendahl or Google+ at AndyMergendahl
I’m posting this on a Saturday, and if you’re working today, especially in a cubicle, this post is dedicated to you.
I work for a big bank and I am a lawyer. And I work in a cubicle. My boss manages 5 lawyers, and he works in a cubicle. That’s just how it is. There are, I believe, quite a few people at the bank who earn double what I earn that work in cubicles too. So I’m not saying I’m being singled out.
Criminal law is under increasing pressure to change, particularly in how it deals with drugs. The War on Drugs has been raging for nearly a century, at a cost of perhaps a trillion dollars.
But it wasn’t always so.
Who’s afraid of legal writing in plain English? A lot of lawyers. Since I started writing about legal writing, I’ve been amazed at how entrenched so many lawyers seem to be against the notion that legal writing should be as easy to understand as possible to the widest audience possible.
But that notion seems to strike fear into the hearts of many, I suspect because it seems to strike at the traditional lawyering culture that in the post-Great Recession economy seems in danger of disintegrating.
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The right to a trial by jury in a criminal case is perhaps the most revered element of the American criminal justice system. Putting one’s fate in the hands of fellow citizens, rather than in the hands of the government, provides us with an important protection against government overreach or the politicization of criminal prosecutions. But can one really expect justice if the jury isn’t made up of one’s peers?
Another, perhaps even more important problem, is how a jury relies so heavily on eyewitness testimony to determine what in fact happened. Putting an eyewitness on the stand to either support or undercut the prosecution’s argument that the defendant did what the complaint or indictment said he did has long been considered the “gold standard” of evidence. This is the kind of evidence the jury will give more weight than any other. But the sad fact is that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
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When it comes to choosing juries that reflect the community, we’ve got a real problem. I’ve written about demographics and juries, but let’s take a closer look at why juries tend to be whiter, wealthier, and more suburban than they should be, and how that affects outcomes.
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People create blogs to attract readers. And in other news, fire is hot.
But how to attract readers? Sure, you can follow Sam’s advice and strive to write well on topics you’re knowledgeable about. I’ve tried that. I’ve combined my experience with my own independent study to provide a lot of sober advice on good lawyering. Almost all those posts were greeted with a yawn, followed, I suspect, by an immediate click over to Buzzfeed.
I’ve also had a handful of posts get rather popular all at once. I’ve been wondering why, so I conducted an entirely unscientific study (okay, I thought about it for a while). You really should follow Sam’s advice—strive for informative, useful content. But when you want to mix it up a little, here are my Top 5 ways to get eyeballs on your posts.
One rainy Saturday, in my first year of law school, the Career Services Office had a big Career Day event. One of the presentations was by a lawyer who had recently gone solo after working first at a large firm and then at a mid-sized firm.
I’ll never forget it. The man laid out, in no uncertain terms, what life is like for a new associate. I still owe him thanks for that. He came across as an arrogant jerk. But one can forgive that if the jerk tells you important truths.
This is what I learned from the Man in the Grey Suit.
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Writing well is difficult. It requires a lot of time and patience. And it’s made more difficult when one has to ignore one’s earliest teaching on the subject.
I fondly recall my elementary school teachers. Well, most of them. And it’s true that a lot of rules they taught me (say please and thank you, wait your turn, use a tissue, not your sleeve) have served me well throughout life.
But our teachers, with the best of intentions, often teach us writing rules that are simply incorrect when we grow up and strive to write better than a third-grader.
Here are three rules you may have learned back in grade school that you should forget.
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Be honest: have you ever deemed anything? Me either.
The quickest way to improve your legal writing is to eliminate legalese, jargon, and bloat. I wrote about the need to eliminate shall from your writing, and created a bit of a kerfuffle by doing so—some lawyers seem to have an almost romantic attachment to it.
I also urged you to stop using such to mean this, that, these, those, or the.
Now, let’s deal with deem. Let’s deal with it by putting it out of our misery.
These are dark days. While law schools and Biglaw continue business pretty much as usual, the good people at Law School Transparency continue to track how the lost generation of lawyers with no real job prospects grows every year.
Steven J. Harper, a Harvard Law grad and 30-year litigator at Kirkland & Ellis, has weighed in on the problems and suggested some solutions in The Lawyer Bubble. It’s the perfect book for a terrible time.
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