Bryan Garner—in true Bryan Garner fashion—just emailed his edits for this post, as noted below. I hope this note meets his legal writing approval… — Ed.
I first heard of Bryan Garner while clerking for the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota. I was having a difficult time crafting an appellate brief on some case involving criminal fraud. My supervisor looked at me, pointed to his bookshelf and said, “Grab the red one.” He was pointing to Bryan Garner’s The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style. As the saying goes, I would never be the same.
There’s little doubt that the man is a legal writing genius. Editor of Black’s Law Dictionary. Prolific writer of almost every book on legal style written in the last ten years (or at least the good ones), he now spends his time writing, interviewing judges about writing, and teaching lawyers how to write. I was lucky enough to join him for the latter on Tuesday for six hours as he schooled 40 Minneapolis lawyers in the fine points of “Advanced Legal Writing & Editing.”
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Last week I joined Sam Glover of Lawyerist and Blois Olson of Tunheim Partners to teach a seminar on websites, online marketing and social media to 100+ lawyers in the process of hanging out their own shingles as part of a day-long “How to How to Start & Build a Successful Law Firm” CLE.
In preparation for the course (and because it’s fun) I reached out to my followers on Twitter to get some advice for these daring lawyers about to start their own firm.
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No one taught me to budget in law school. The financial aid folks said little more than “good luck paying off your $70,000 in debt,” and I was on my way. Years later, done with law school and thankfully bringing in some income, I was at a total loss as to how to start paying off student loans and daily expenses, set up a budget, and save for my future. That is, until I discovered Mint.
Mint is a user-friendly online personal finance and budgeting website. The NYT Magazine’s Virginia Heffernan reviewed Mint, saying:
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I have been asked by many attorneys on Twitter how to cut down the clutter. Thousands of tweets float through your feed every minute, every hour, every day. It is so overwhelming for many of us, that sometimes it just seems easier to tune out. Sign off. Stop tweeting.
Don’t give up on Twitter.
Learn to use (and create) state-specific attorney Twitter lists. I have listed a dozen to get you started.
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You passed the bar but you have no job. Or you have a job, but your start date has been deferred until March and your loan repayments start in November. Or maybe you blew the bar entirely this time around. And to top it all off, Thanksgiving is just around the corner, so your whole family is going to be sitting around a table, cutting into a bird and staring you down, asking, “So, what’s new?” and “Why don’t you have a job yet?” and “Aren’t your loans due soon?”
Maybe you are crying a lot, yelling at your significant other for no apparent reason, or drinking more than you know you should. If any of this sounds familiar, you could have a common case of the post bar exam blues.
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I jumped onto the LinkedIn bandwagon in college, added all my classmates in law school, and reached out to old colleagues to re-connect once I was looking for new jobs and legal opportunities. I have pushed law students to join LinkedIn, told lawyers how to use LinkedIn (and other social media sites) ethically, and done one-on-one LinkedIn trainings for legal professionals and law schools.
But recently my tune has changed. I have stopped signing onto the site. I have started ignoring my LinkedIn e-mails.
Why you should unclutter LinkedIn
Sit back and think about how you are using LinkedIn. Do you ever sign on anymore to update your status? Have you marked as “spam” all the e-mails you get from the site because they are annoyingly piling up in your inbox, unread? Was the last time you reached out to connect with someone on the site months ago?
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Virginia Heffernan would have us believe we are experiencing a “Facebook Exodus,” or so she lamented in the New York Times magazine this weekend. Describing the packs of former users signing off the site for good, she wondered if Facebook was no more than a college clique, doomed to become an “online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages, with packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit.”
The description—although poetic—is dead wrong.
As of August 4, 2009, there were about 78 million users on Facebook, 40% of them over the age of 35. Facebook’s users in every demographic are increasing, not decreasing, with certain demographics like those over the age of 55 increasing by 514% from January through July 2009.
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If you are taking the bar exam next week, you are probably already getting advice from friends, family, high school buddies on Facebook, and any other random people you run into when you are not curled up beneath your BarBri study aids.
I have also been getting advice from lawyers I communicate with on Twitter, and since it has been so helpful to me, I thought I would share the love. I sent out this tweet yesterday:
“Please send me your bar exam advice (in 140 char.) for a @lawyerist post this week. Thanks!”
I got responses from lawyers from Minnesota, Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado, Utah, Texas, Maryland, Washington, New Jersey, and California. Here are my top ten:
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As I signed off of the American Bar Association’s CLE webcast and phone conference yesterday, Ethical Implications of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World, I was left, not surprisingly, with more questions than answers. The CLE provided no magic bullet or easy catch-all answer, but the speakers—Micah Buchdahl, Michael P. Downey, and Scott G. Wolfe, Jr.—did raise interesting legal issues and some controversial points surrounding lawyers blogging, tweeting, facebooking and connecting on LinkedIn.
Below is my best attempt to capture the highlights of the conversation, and to provide a forum for you to join me in the comments below in examining some of the questions raised by this CLE.
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A colleague sent me a fascinating legal ethics question today via email. Can a lawyer in City A go to Facebook and change the regional network that she lists on her personal Facebook account from City A where she lives and works as an attorney to City B in order to investigate a witness or opposing party who lives in City B?
(Note: This question assumes that the witness or opposing party to be investigated has opened up potentially valuable information on her Facebook page to the thousands of other individuals who list their regional network on Facebook as City B, but not to those listing their network as City A. )
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