How many times have you been ready to file that brief, only to learn that it is a page too long?

Of course, you first read through the brief to see if there is anything that is truly redundant and should be deleted. Then you resort to the tricks. I first look for paragraphs that end with just a word or two on the last line; if I can delete just a word or two from the paragraph, I can get rid of an entire line. Then I resort to removing the word "the" whenever possible, creating shorter defined terms, more short cites for cases, and moving text to footnote. Deanna Carper-Lilly at the Writing Corner has put together a comprehensive list of ways to "tighten up that manuscript." Deanna's context is general writing but certainly provides helpful tips for legal writers. She refers to the process as washing the dirty laundry and even "hums the old song 'I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair' for the movie South Pacific" while she does the editing. That's a trick I have not tried.

Thanks to Legal Writing Prof Blog for this link.

For several years, I have subscribed to Marylaine Block's weekly email of "neat new stuff" she finds on the internet. I recommend that you do the same. Here are some of the neat new things for this week:

Freedom-to-tinker is a blog written by Ed Felton, a professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and J. Alex Halderman, a graduate student in Computer Science at Princeton University. According to Ed and Alex, the focus of the weblog "is on issues related to legal regulation of technology, and especially on legal attempts to restrict the right of technologists and citizens to tinker with technological devices. But we reserve the right to write about anything that strikes our fancy."

A May 2006 CRS Report for Congress on Government Access to Phone Calling Activity and Related Records: Legal Authorities.

Information about the "Bad Boss Contest" on the Working America website. The winner gets a free vacation. All you bad bosses out there can relax because entries including names of companies or personal names or identifiers will not be posted. There are weekly semifinalist competitions and voting for the grand prize winner ends in August, so you have plenty of time to enter and vote. The website includes almost a thousand stories already, so there are plenty for you to enjoy!

Lynn Gaertner-Johnston at businesswritingblog.com has an editing contest that you might want to consider.
The task -- produce the best edited version of a 139-word job announcement. The job announcement is a doozy. Almost any editing will be an improvement, but I suspect the competition for "best edited" will be tough.

Lynn will choose the winner based on her best judgment. As she notes, however, "everyone who enters will win the satisfaction of rewriting a bad sentence and sending it to someone."
Good luck!

Appellate Law and Practice has a link to audiobooks at Internet Archive.

You can listen to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and even oral argument in cases like Miranda, Roe v. Wade, and Ginzburg v. U.S. The Archive includes many more valuable resources that are not readily available at our desks.

The California Judicial Council's website includes discussion of plain English jury instructions that were approved in July 2003.

The website include a "Civil Jury Instructions Resource Center" that compares some BAJI instructions with the Plain English version. For example,

BAJI 2.21 reads: Failure of recollection is common. Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon.
The latter sentence is stated in triple negatives. The comparable Judicial Council instruction (number 107) reads: People often forget things or make mistakes in what they remember.
This is an example of the use of basic English language principles to make instructions simpler.

Or here is discussion of that tricky concept of preponderance of the evidence:

BAJI 2.60 reads: "Preponderance of the evidence" means evidence that has more convincing force than that opposed to it. If the evidence is so evenly balanced that you are unable to say that the evidence on either side of an issue preponderates, your finding on that issue must be against the party who had the burden of proving it.
These are familiar words to lawyers. But the task force had to ask whether the average juror ever used the noun "preponderance"� and, more pointedly, the verb "preponderates."� The comparable Judicial Council instruction (number 200) reads: When I tell you that a party must prove something, I mean that the party must persuade you, by the evidence presented in court, that what he or she is trying to prove is more likely to be true than not true. This is sometimes referred to as "the burden of proof."

The instructions are available at the Judicial Council website, subject to the stated licensing restrictions, and should be helpful to all lawyers who want their juries to be instructed in "plain English."

I always enjoy reading Adamsdrafting and the entry today about "representations and warranties" in contracts was no exception. We have all seen and/or written that standard section in contracts that lists "representations and warranties."� Ken discusses what, if anything, that heading means in the context of subsequent actions for breach. For example, if a particular promise or statement is characterized only as a "warranty,"� can its breach support a claim for misrepresentation or fraud? Ken concludes:

So here's the upshot: There's no modern support for the notion that whether you use representation or warranty (or represents or warrants) in a contract would affect the remedies available to a party. Instead, there's authority for the converse. Whatever purpose you might be seeking to accomplish through such a distinction, you'd be much better off using other, more explicit language to accomplish it.

This analysis has application beyond contracts. In any kind of legal writing (or non-legal for that matter), the best course is to decide what your purpose is and use explicit language to accomplish that purpose.

Appellate Law and Practice has a link to an article on the Utah State Bar website (via the Insurance Defense Law Blog) about how to set up an out-of-state deposition.

If you frequently set up these depositions, the article probably repeats what you know. If, however, you set them up so infrequently that you have to start over with the research each time, this article could be a handy reminder.

I have been a faithful and grateful user of the tremendous resources at www.llrx.com for many years. If you do not know about LLRX, check it out and you will be glad you did.

Here are two recent articles that are especially helpful to legal researchers:

"Discovery Update - by Fios Inc. -- Controlling the Accidental Release of Digital Information"

"Google's New U.S. Government Search." The article compares the new Google resource with Firstgov and has helpful information about how to search and personalize the Google portal. "The new Google U.S. Government Search and the relatively new FirstGov Search are useful search tools. They are part of tool chest, but they are not the only tools."

A few days ago, I mentioned a law journal article by Natalie M. Gomez-Velez, Internet Access to Court Records - Balancing Public Access and Privacy, Loyola Law Review, Vol. 51, p. 365, 2005,
Here is a blog article (thanks to the Virtual Chase) discussing one court's redaction of sensitive information.

 According to the article, the Superior Court, District of Columbia, has started removing dates of birth from its criminal index system. The article is on pibuzz.com, the "'Official' Blog of PI Magazine." According to PIBuzz, "the unfounded concern for identity theft is cited by other courts as the basis for truncating or removing the date of birth information from public records."


I am not sure I agree with PIBuzz's characterization of the concern for identity theft as "unfounded," but I will be interested to see if other courts follow suit.

I read about this article at Law Librarian Blog.

Natalie M. Gomez-Velez has written an excellent article, Internet Access to Court Records - Balancing Public Access and Privacy, Loyola Law Review, Vol. 51, p. 365, 2005, addressing the multitude of issues arising from public access to court records.

We all know that court records have always been "public," but you had to drive to the courthouse and find a parking place and go to the clerk's office and check out the file to read those records. Now, with just a PACER account, you can read everything that is filed in almost every federal court in the country. This easy access sure makes life convenient for many lawyers, but it is sort of frightening to think about how the access can be abused. As Gomez-Velez points out, the records can include Social Security numbers, detailed medical information, and sensitive personal information in family law cases involving children. Many lawyers file complete depositions in connection with motions for summary judgment, even though depositions are not limited by strict relevancy standards and often include information that is embarrassing and scandalous.

So what do we do? Gomez-Velez has some good points and identifies important factors that courts should consider in balancing the competing interests in privacy and access.

I hope that all of you will read the article and be inspired to volunteer to assist your local bar association in addressing these important issues.

Tim W. at Mother Tongue Annoyances had a blog entry last week that addressed an interesting point of grammar -- subjunctives.

Some time ago, the Chicago Manual of Style website featured a question about subjunctives. The writer asked about the sentence, "I just wish she was/were still alive," and said that some people in his office did not think that "were" sounded right in that context. The answer was that "were"is correct because it is a subjunctive. The Chicago Manual of Style went further and noted that "if it doesn't sound right to your colleagues, is it because they are under thirty? (I have a feeling nobody teaches the subjunctive anymore.)."� I confess that I am over thirty (and proud of it) and, even though I know what subjunctives are, they sometimes just don't sound right anyway.

Bartley.com explains subjunctives like this: "These sentences all contain verbs in the subjunctive mood, which is used chiefly to express the speaker's attitude about the likelihood or factuality of a given situation."�  Of all the descriptions I have heard, I think that is most understandable to me.
Tim has some good rules for the use subjunctives and examples (from Get It Write) The discussion at Bartlby.com is also helpful.

I don't care how old you are, most people agree that subjunctives don't sound quite right. Keep these resources handy and turn to them when you have a question on subjunctives.

WSJ.com is running a series on the life of four summer associates across the country. I don't think you can access the series without a subscription to wsj.com, but anyone can read the comments at the WSJ lawblog. I found the comments to be more entertaining than the stories about the summer associates. Check it out and see if it brings back any memories.

Kitty Burns Florey has a new book coming out in October that will address something that I mentioned in this blog a few weeks ago – diagramming sentences!! The title is Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog : The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences.
According to the book description at Amazon.com,

Florey studies the practice in a charming and funny look back at its odd history, its elegant method, and its rich, ongoing possibilities. From a discussion of its birth at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, to a consideration of how it works, to a revealing look at some of literature's most famous sentences in diagram, it is a charming and often inspiring tale. Along the way, Florey explores the importance of good grammar and answers language lovers' most pressing questions: Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper a better grammarian? Can knowing how to diagram a sentence make your life better? And what's Gertrude Stein got to do with any of it?

If you enjoy diagramming sentences or if you had no idea how to diagram a sentence, you should read this book.
(Thanks to Nicole Stockdale for alerting me to this book.)

John McIntyre at the Baltimore Sun has an interesting blog entry today about words that are frequently misused. I cringe when I read lists like this because I always see words that I have used incorrectly.
In addition to pointing out the mistakes, John also provides some helpful reminders for correct usages. For example, "comprise is the box that contains the contents, not the contents themselves. The alphabet comprises 26 letters. The alphabet is composed of 26 letters." � But this was my favorite:

Podium. A Web site on public speaking offers the advice "Stand behind the podium, don't lean on it or slouch behind it." � Crouch, maybe. Apart from the comma-splice run-on, the problem here is that a podium is a platform on which a speaker stands. Podium, from the Greek podion, foot; same root as podiatry. A lectern is the stand on which the speaker rests notes.

Thanks for the pointers John.

It seems like some organization is always ranking cities on various subjects. Old Spice recently ranked the Sweatiest Cities. My home, Nashville, ranked 43, thank you very much. Interestingly, however, Nashville ranked 17 just three years ago. I don't know what changed but I think it is a change for the better.

Rory Perry has information and a list of courts that have live and/or archived webcasts. I watched an argument in the Florida Supreme Court earlier this week -- amazing!

Looking for clothing to tell the world that you are a lawyer? Here is another option at Tortfeasor.com.

Sabrina Pacific always has interesting resources at bespacific.com and at llrx.com.

One recent entry is a list of the top 25 search phrases used to search for documents on the CIA website.
I was surprised to see that "Iraq"� (366) was used as a search term only two times more than "area 51" (364). The search term "ufo" beat them both with 1066 searches. I had to look this one up, but "pbsuccess" was searched 212 times. According to Wikipedia, "Operation PBSUCCESS was a CIA-organized covert operation that overthrew the democratically-elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954."

Most of those terms were definitely not on my mind in the past month or two, but certainly generated interest from people who search the CIA website.

Pointoflaw.com reports this morning that Northwestern law professor Ronen Avraham has compiled a database of tort reform. The report is over 1000 pages and, for each reform, includes "the effective date, a short description of the reform, whether or not the jury is allowed to know about the reform, whether the reform was upheld or struck down by the states' supreme courts, as well as whether it was amended by the state legislator."

Benjamin Spencer at Federal Civil Practice Bulletin has a blog entry today about a very interesting article in a recent issue of the Minnesota Law Review. The article, "he Supreme Court, the Rules Enabling Act, and the Politicization of the Federal Rules: Constitutional and Statutory Implications,"� by Martin H. Redish and Uma M. Amuluru, was part of the 2005 Lindquist & Vennum Symposium on "The Future of the Supreme Court: Institutional Reform and Beyond." Webcasts of the presentations at the symposium are available at the Minnesota Law Review website.