My blawging inspiration,  What About Clients?, posts often about legal writing.  Both Holden and Dan are in favor of writing well, though Holden appears to be the more bloodthirsty of the two.  But I get their drift, and agree wholeheartedly.  Communicating through written expression is an absolute necessity in the lawyer’s arsenal of skills.

But there comes a time when enough is enough. 

I represent a number of lawyers in various matters.  Shameless self-aggrandizing point:  There’s a reason why other lawyers select me to be their lawyer.  Lawyers are not easy clients.  Aside from trying to get them on the phone when you need something, or their insistence that they “get it” when they don’t, they want to read everything you write in their case.

Now, criminal law is not considered particularly paper intensive, as compared to other practice areas where people think they are doing litigation when all they are doing is papering each other to death.  But I take my motions and memoranda of law quite seriously, and put in a great deal of effort to make my arguments fly soar.  It’s not just a matter of professional pride, but since I do appellate as well as trial practice, I recognize the importance of establishing sound legal arguments to avoid claims of waiver or lack of preservation later. 

As I write, I send off my work to my clients for their review.  Some clients just feel the weight, and that’s enough for them.  But my lawyer clients are very different.  They will pore over a document, parsing every verb and adjective into the middle of the night.  For some reason, they tend to leave nouns alone.

If I don’t get a half dozen phone calls about a particular set of papers, I find a dozen emails in my box every morning asking the crucial question, “Shouldn’t this verb be in the past pluperfect tense?”  “Get scrod,” I mumble to myself.  Or the message left on voice mail at 3:32 A.M. asking what the proper bluebook form is for an Idaho citation.  Yeah, that’s the one that will win or lose the case.

I appreciate other people reading my work.  They will find the occasional missing letter, or inadvertent comma.  They will question an awkwardly phrased sentence that seemed perfectly normal to me at the time.  Since communication is about reception, not just conception, it is critically important that the message I think I’m sending is the same message that is received by the reader.  What I think doesn’t matter nearly as much as what the reader thinks.  I’m down with that, and I really like to have someone edit my work.

But there comes a point when all the i’s are dotted, all the t’s are crossed, and staring harder at the page of characters brings diminishing returns.  Arguments can be tweaked to the point where their purpose is lost, their meaning is muddled in a morass of unduly-detailed edits.  Clients frequently are obsessed with the most trivial details, which loom far larger than life when they read about them over and over and over. 

They suddenly take on earth-shattering significance, when the reality is that they are at best peripherally important and at worst totally irrelevant.  Litigants are particularly bad at discerning irrelevant detail.  They think everything that happened in their life is of monumental importance.

It’s up to the lawyer to allow clients their chance to speak their mind, have their input and feel as if they are empowered to have a say in their case.  But it is also the lawyer’s job to know when to put a stop to it.  Sure, it’s their life and if they want to screw up the papers, why stop them.  It’s unpleasant.  It can piss off the client.  It’s not as empathetic as some touchy-feely proponents think it should be.  But like a good parent, a good lawyer knows that the end-game, prevailing, takes precedence.  Sometimes, you have to say no.

Besides, if you don’t put your foot down, they’ll drive you nuts.