photo credit: coalandice

Isn’t it remarkable how time always flies in the spring and summer and crawls along in the fall and winter? We’re already into the second week of May. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss the rest of it. In fact, keep your eyes wide open and enjoy the following stories and blog posts:

• S.cotus at Appellate points out the silliness in CNN legal commentator Sunny Hostin’s rant about pro-se defendants.
• Here’s one way to avoid jury duty: get high outside the courthouse. Of course, that all but ensures repeat trips to the building, but hey, at least its not for jury duty.
• Law Geek index is at 100 with this post, fantasizing about introducing real legal concepts to Grand Theft Auto IV.
• It might be a good idea to let your client know that you’re being prosecuted too.
• Mark Bennett wonders if there is a market for the hired-gun prosecutor.
• The Fifth Circuit comes close to reversing another conviction for (not so?) faulty voir dire.
• Grits turns his attention to the next frontier in wrongful convictions: Arson.
• Lawmakers in Missoura are voting on a proposal to require proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote.
• Three eight-graders suspended for not standing during the pledge of allegiance.
• Iowa’s Supreme Court approves of indefinite confinement of “Sexually Violent Predators”.
• Are cameras reducing crime in Philly? asks the Judgment Day blog.
• The Judge who sued the Korean dry cleaners for $65mil (and lost) is now suing to get his job back (and only $1mil in damages).
• Norm Pattis takes issue with CJ Rogers’ proposal to allow camera phones into courts. I disagree.
• Prof. Berman points to an editorial on racial inequality and drug arrests and Scott goes in-depth. (Berman’s also making a short-list of possible SCOTUS appointees).
• Then there’s the whole “rape by fraud” melee.
• Has the defense bar been gutted by fear?
• The Legal Satyricon has the latest on the AutoAdmit/Yale defamation lawsuit.
• The CT Lege’s special session may include ethics reform.
• The Windypundit has another radical idea for reform: Permit lawyers to use peremptories on judges.

What? You want more?

Good old stupidity under pressure:

Finally. I was beginning to think that CT lawyers were going to continue to shun the web and the blawgosphere. I just stumbled across this new blog today, creatively titled the Connecticut Criminal Lawyer Blog. Written by a solo, Nicholas Adamucci, the blog has a few informational posts, but nothing “bloggy” yet. Hopefully, he’ll get around to writing blog posts and not just regurgitating statute provisions. Unfortunately, comments are not enabled, so maybe he’ll see the traffic from here.

Okay, so perhaps not as pronounced as in the title (and certainly not bad spelling), but as this National Law Journal article points out, lawyers are getting worse at legal writing.

Like other writing coaches, Garner sees the influence of technology in attorney writing, and, in many ways, he is not amused.

“They are losing concentration with what they’re writing about,” said Garner, who also is co-author with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia of Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, which was released last month.

This piece spends a considerable amount of time explaining how advances in technology serve to interrupt the “flow” of a writer’s thoughts and create distractions. These distractions prevent us from writing in a coherent and simple manner.

“It’s a problem of distraction,” said Jennifer Murphy Romig, a legal writing and research instructor at Emory University School of Law and a writing coach to law firms.

She notes that interference with writing has always been present. A few years ago, it was computer solitaire, she said, and before that it was the old-fashioned crossword puzzle. But she describes today’s distractions — including texting, e-mail on a desktop computer, Blackberry messages and online news alerts — as “more aggressive.”

In addition, most of those distractions involve human communication, which makes them all the more attractive to attend to rather than drafting a brief on, say, jurisdiction.

My problem with writing is slightly different. As my readers (and co-workers) will surely attest, I often don’t know when to stop or how to get where I want to go. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m always learning, trying to get better.

I write (for work) like I think: mostly meandering. It’s not that there isn’t a (to me) logical sequence. There is. I just leave it out and expect the reader to follow. And then there are the times when I’ve had enough. I’ve spent 5 pages setting up the law and the facts and started making the argument and I think to myself: Well, that’s pretty clear. So I move on.

Like this.

Technological innovations also have an up-side, as anyone who has used spell-check will know.

Word processing basics, such as spell-check, passive-voice detection and subject-verb disagreement prompters can make more time for “what’s really hard about writing,” she said.

Advances in legal research also have improved writing, she said. Before online research, Shepardizing a case, for example, required a trip to the library to page through creaky volumes.

But the use of electronic research can create problems, especially for beginners, she said. All cases in electronic form look basically alike, she said.

That last line is a lead-in to a bizarre theory that if you don’t hold the book in your hand, you’re likely to miss that a case is from a non-binding jurisdiction or from the 1920s.

Or it could just be a cover-up for inattentiveness. I’m just saying.

I think these “problems” are not confined to legal writing. The same could be said of trial lawyering, communication, negotiation. We are a constantly distracted society and either you have it in you to focus and push everything else aside, or you don’t. In which case, you better learn how to multi-task well.  In the end, all that matters is the client and how effectively you represent him/her.

See? What the heck did that last paragraph have to do with anything? Come join the joyride!

(PS: Obviously, my work is vetted before I turn it in [for the most part], so don’t run around thinking my briefs are awful. They’re not.)

HT: WAC?

Now enjoy the Joyride:

From the Fail Blog