While I primarily practice corporate law, I have recently been branching out into litigation as a result of my love for writing. Before this recent switch in practice areas, I had fulfilled my passion for writing by editing other people's pleadings. I can appreciate how horrid that sounds to most people, but I actually enjoy it. And I don't just edit pleadings, I also edit emails... from professional to personal, pride-saving emails. I am sometimes referred to as the "Ghostwriter" for my friends.
My boyfriend is a lawyer. He is also Irish. And he is a litigator (a "good" litigator... both in the sense that he works for the good guys-defending doctors and lawyers, and in that he is good at what he does). Sometimes, however, his tone needs a little work. He asked me to look over one of his motions and "edit for tone." I chewed him out for coming across as pompous. He was surprised by my critique and said he had worked really hard to "tone" it down (pun intended). I chalked it up to the Irish in him.
This week, I received an assignment to draft my very own motion. This is big news for me, and I'm excited to have the opportunity to do some persuasive writing. As is very much my style, I waited until the last minute to start writing, getting all of the "little things" out of the way so I could really focus all of my attention on the task at hand. Naturally, my assignment was kind of a "stretch" argument (which is probably why it landed on my desk... Oh, let her give it a shot. It's not like we're going to win, but she can't really lose it for us either.). When the argument was first presented to me, I was worried about having to persuasively make an argument that I thought sucked. But... the more research I did and the more I thought about it, I found myself thinking that maybe we were in the right after all. The "maybe we were right" turned to "we're definitely right," which turned to "how dare they sue my client over this!!! How DARE they!!!" As the hours went on, case law flowed, and my arguments developed, I became more and more convinced that we were right... that I was right... and that this opposing attorney (who had such seemingly winning ideas when I initially read his brief) was ... well, nothing short of an idiot. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and by the end, I felt really good about my efforts. In my mind, we had obviously won and no reasonable judge could rule against us. I set my draft down and took a two hour break (to go buy myself something off the sale rack at Banana Republic because I. Had. Earned it.).
When I sat back down to begin the revisions process... I was blown away. I hardly recognized myself in that pleading. Who was this person?!?! I could hear the author rolling her eyes throughout the entire piece. I had broken all of my own cardinal sins of legal drafting... the same ones I had harped on my Irish boyfriend for only days earlier. Don't use words like "obviously" or "clearly" because you're over-selling it and it's not persuasive. Do not act like opposing counsel got his law degree yesterday because (well, first off, chances are he's way more experienced than you, and...) the court really doesn't like that. And the big overarching theme: Be nice. You can be nice and still be right. I could not believe that I was struggling with this...
I immediately emailed my boyfriend, who suddenly didn't seem so Irish, and apologized for making him out to be a mean ogre. We laughed about our stubbornness and self-righteousness... about how funny it is that what had seemed like a toilet-argument two days earlier had suddenly become the clearest, most common-sense thing I had ever heard. Maybe the self-righteousness derives from the fact that for two days, or ten days, or two months, or a year, that toilet-argument is our life. We eat, sleep and breath that argument. We defend that argument all the way to the end. And by that end, it doesn't even matter if the argument was right in the first place. By the end, we're so beyond the technicalities and the law school elements, that all that matters is whether we won or not.
I can see how litigious and self-serving that all sounded. But at the end of the day, I believe this is why the system (generally speaking) works. You take a bunch of self-righteous, stubborn and competitive people and you pit them against each other to solve other people's problems. The clients' problems become the lawyers' problems and when you combine that with the lawyers' pride... Fireworks. It really is genius in a way... the design of it all. But really, I do think we would further the profession so much more if all of us could just rein it in a little bit. We can still "zealously" represent our clients (I heard a rumor that they removed "zealously" from the ethics rules because lawyers were a little too "zealous"), but we can also be respectful about it.
Funny enough, above, I initially wrote "reign" it in, as opposed to "rein" it in. Obviously "reign" being associated with royalty (There's a 'g' in both reign and king). Oh the grammatical irony....
I will take this opportunity to conclude with a note that I don't think I have an ethical violation in disclosing my commentary on my experience in this case. Having said that, I also feel compelled to tell my readers that you won't find my pleading out there in legal cyberspace. Ghostwriter strikes again.
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