Monkey see. Monkey do?
Take 4 sentence-snippers to the zoo:

🔪 “there are”

“Four monkeys play at the zoo today.”

—is shorter than—

“There are four monkeys playing at the zoo today.”

When I started, I didn’t even know how to “tag” someone. In fact, I didn’t even know it was called a “tag.”

I recall asking someone (who seemed non judgmental):

— “How do you make it so a person’s name lights up in blue bold so they get a notification that I mentioned them?”

I was 47, and I had no clients.

What firm wanted a 47 year-old, BigLaw burn-out with no book of business?

I felt old, useless, unemployable.

I tried to become a law professor, but that failed fast.

Dear Legal Writer,

I wanted to title a post, “do’s & don’ts.” But I had no clue how to make either word plural. So I enlisted my friend, Lindsey Lawton, to help.

Here’s what we found out:

I’m spending the weekend in a final push on the book:

going through the last round of comments from the final proofreader.

A surreal feeling suddenly came over me on this early June morning, and I thought I’d share.

It made me hate legal writing.
It made me never want to write.

Why am I telling you this?

Well, law school grades just came back.
Maybe you bombed writing, too?

The biggest complaint I hear from associates about legal writing is that the partners are constantly rewriting everything they write.

The result is that associates lack confidence in their legal writing.

Dear Legal Writer,

Here’s everything you need to know:

🔸 To begin, “myriad” means “a countless number of specified things,” (Oxford English Dictionary), or “too many to count.”

Here are 7 sayings that I heard for the first time at a firm.

Learn these today, so you won’t hear them, feel clueless, and be left to wonder.

⬇️

🔸 “I forgot how ‘green’ they are.”

It’s called “Dear 1L: Notes to Nurture a New Legal Writer,” and it’s due out June 25, 2024.

🔹 If you read it, you’ll learn:

-What to expect every month of 1L
-How to research & write the 1L fall memo

“A triumvirate of murine rodents totally devoid of ophthalmic acuity were observed in a state of rapid locomotion in pursuit of an agriculturalist’s marital adjunct.

Said adjunct then performed triple caudectomy utilizing an acutely honed bladed instrument generally used for the subdivision of edible tissue.

Dear Legal Writer,

I’ve been seeing “plethora” used inappropriately in WAY too many LinkedIn posts from legal peeps recently:

▫️ “We discussed a plethora of topics on the podcast.”
▫️ “Our new expert witness has a plethora of good ideas.”
▫️ “Jane has a plethora of adorable pets at her house.”

🔹 I was hired fresh out of college and had no experience. There were 6 of us, plus a paralegal manager, and she was the only one with prior experience.

—Luckily, when I was brand new here in Sept 2021, Jay’s posts were some of the first in my feed.

—That first year, I didn’t let a work day go by without reading Jay.

We were 4 toddlers strapped across the back seat that day—two to a seatbelt, in the 1972 carpool, as then was the way.

I must have had my mother tell me the story of that morning a million times. It became a bedtime ritual.