Advocate's Studio

Ever fascinated with Wikipedia as legitimate support for meaningful argument, I found this entry by John Gregory at Slaw.ca noteworthy: despite the efforts of the federal attorneys, an appeals court struck down the use of a Wikipedia entry to challenge the status of travel documents in an immigration case. John Timmer at ars technica reported on the incident, with the sweeping statement that court is the one place everyone agrees that Wikipedia does not belong. The case, Lamilem Badasa v. Michael B. Mulkasey, Attorney General of the United States (Court of Appeals opinion linked here) is now back with the Board of Immigration Appeals for review of whether factual grounds exist for the argument against Badasa’s petition apart from Wikipedia entries.

The Court of Appeals did recite a prior case and an article by R. Jason Richards published in Trial, April 2008 that I reference in an earlier blog entry of my own to substantiate its incredulity at the use of Wikipedia.  The cites and quotes bear repeating here:

See also Campbell v. Sec’y of Health and Human Servs., 69 Fed. Cl. 775, 781 (Fed. Cl. 2006) (observing that a review of the Wikipedia website “reveals a pervasive and, for our purposes, disturbing set of disclaimers”); R. Jason Richards, Courting Wikipedia, 44 Trial 62 (Apr. 2008) (“Since when did a Web site that any Internet surfer can edit become an authoritative
source by which law students could write passing papers, experts could provide credible testimony, lawyers could craft legal arguments, and judges could issue precedents?”).

Badasa, supra, no. 07-2276 p. 3 (8th Cir. August 29, 2008) (slip op.).

On the other side (because there always is another side), Lisa Spiro at Digital Scholarship in the Humanities recently posted regarding the growing use of Wikipedia as a respectable academic source. The post is quite interesting and informative and I do recommend a read to see the data, get a good overview of the criticisms and examine Lisa’s responses.

While I agree with the tone of Timmer’s comment, quoted above, I don’t agree with the factual substance and will point the reader back to my original post about the growing number of citations to blogs and wikis in legal opinions. Whether you love or hate Wikipedia, I say this to those who wish to rely on Wikipedia to support their legal arguments: “caveat emptor!”

You are a lawyer or a business person. You must communicate your ideas to others on a regular basis. You pride yourself on the depth of your knowledge in your particular field or practice area, having spent years clearing the hurdles of an elementary, college and graduate education. You are now on the job, earning a living based in large part on the same written communication that secured your passage through a long and challenging educational process.  Throughout your career, you have employed your writing in examinations, papers, letters, briefs, reports and emails. You now are being challenged to write in emerging venues. There is little question that your results are directly affected by how well your thoughts are communicated and how positively your written work is received.

Given your long-standing affiliation with the use of words as a means to your ends, you understandably pride yourself on your written work. But can your written work be improved? Can you polish your communication even further to more effectively sway the judge, the officer, the jury, the client, the boss, the panel or any other audience you may wish to address? Can you tweak your words with just one more pass and drive home your point of view in a more direct and persuasive manner? The answer is always YES, whether you are a writer by trade or a writer by necessity.

Giving your work multiple reads and edits takes valuable time. For attorneys, time is directly related to money, which is easily measured by the hours that otherwise could be devoted to legal billing or rain-making. For business professionals, time spent re-reading, editing or generating written communication takes away from other profitable pursuits involving direct client contact or verbal communication with peers, supervisors or others who can influence your bottom line. More often than not, the calculus of how much your writing and editing time costs yields a substantial number, reaching hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.

This is where I come in. My firm, Advantage Advocates, provides many services related to this cause, including editing and proof-reading of existing documents. We ghostwrite new documents from scratch using your ideas and information. We can support your ideas with research or provide ideas that you have not yet considered. These services are offered at very reasonable rates that most likely are much lower than the value of your time spent performing the same tasks.

Is it worth it to put that extra coat of gloss on your words?  You betcha! My inspiration for writing this obviously self-serving post was my reading of a post by David Zaring over at The Conglomerate on a practice of U.S. Supreme Court Justices and clerks of lifting passages from the winning brief when writing the opinions. Zaring is reporting on the findings of Pamela Corley, a professor at Vanderbilt University, who has measured this phenomenon using plagiarism software. One of the factors that Corley and, in turn, Zaring, suggest may encourage “brief-quoting” is the quality of the brief itself. Zaring also posits that the likelihood the brief will be heavily quoted in the opinion increases with the size of the court’s case load and probably is even greater at the intermediate appellate and district or lower court levels.  It is not the least bit surprising that a court faced with a well-written persuasive brief is more likely to employ that attorney’s words when explaining why it reached a result favorable to that attorney’s clients. I will wager that a similar phenomenon occurs in the business world, where it is easier to rely on a contributor’s well-written passage than it is to reinvent the wheel when preparing a report or white paper.

I see this phenomenon as conclusive support for my raison d’etre. If your work product is better than the competitions’ product, then who is more likely to win the case or seal the deal? If your work product can be improved with the help of an editor, why wouldn’t you employ one to secure your win? And, if it is cheaper to use an editor to hone your words than it is to put that extra time into the project yourself, the case for an editor surely is open and shut!

For many of us, positive public opinion regarding our expertise and professionalism directly relates to the quality of our written work. Your words often are the first or only “face” your audience sees. Your stock value soars when your written work shines. Consider Advantage Advocates to be your “shoe shine girl” – the faithful servant keeping an eye on your polish while you keep an eye on the results!

Back on the Twitter tip, there is nothing better than a willing soul doing the work for you. Adrian Lurssen at JD Supra has this great list of 180 lawyers who Tweet, Twitter, Twit or otherwise report on what they are doing in 140 words or less on a regular basis for the benefit of those willing to listen. So, if you are interested in Twitter from the legal perspective, this might be a great way to jump on in!

Law Librarian Blog has cited findings in the ABA 2008 Legal Technology Survey Report that are very interesting indeed: apparently the number of private sector lawyers employing free on-line legal research has now outstripped the number of lawyers employing fee-based services for the first time – 89% compared to 87%. Although it is not clear from the entry (I admit I haven’t read the Report myself) whether the surveys really compared apples to apples, e.g. case law research to case law research, it certainly shows an interesting trend. Undoubtedly, this must have caught the attention of Westlaw and Lexis, the sponsors of the survey.

So, the likes of PreCyDent (prior post here), PLoL and AltLaw most definitely are making inroads in the profession, and that is a good thing for those of us in the research business. Hey, who doesn’t appreciate a little healthy competition? For good measure, check out the free online public records directory and U.S. Courts Reference and Directory at Northwest Location Services, Inc. It will be interesting to watch as the free resources dramatically improve their search engines and organization and the Big Two react. Which one will “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee?”

Lenovo finally finished tinkering with my laptop and, with a few minor glitches care of FedEx, I have now re-tethered myself to the digital realm. While It is nice to be back, it also was nice to have a little breather from the information superhighway, which really is more like an information Autobahn. I have lots to do to catch up. I have been maintaining minimal contact with my RSS feeds, so I am not completely in the dark. I am amazed, however, with how quickly one can fall behind on the news, tech and chatter.

There is much I want to write about, and will do so soon.  For the time being, I would just like to say Hello, y’all!