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Lawyering skills

D. Murali

A PRACTICAL guide to lawyering skills, by Fiona Boyle and others, has interesting statements such as:

* The hardest part of writing a book on lawyering skills is in deciding where to stop.

* Most lawyers in practice believe they write effectively. The trouble is that their clients do not agree.

* You learnt to write so long ago you have probably forgotten the process.

* Plain English is not simply the product of using simple words. It requires the organisation of often complex material into a readily comprehensible form. You can use the simplest words, but if you are not clear about what you are saying, the message ca n never be clear.

* It is not just professionals, such as accountants, doctors and management consultants, who take refuge behind a wall of unintelligible terms. Specialist occupations in the criminal underworld have long been the source of long lists of technical terms f or the mysteries of lifting (pickpocketing), kiting (passing forged cheques) and blagging (armed robbery).

* A misspelling may send out a message that you are ignorunt. Or ignorant even. Or it may simply suggest that you can't be bovered to chec your work. You must bother to check. Because the reader's eye is drawn to the mistake, the reader stops concentrati ng on the content of your letter. Your carefully planned legal advice is lost. Spell it write. (And remember that there are some mistakes that even a spell checker won't spot for you!)

* Problems can be classified as being either focused or unfocused problems. A focused problem might be: what case formulated the current basis of the duty of care in the law of negligence? Contrast this with an unfocused problem. You are asked to advise a client who is seeking damages after suffering personal injury and shock when she found a decomposing snail in her drink, which had been poured from an opaque glass bottle.

* In advocacy the appearance of confidence is essential. Nervousness is your secret. Keep it secret, and you will find that you are better able to put forward a facade of confidence.

The book lists useful Web sites such as www.ilrg.com, www.lawguru.com/ilawlib/index.html, www.icclaw.com, www.accesstolaw.org/default.asp, www.lawreports.co.uk/indexdln. htm, www.hrweb.org, www.scl.org.

Buy a copy for your lawyer.

Roads to riches

PETER Jay, a TV journalist specialising in economic stories, has written Roads to riches, alternatively titled The wealth of man. In his preface, he writes how it is customary to thank someone for having typed the whole manuscript several times. ``Having no such person I wish to thank Mr Bill Gates for having devised machinery that enables those of us who learnt what is now infelicitously called `keboarding' on a manual Hermes in the 1950s, and whose ever more hazy knowledge of where each key lies is im printed in our shoulder and back muscles rather than our finger-tips, nonetheless to prepare a volume of more than 100,000 words.''

The book tells the story of the rise and the fall of whole economies and nations, the ascent -- and frequent pauses -- of mankind as the only economic animal, as producer, consumer and accumulator of wealth.

Jay writes that human productivity -- output per person per week or per hour -- has increased much faster than the population. However, the syndrome summed up in the quip ``they pretend to pay us; and we pretend to work'' lies at the heart of the probabl e eventual failure of economic systems based on centrally set strategic goals and on administrative hierarchies for their attainment, according to Jay. ``Common sense can be a false guide in economics, especially macroeconomics.''

Put that way, what Jay has written could be considered `uncommon'.

*The e-scribe

JIM Hall's Online journalism -- a critical primer is a survey of new technologies and conventions. The book relates ``the story of news journalism's encounter with the World Wide Web.'' Here are some excerpts:

* In the packaging of news stories for the Web, editors and producers have to search out suitable sources and links. Sites such as the Spider's Apprentice, searchinsider.com and searchenginewatch.com provide primers on Web searching as well as informatio n and rankings for the rapidly expanding range of search engines available to Web users.

* Shovelware is what the new media scoops from the print edition.

* The Web has become part of a new media economy in which it not only acts as a link in the chain but also accelerates the whole process and detonates those stories in a global arena. The fact that news providers report a story, even where it is offered as unconfirmed, in itself gives it the credibility to merit repetition.

* Scandal and muckraking sell newspapers, it is true, but, as is evidenced in the press allegations against politicians such as Richard Nixon and Jeffrey Archer, they also expose corruption and crime.

* While some regimes refuse to countenance access to the Web it is impossible for them to prevent content from being written to it. The Internet was designed to resist attempts to interrupt the flow of information. Where breaks occur in networks the info rmation simply finds a new pathway.

Find the new way.

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Tailpiece

``The new librarian is an ex-curator.''

``Takes good care of the books?''

``He has put up notices saying `don't touch the exhibits'.''

(Books courtesy: The British Council Library, Chennai. e-mail: contact.chennai@in.britishcouncil.org)