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Additional Posts in Law
My favorite office activity: canceling meetings.
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I had a partner who was very particular about the sequence/order of email addresses in the “To:” line of our emails.
To be clear: he wasn’t saying add a person to the email; he was saying “change the order of these email addresses.”
Equity Partner 3: This is really good advice and perspective. How it should be done.
I had a partner who insisted that any reference to “the Netherlands” should be turned into The Netherlands. The term was not defined. I dealt with it by defining it at the beginning of the document, but she said she doesn’t want that...
Unless their own government doesn’t know how to write the name of the country, I would disagree with you and that partner https://www.government.nl/topics/coronavirus-covid-19/tackling-new-coronavirus-in-the-netherlands/travel-and-holidays/visiting-the-netherlands
This is more of a general gripe but one of my biggest pet peeves is when a partner revises their own revisions and leaves you a comment as to why they changed it (suggesting that you made the prior edit when you didn’t).
It’s a power trip most of the time
I’m 29 and a lot of these corrections are ones I’d ask my law clerk to do. Things need to match. I don’t like work looking like you did it in a rush and accepted that it was sloppy. Half the addresses can’t have “W” and the other say “west” pick one format and be consistent. Also yea, the fonts need to match. And the page number fonts need to match. It takes 10 second to make the correction but it’s obvious to me when it’s not done.
Good comment, OP. I get frustrated by a partner freaking out over a small thing we BOTH missed and acting as if it’s a huge problem (it’s not) and that it would make us look “sloppy and embarrassing” to the court. Hard not to point all the previous filings by other firms, bugger fancier firms) in the same case with more egregious errors or typos from her favorite previous associate. 🙄
For me it’s really just when a partner makes a minor change, I fix it, and then they change it back to how I initially had it.
Rising Star
Changing square bullets to circles. Scanned me his handwritten notes. He had put an X over the squares and drawn little circles 🙄
I worked for a partner who quite proudly told me he had NEVER used the document management system
Making me change the apostrophes from ‘ to ´
Not gonna lie. I don’t even notice it, but I see the correction in my legal writing software - what’s the difference and how do you fix?
Well...
Changing a street address in the notice section from “101 W Ave.” to “101 West Avenue”. No abbreviations here, we bill by the letter apparently!
They removed my f**king Oxford commas! Honestly, who doesn’t use the Oxford comma?!? 😂😂😂
Monsters. They’re essential.
A partner told me not to sign letters with her name with “sincerely” 😂
My firm asks what you want to sign as when you are hired. I don’t even pay attention to that.
Can’t think of a specific example, but a partner at my firm changes things like “amount” to “number.” I think he just likes saying he made changes.
So much of this ^
O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy. “For want of a comma, we have this case.” $5M folks. Don’t sleep on the Oxford comma.
What! A3: that’s awesome. That means you’re working with normal people. Good for you. Are you guys hiring?
Changing the dash between the area code and phone number, to a space.
Rising Star
The only proper way to do this is with periods. 555.555.5555. I adopted periods years ago and now dashes annoy me. 😂
Correcting what he thought were “misspellings” — words were spelled in British English instead of American English....
just add (sic) we all good
My biggest pet peeve is when something is edited so that it’s grammatically incorrect, and if I don’t make the change they get angry...
Changing “three days” to “3 days”
Senior Counsel 1: can you share that anecdote please?
In a report closing paragraph, "we will continue to keep you apprised of any updates".. Where "updates" changed to "developments" because "we don't use the word updates here" 🙄 Meanwhile this person could barely eke out a full sentence on paper
Also, the same associate I noted above once asked me to have document processing amend a court form to her liking before filing. Specifically, we were helping a client with a quick small claims document. The client had two separate cases against it. I prepared two separate form docs, each for one case to be filed. She told me to combine it into one form and file it. I didn’t understand cause it was two separate cases and there was no connection between the two. In fact, the PDF form the court uses doesn’t have enough space to insert two case numbers into it. She wanted document processing to reprogram the form to accept more writing so she can type in two case numbers.... she was so dumb. I’m glad she doesn’t work with us any more.
Removing the zeros from the bates labels