Death by Email has a top 10 list of phrases to never write in an e-mail. The author, Roger Matus, advises, “If you find yourself typing one of these phrases, perhaps you should delete the entire email.”
Hat tip to the ABA Journal.
I figure there’s nothing like gross over-generalization to stir up some comment and debate. So here goes.
There are two things that most litigators should know how to do: fight and persuade.
Fighting is not the same as persuading. In fact, some things that are effective in a fight are ineffective, even counterproductive, when the task is to persuade.
There is a time to fight, and there is a time to persuade.
A major source of failure to persuade is the lawyer’s failure to recognize the difference between fighting and persuading, between what is effective in a fight and what is effective in persuading, between the time to fight and the time to persuade.
Comments?
Here is an article of mine, recently published in the November 2008 issue of For the Defense. The title is Counting Each Shot: Techniques for Emphasis and De-emphasis. The lesson is how to use the structure of a written piece to play up or play down the facts.
This article started out as a blog post. From there, it evolved into a short article for the DRI Appellate Advocacy Committee newsletter, Certworthy, Summer 2007 issue. Now it’s become a longer article for FTD’s larger audience. I guess this is an example of how blogging can help a writer record an idea when it happens, and later develop the idea into something suitable for paper publication.