Saturday, February 21, 2015

Why not let your client write the brief

That patent lawyer who has gotten his name in the news for filing an incomprehensible and weird-looking petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court that was supposedly mostly written by the client is an engineering graduate of Virginia Tech and a member of the Virginia State Bar.

I generally root for engineers from Virginia Tech and fellow members of the Virginia State Bar but that petition would have bothered me. The one United States Supreme Court petition I filed was as smooth and comprehensible as I could possibly make it. I was still thinking about how to make it better for years after it was denied. Some years later, I filed an amicus brief for Congressman Boucher in the Missouri municipal telecommunications case but that was a different sort of writing, and so it said what he wanted it to say no more and no less.

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