Lawyers must take the time to proofread their letters to clients or potentially risk looking incompetent, says Martin Cutts.

Attention to grammar, punctuation and the meaning of words has long been claimed as a hallmark of lawyers.

But, as an occasional client of a few law firms and a provider of writing-skills courses to rather more, I’ve noticed that blunders in letters to customers have become commonplace. I don’t mean things that obsess only extreme pedants, like split infinitives or prepositions at the end of sentences, but missing words, bad spelling, ‘their’ for ‘there’, verbless sentences, its’, and commas where semicolons or full stops should be.

One legal executive’s two-page advice letter contained more than 70 mistakes. Thus some of his sentences were unclear; the whole thing read like a hoax instead of the product of a £150-an-hour mind. The author pleaded haste, late-night working and two-fingered typing. And, he murmured, since the (foreign) client hadn’t complained, why should anyone worry?

But error-strewn letters give an impression of incompetence and detract from the professional image law firms want to convey. If lawyers blunder so badly in their letters, readers are entitled to wonder about the quality of their advice and decisions.

Writes and wrongs

It’s not just junior lawyers who either don’t know right from wrong or don’t check their stuff. On a relative’s behalf, I recently corresponded with a senior partner about his firm’s use of a power of attorney. His letters usually included several typos, and one reply said the following (names changed):

I am able to confirm to you that Mr Pillion retired from my firm and was not in any way connected with Mrs Smith’s matter.

When I queried this, since Mr Pillion had undoubtedly been dealing with Mrs Smith’s affairs for many years, the senior partner replied: I am not in any way saying that Mr Pillion did not act in respect of the affairs of Mrs Smith as it [sic] is apparent of [sic] all that he did. I do not therefore understand why you have read this interpretation into my letter.

In full pedantic mode I asked him to check his original letter again, and he at last responded more graciously:

I now fully understand the issue you are raising… the word ‘this’ was omitted… I apologise for not properly proofreading the letter before signing it. As you will now appreciate I meant to say that Mr Pillion had retired from the firm, as had been agreed for some time, and this retirement was not in any way connected with the matter you have raised with me.

Matter of minutes

Clients sometimes mistakenly think they’ve understood a badly written letter and act on it. In an unreported case in 1983, the judge found that a client who’d misunderstood his solicitor’s ‘very obscure English’ was entitled to £95,000 for the losses that resulted.

Perhaps the most important thing about proofreading is to be bothered enough to do it. A letter that’s taken an hour to write really is worth a few minutes’ checking. The best way is not to skim-read but to concentrate on the sense, and to run your pen or finger under the line of type you’re reading.

Of course, the odd mistake will always slip through. I once made some last-minute amendments to a book extolling the virtues of clarity in legal writing. When it hit the bookshops, the text said: ‘Organisations that want to win the confidence of customers should give them incomprehensible legal agreements to sign.’ Not quite the intended message.

Martin Cutts is research director of the Plain Language Commission (http://www.clearest.co.uk). An experienced editor and course presenter, Cutts has worked in the plain-English movement since the mid-1970s. He is author of The Oxford Guide to Plain English (published by Oxford University Press), Clarifying Eurolaw and Lucid Law, and is co-author (with Emma Wagner) of Clarifying EC Regulations. This article is based on a longer piece in issue 58 of Clarity, the journal of the organisation Clarity.