10/10/2008 07:57:04 AM EST
Crunched for Time? Don't Cut Back on the Basics
While you might be tempted to submit a pleading or brief without proofreading it because of time limitations, you might want to think twice about that. As Shannon P. Duffy reported in the Legal Intelligencer, one attorney had his requested attorney fees slashed for his “slip-shod submissions” in a civil rights suit. According to the article, Senior U.S. District Judge J. William Ditter Jr. excoriated the attorney for submitting a fee petition in a civil rights suit that was riddled with typographical and other errors, including "plaintf," "Philadehia," "attoreys," "reasonbale" and "Ubited States." Other errors included a misquoted federal statute, the wrong court rules, and a reference to a U.S. Supreme Court dissenting opinion as a concurring opinion. According to the piece, while the attorney filed an amended fee petition that corrected most of the misspellings, it still contained several errors, including the wrong first name for a police officer, errors in case and statute citations, missing words, “challenging” assertions, and the incorrect listing of the amount of damages awarded by the jury.
Duffy reported that the attorney had requested more than $180,000 in fees, but he received only about $26,000 after the judge lowered the amount to $105,000 to account for claims dismissed before trial, and then decreased the amount by 75 percent to account for claims rejected by the jury and what he called “questionable time records, lack of candor, slip-shod submissions.”
The moral of the story? Your submitted work speaks volumes about you. Make sure that you leave plenty of time for proofreading, and don’t rely on support staff to do your legwork for you. The final product that you submit has your name on it. If you fail to ensure that the submission is polished, it will reflect poorly on you and will undermine your credibility, whether with a supervising attorney or the court. Taking the time to make sure that it reflects the hard work you have put into it establishes that your work is thorough and professional.