An article by Adam Liptak in today’s NY Times proves that your fourth-grade English teacher was right when she warned you about the importance of writing correctly:
A federal judge in Philadelphia, in prose suggesting barely suppressed chortles, reduced a lawyer’s request for fees last month because his filings were infested with typographical errors.
The lawyer, Brian M. Puricelli, had offered this vigorous but counterproductive defense:
“Had the defendants not tired to paper plaintiff’s counsel to death, some type would not have occurred. Furthermore, there have been omissions by the defendants, thus they should not case stones.”
The judge reduced Puricelli’s fee from $300 to $150 per hour, saying that Puricelli’s prose was “vague, ambiguous, unintelligible, verbose and repetitive” and that his “complete lack of care in his written product shows disrespect for the court.”
Lovely, how judge’s not even mentioning ‘dispespect for the clients’.
That should be ‘disrespect’, of course. I guess I now will be ‘cased’ with stones…
$150 per hour for writing that is “vague, ambiguous, unintelligible, verbose and repetitive”? Sounds pretty good to me. Where can I get one of those jobs?
sign me up for that too…$150 per hour is great for writing garbage.
I’d do it for $75
I’d do it worse for $50.
This man has dispepticised our septum of juice-produce.
Actually, thinking this guy just had his word processor set to automatic spellchecking.