The blogging gurus have told me not to write blog posts like legal briefs.
- Make posts short, with short sentences and bullet points, they say.
- But tonight, leaving a bar association dinner, a judge’s law clerk read my name tag and had a flash of recognition.
- In researching a question on which there was no case authority in Georgia, she searched Westlaw for hours without success, and then Googled the question.
- That led to a post on my blog that was, yes, written like a legal brief, complete with citations.
- Of course it was, since I had copied and pasted from a brief I had filed in a case.
- She read the turgid prose in my post, looked up the cases I cited, decided my analysis was correct, and gave that work product to the judge in an order to sign.
So much for short, bullet pointed blog posts. If I want to write a law review article and put in on my blog, complete with exhaustive legal citations, in order to share some creative legal thinking with lawyers, judges and judicial clerks out there, by golly I’ll do it.
Ken Shigley is a trial attorney in Atlanta, Georgia who has been listed as a "Super Lawyer" (Atlanta Magazine), among the "Legal Elite" (Georgia Trend Magazine), and in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers (Martindale), and is a Certified Civil Trial Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy,. Mr. Shigley has extensive experience representing parties in trucking and bus accidents, products liability, catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death, brain injury, spinal cord injury and burn injury cases. Currently he is Secretary of the 40,000 member State Bar of Georgia.