I offer a consulting/editing service that is based on my credentials and experiences in the worlds of lawyering and writing. I describe the basic problems lawyers have in the briefs they write and what I can do for the lawyer and the brief in an article in the National Law Journal, which you can read here.
The service, which is done on an hourly fee basis, has me reading and editing a document and then consulting on the revisions that should be made. The editing is done using word processing programs Word or WordPerfect, and the consulting part of the service is done with email, the telephone, or video conferences, such as with Skype.
The goal is to make the document the best written document it can be. I consider all aspects of writing, from mechanical to stylistic, and apply an approach that aims to reach the intended audience.
I have practiced law for not quite thirty years and have worked in a wide array of areas, from A (admiralty) to Z (zoning), so to speak. I have also been a trial lawyer and have tried criminal and civil cases in both state and federal court.
As a writer, I have over more than thirty years written articles, essays, columns, book reviews, and books. I have put on my website some samples of my writing. There are several columns I wrote for the Los Angeles Daily Journal, the leading legal newspaper in the western United States, and an article from last year published in the American Journal of Legal History on the correspondence between Henry Friendly and Richard Posner.
My books are all available through Amazon or through the respective university presses that published them: In the Opinion of the Court (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); The Great Justices 1941-54: Black, Douglas, Frankfurter, and Jackson in Chambers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); and Federal Judges Revealed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
I have had a special interest in judicial opinions. I wrote about them as a literary genre of their own in my first book, In the Opinion of the Court. And in my second book, The Great Justices, I featured in part the writing skills of U.S. Supreme Court Justices. For a current book project, I have worked my way through the last five years of the Federal Reporter to report on trends and matters of interest found in the two hundred or so volumes I looked through.
As detailed elsewhere on my website, I have degrees in both law and English. I have a J.D. from the University of Connecticut School of Law and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. My published work has been on both legal and literary subjects.
I can be reached via email or the telephone. I can give a sense of what my work will amount to once I know more about the brief (or any other document for that matter).