When Should I Submit My Writing Sample
[00:00:00] When should I submit my writing sample?
One of the things I just wanted to say about writing samples is I had an attorney working for me not too long ago. She was very arrogant, but she knew everything and her writing was horrible. She was actually from a poor country. She would make a lot of bad mistakes wouldn't communicate the right ideas and wasn't thinking through things. I told her at one point, you're never going to get ahead in this profession and she was just working in a kind of a contract role doing some stuff if you continue with us.
She didn't like hearing them and she was very upset about it and ended up returning to her country. She was so upset to hear that from me.
I was being honest with her because I'd given her several warnings. I bought her a lifetime subscription to Grammarly or whatever it was and other things, but the air has kept happening. And the other thing was the writing errors happen, but also logic errors.
Learning all, this is very important. It's part of the job. Again, if a client sees a writing sample with errors in it, they're going to assume that your thinking process also has writing errors in it. That's going to hurt you and people don't want to be represented by clients like that.
I had an instance once where it was embarrassing, but I'll tell it. Was living
[00:01:00] on a farm when I was in Moscow in Charlottesville, Virginia, and these neighbors of mine. They had taken their dog to a kennel and lost the dog and had gotten out or something. So they were upset and they wanted to sue the kennel. They had me draft up a little complaint for them to file the small claims court. And I did, and there were errors and they took it, and then they came back and, said, correct fees. And then they took it and then the more errors and they came back and they took it and they came back again on their errors.
These were people that, were farmers essentially. They were, not they were not sophisticated people, but this is someone that, at that point, that was on law review and doing, getting ready to do a federal clerkship and all this stuff and I was still making errors like that and not taking it seriously. The point is that the people take this stuff, even the clients very seriously. And if those people were ever probably never would have used me, even though I was thought I was such a big deal and I wasn't a big deal.
I was a hack at that point because I didn't know what I was doing. You need to do the best quality writing you can't and you need to learn it. Even people that are educated are very insulted or hurt by those errors lack of attention and so forth.
The question about when you should have
[00:02:00] made your writing sample is don't unless they ask. Writing sample anything that many times unless you are so confident that your writing sample of awesome, and it's not going to hurt you.
I typically would not submit a writing sample unless someone asks. Also, don't put writing samples available or references available on request and so forth on your resume. If they want it, they'll ask for it. So don't worry about that but in terms of your writing sample, the reason you don't want to submit a writing sample unless they ask is that it's just an opportunity for them to find things wrong and find mistakes and may decide that they don't like it.
Again, every law firm not all of them, but a lot of them always have the writing gurus that are in the firms and those writing gurus most of the time. And I'm not again trying to be rude here, but a lot of them do not. Their sense of importance and value to the firm comes in shooting down not only the people that work there as writing samples but law students and other applicants running samples.
You need to be very good about making sure that you avoid those people if at all possible because they will always put in a bad word for you. Very few writing samples that people ever
[00:03:00] receive are going to get a lot of praise.
Typically, I'll be marked up in any writing sample that can be torn apart. I had one funny experience actually, where I used to be. I thought that I learned all this stuff about writing samples, by the way, from, clerking and from, learning, working with someone that took them seriously and clean writing, which I'm to this day.
I've had instances before where people have given me writing samples and I've marked them up, with five different colors of ink and everything and done a good, spend a lot of time on them and then they brought them back corrected and I've done the same thing with them again. When people are like, that's just crazy, but so many times people, you just, please. And so you have to be very careful.
