Pause for thought

THE trend towards mergers between law firms, large and small, continues apace. Haight, Gardner, Poor & Havens, one of New York’s finest, merged with Holland & Knight of Florida earlier this year. Soon, nobody will remember poor old Poor and Havens. Fine names disappear, Faber & Dumas are subsumed by Corroon, but the world continues to turn, advised by ever-bigger law firms.

So what do lawyers talk about when they are discussing the finer points of a merger? Client profile? Numbers of fee earners? Turnover? Possibly, but we are reliably informed that a good four or five hours was spent in the Haight Holland negotiations discussing commas. The crucial issue was apparently whether there should be a comma after Haight Gardner and before Holland & Knight. I could have told them for nothing.

Commas in proper names are a waste of time. Putting one in Haight Gardner Holland & Knight might serve as a sop to old timers who remember the firms before they merged, but in a few years there will be a whole new generation of people who never knew any different and who will just regard the comma as an affectation. Not that there is anything wrong with affectation. It is a must for some people. But it is not to be confused with punctuation.

Whole articles have been written about the humble comma. The truth is that few people know how to use it. My advice to those who don’t know how to use commas is not to use them at all. Semi-colons, meanwhile, like semi-quavers, should not be used under any circumstances, particularly by lawyers. The world would be a better place without them. Semi-colons, that is.