As a law student, I spent many hours reading law books. It was the longest week of my life.
Then I
discovered that law students don’t read law books. They are to be carried, taken home
once, then placed on bookshelves
and finally sold to next year’s law
students in pristine condition.
For lawyers, unlike participants in the four-minute mile or the Tour de
France, taking shortcuts is understandable when reading traditional law books. But still, we legal authors find it
difficult not to include everything that we know and a great deal that we don’t
know.
I wanted to write
law books that people including lawyers would have the satisfaction of reading
cover to cover. I was prepared to take the risk that they would discover that
my books were total rubbish as opposed to traditional law books where they
could never be sure. This new approach called for
law books to be either shorter or more interesting.
I soon found that
I could leave out a few hundred pages, and
readers either didn’t notice or didn’t mind. In my first book “Law for
IT Professionals” I was complimented by
one reviewer (there was only one) for summarising the rest of the law in eighteen pages, or was it thirteen.
Other legal
authors found that my brief and short (“BS”) approach to law suited them too and
cut hundreds of pages from their titles. They found as I did that they were far
easier to carry around and introduce into conversations.
One disappointment is that the second-hand market in short law books is disappointing. On one occasion, I happened to be in Dymocks in Sydney
and on requesting my own book (posing as
a discerning reader) I was told, “You are in luck, they are now fifty per cent off.”
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