Legal writing: analytic, interactive, and nonroutine. A computer can’t do it.

One of the most difficult lessons to get across to my students is that good legal writing requires them to exercise their imaginations, that I cannot merely tell them what they are supposed to do. It’s no surprise that it’s so difficult to get this message across; even within law schools there are many who believe legal writing is nothing more than composition and citation. So I thought it was interesting that Paul Krugman wrote today on his blog about “the influential analysis of Autor, Levy, and Murnane . . . , which argued that the crucial difference in terms of possible replacement of humans by machines was one of routine versus non-routine, rather than white-collar versus blue-collar . . . .”

In the article Krugman refers to, the authors set forth a chart dividing different tasks into “analytic and interactive tasks” and “manual tasks.” They also then divide each of those categories into those that are “routine” and “nonroutine.” I was relieved, but not surprised, to find that legal writing is an analytic and interactive task that is nonroutine:

If you think lawyers lifting other lawyers’ language is proof lawyering is easy, you know nothing about true creativity.

There’s always the danger that when someone suggests that genuine creativity can and is built from earlier creative works that someone else will believe the implication is that creativity is no big deal. If I feel I can cut-and-paste from other lawyers’ works then lawyering must be nothing but a cut-and-paste job, right?

It’s not as if I’ve never dealt with these matters for real, as if I’m dealing with it from an academic perspective “unsullied” by the realities of practice. A client who retained me to draft a contract for him once said to me, after we’d spent a considerable amount of time discussing the details of his deal, “It’s all boilerplate, right?”

I responded, “I don’t do boilerplate. Every deal is different, and if you know the lawyer who’s done exactly your deal before and you’re confident the contract he wrote then is just fine for you, go hire him.”

Which isn’t to say I didn’t review a lot of other contracts or that I didn’t lift language from those other contracts. I did. I took a line or two from this one, a paragraph from that, another line from another, etc. And I put those things all together with my notes, shuffled things around, revised a lot of the language I’d lifted from other sources, wrote far more language necessary to express what was necessary to express this particular deal, worked and reworked, checked and rechecked, revised and revised, and at the end I had a document that set forth the client’s deal in all its precision, breadth, and ambiguity. It wasn’t boilerplate at all. But were there lines and even, perhaps, a paragraph lifted from other contracts? Of course.

I obsess about these matters in part because there is terrible confusion about what genuine creativity (in art, music, literature, the practice of law or a myriad of other endeavors) is. The confusion arises because, I believe, there is so much money at stake in the legal and rhetorical wars over copyright. So there are a lot of people who will look at Shepard Fairey’s Obama Hope poster and the photo Fairey used as the poster image’s source, and write things like the following:

Any director, writer or actor interested in making long-term money in the entertainment industry should be calling Fairey what he is: A plagiarist.

While I recognize the attitudes underlying these views — no one else is entitled to make a buck from my work! — the blindness to the creativity involved, even acknowledging the appropriation, is astounding. I’ve gone on at length about my view on this, but no one can deny that Fairey’s poster had a profound resonance and impact during the 2008 presidential campaign, and no one can suggest that the poster would have had any similar impact if the original photo had appeared on the poster rather than Fairey’s reworking. So how can anyone possibly suggest the level of creativity in the poster wasn’t profound?

The KLF “were one of the seminal bands of the British acid house movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s.” Their relevance here is that, “despite their protestations of 1988 about not wishing to be seen as crusaders for sampling, the [KLF] continue to be associated with the cultural movement which retrospectively bundles together those literary and artistic works that make use of ‘creative plagiarism’. 1987: What the Fuck Is Going On? is considered a landmark work in the early history of sampling music in the United Kingdom.” Their #1 British hit, “Doctorin’ the Tardis” “is predominantly a mash-up of the Doctor Who theme music, Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock and Roll (Part Two)’ with sections from ‘Blockbuster!’ by Sweet and ‘Let’s Get Together Tonite’ by Steve Walsh.”

Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond — who were the KLF — are also very smart fellows. Among a never-ending series of creative works in a wide range of media, they wrote The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way, which I’ve heard some describe as a cynical con job but that is far more intelligent and complicated than that. On the one hand, The Manual explains

Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested. They have to believe it is through this sojourn they arrive at the grail; the great and original song that the world will be unable to resist.

But Drummond and Cauty are not accusing successful musical artists of being “mere plagiarists.” They recognize that even if a song can be broken down into bits and pieces of other songs, there is real genius in great pop music:

So why don’t all songs sound the same? Why are some artists great, write dozens of classics that move you to tears, say it like it’s never been said before, make you laugh, dance, blow your mind, fall in love, take to the streets and riot? Well, it’s because although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before their own soul shines through; their personality demands attention. This doesn’t just come via the great vocalist or virtuoso instrumentalist. The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes – a million years of pain and lust.

Lewis Hyde makes a similar point in Common as Air, the new book that was the starting point for my exploration the other day of lawyerly “plagiarism”:

“Intellectual property” is the phrase now used to denote ownership of art and ideas, but what exactly does it mean? Does it make sense, to begin with, to say that “intellect” is the source of the “properties” in question? A novel like Ulysses, the know-how for making antiviral drugs, Martin Luther King, Jr’s “Dream” speech, the poems of Rimbaud, Andy Warhol screen prints, Mississippi Delta blues, the source code for electronic voting machines: who could name the range of human powers and historical conditions that attends such creations? All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind- states may well attend her creativity.

There is intellect, of course, but also imagination, intuition, sagacity, persistence, prudence, fantasy, lust, humor, sympathy, serendipity, will, prayer, grief, courage, visual acuity, ambition, guesswork, mother wit, memory, delight, vitality, venality, kindness, generosity, fortitude, fear, awe, compassion, surrender, sincerity, humility, and the ability to integrate diametrically opposed states of mind into harmonious wholes . . . We would need quite a few new categories to fully map this territory — “dream property,” “courage property,” “grief property” — and even if we had that list, only half the problem would have been addressed.

Do you want a great lawyer? You can have one even if he cuts-and-pastes the work of other lawyers into his work. But please — don’t believe for a second that means that lawyering can be reduced to cutting-and-pasting. Lawyering requires as much creativity as any endeavor on earth — if I didn’t believe that why would I write a blog devoted to law and creativity? And creativity is infinitely more complex a matter than tracking down the bits and pieces that make up the creative work. It requires the imagination necessary to find those bits and pieces, the vision to understand how to select and fit them together to due the present job, the skill borne of years of work to write in the stuff that can’t be found anywhere else and without which those bits and pieces would be just a bunch of crude boilerplate that doesn’t fit well into any specific situation at all, the passion and energy necessary to do the work to bring all this stuff together, the courage to stick to one’s vision even as one’s adversary is insisting you’re wrong, the delight without which the strength to do all of these difficult things would be impossible to muster, the generosity of spirit that can identify a client’s problems as your own, and a million other things.

So don’t you dare suggest that taking some language that is useful for doing the job that needs to be done from another lawyer is evidence lawyering is like putting together tinker toys.

Economic pressures motivate law firms to try innovative billing practices

There is nothing new in lawyers trying to find ways to price their services in ways other than the standard practice of charging a price for each “billable hour” of work performed for a client.  Each lawyer, of course, is billed to a client by her firm at a different rate, the precise rate per lawyer depending primarily on her experience.  When I began practice in 1984, my firm billed my work to it clients at about $100 per hour.  By the time I left practice to teach, the hourly rate my firm billed my time out to clients was $315 dollars per hour.  I can only imagine that had I continued in practice, by now, twelve years later, my hourly rate would be in the ballpark of $500 an hour.    According to the New York Times, Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York is “one of a number of large firms whose most senior lawyers bill more than $800 an hour.”

Lawyers have always also used pricing schemes other than billing per hour.  Certain types of transactions are generic enough that lawyers can charge a flat rates for representing a clients in such a transactions.  And, of course, firms that represent clients with modest to poor economic means suing wealthy clients have regularly charged contingent fees, collecting a percentage (typically 25-40%) of any recovery achieved as a result of the lawsuit.  Those firms finance their losing cases with the windfalls they earn in winning cases.  And their clients benefit because without the contingent fee arrangement they could not possibly afford to pay for the lawsuit.  The most typical types of cases employing these billing methods are personal injury and malpractice lawsuits.

But in most other situations the billable hour has been the standard way to price legal services.  There always have been severe criticisms of the practice. Its potential defects are plain.  Some firms break the hour into 15 minute segments; others into 6 minute segments.  If you perform one minute of work by, say, making a brief telephone call on behalf of a client, you might well  record an entire billable segment (6 or 15 minutes) for the call.  Everywhere I worked I had the discretion to choose not to record time for such brief tasks.  So I wouldn’t.  I couldn’t justify the cost the minimal effort would cost the client. If, for example, an attorney makes a one minute telephone call, the attorney records that call as fifteen minutes of billable time, and his  firm bills his work out at an hourly rate of $300 dollars, that one minute phone call would cost the client $75.

But the fact I wouldn’t bill a quarter of an hour for a one minute phone call could hurt me in a very real way.  It reduced the amount of time I recorded as billable hours.

And the number of hours a lawyer bills over the course of a year plays a significant part in the firm’s evaluation of his performance.   The lawyers conducting the evaluation may understand that the sheer number of billable hours bears little relationship to the quality of a lawyer’s work, but any overburdened organization engaged in evaluation tends to put a lot of weight on hard numbers that bear little relationship to the qualities being evaluated.  So my failure to bill a quarter hour for one minute of work could work against me in my efforts to advance within my firm.

The system also biased the evaluations against better lawyers.  I always prided myself on my research and writing skills.  I felt I could identify, analyze, and research a disputed issue faster and more effectively than any of my colleagues.  I also felt I wrote better and more quickly than my colleagues.  Yet colleagues who were slower at the same work I did billed more hours for that same work, and that higher number of hours accrued to their benefit, at least in part, when our performances were evaluated.

I was exceedingly fortunate in not suffering from these potential defects in the billable hour system.  I worked regularly with a close-knit group, so we knew each other’s work well.  Our work, therefore, could be evaluated direrctly on the basis of its quality.  But the larger the firm and the more a lawyer is shuttled from colleague to colleague as he works on new matters, the less the firm will evaluate his work based on its intrinsic quality and the more the firm will rely  on the number of his billable hours.  And some firms, naturally enough, don’t care why a lawyer might bill more hours than a better performing colleague.  The higher number of hours mean more money for the firm.

I certainly felt the constant pressure to bill as many hours as possible.  Over my 12 years of practice I billed between 1900 and 2400 hours a year.  1900 billable hours seemed a livable amount of work (and seemed to be the minimum an associate could get away with), but it hardly amounted to what most people would consider a reasonable work schedule.  For one thing your billable hours are not the hours you work.  They are only the hours you work on matters that can be billed to clients.  The hours spent on administrative work on behalf of the firm, on pro bono work, on training younger attorneys, and on the necessary interludes from the demanding work are not billable hours.  In my last years of practice, as a partner, when I was still a relatively young but experienced commercial litigator, I generally was in the office from 8:30 a.m. until sometime between 7 and 8 p.m.  I also worked regularly on weekends for 3 to 8 hours.  During my busiest times, which occurred with regularity, I could easily bill something on the order of 110 hours a week.  I don’t know how I did it.  There are only 168 hours in a week.

The system provides an incentive to the firm itself, and not merely its lawyers, to maximize the number of hours billed to a client.  The more time a firm spends on a matter, the more money the firm will make.  That makes for a perverse incentive — clients want matters resolved as quickly and cheaply as possible.  But it is in lawyers’ short term financial interests to resolve matters in the most complex and drawn out ways possible.  As the New York Times points out,  “In litigation, firms that charge by the hour can suffer if they are too successful and end a lawsuit – and the stream of payments from continuing work – too quickly. One law firm that recently collapsed, Heller Ehrman, was hurt in part because a number of cases had settled.”

The defects inherent in billing by the hour began to become an issue to clients  in the late Eighties as a consequence of the economic difficulties set off by the 1987 stock market crash and the Savings and Loan debacle.  Money was tight, so clients would scrutinize more carefully the prices they were being charged and the ways those prices had been arrived at.   It doesn’t surprise me, therefore, that the New York Times suggests that today’s “rough economic climate is making clients more demanding, leading many law firms to rethink their business model.

One change demanded by a client I worked for back in the late Eighties and early Nineties was to produce a detailed budget in advance of his decision to have our firm represent his company in a  lawsuit.  The budget would provide an estimated cost of the representation, with the ultimate cost limited no more than a fixed amount above  the estimated total cost.  The budget would lay out in detail the work that would have to be done — work that would include, among a myriad of other things, drafting pleadings, drafting and arguing any and all pre-trial motions, conducting discovery (including the oral examination of witnesses under oath in depositions, the review of documents, and our own independent investigation into relevant matters), any and all legal research that might become necessary in the course of the case, the retention and preparation of any experts that might be required, and the preparation of our own witnesses for both deposition and trial testimony.

The time and effort necessary to conduct these tasks is to a great degree unknowable in advance of a lawsuit.  Moreover, unforeseeable complexities are almost inevitable.  It is virtually impossible to calculate  the number of new claims that might be asserted in a lawsuit, the number of new parties who might be drawn into it, the number of  new legal issues that will inevitably arise in the course of the case, and the amount of work each of these and other unforeseen complications will require.  Preparing these budgets was one of the most difficult things I ever did as a lawyer because so much of their content seemed largely the result of guesswork.

It was not, however, a senseless product I was producing.  Essentially, the budget set forth our best estimate of a fixed fee  for all the work required to conduct the lawsuit through trial.  In the event the case settled before trial , our fee would be limited to the amount the budget had allocated for the work we had actually done.

With the recovery of the economy in the Nineties and the enormous sums earned by corporate America, the motive to impose such novel billing methods waned, and the billable hour managed to maintain its role as the foundation of large firm billing practices.

But, as Friday’s New York Times stated:

The evidence of a shift away from billable hours is, for now, anecdotal, as few surveys exist. But partners at a half-dozen other big bellwether firms and lawyers at corporations, who sometimes engage outside counsel, say they are more often seeing different pay arrangements.

One such novel scheme was followed by Morrison & Foerster, and in fact resulted in the firm earning a much higher fee than if it had charged by the hour:

In one case, he said, Morrison & Foerster negotiated a fixed fee for defending a company in court, covering work up to the point of a motion for summary judgment.

On top of the fee, if the case settled for less than what the company feared having to pay if it lost in court, the law firm got a percentage of the amount saved. The arrangement made sense when the goal was to resolve the dispute quickly, Mr. Leonard said.

Lawyers on the case negotiated a settlement for much less than the client’s worst-case number, Mr. Leonard said. “The effective hourly rate was something like 150 percent of our hourly rates,” he added. “We made money, the client was happy.”

What other types of pricing will clients and lawyers develop?  It remains to be seen.   But since the financial crisis seems more dire than any we’ve experienced in the last seventy years, law firms might have to engage in the first comprehensive overhaul of their pricing systems since at least the Sixties.

Finally, let me emphasize that there are good lawyers and bad lawyers, just as there are good and bad people in every profession.  The people I worked closely with were kind, generous, hardworking, and dedicated to serving our clients as efficiently and effectively as possible.  We would not bill a quarter of an hour for a one minute phone call. The founder of one firm  I was a member of for many years,  Gene Anderson, made sure the firm’s lawyers put our clients first in everything we did.  Any business air travel, for example, had to be made in coach class.  Every lawyer I knew at comparable firms would fly First or Business Class.  Doing the least expensive and most efficient work for the client was, in short, the ethic of almost every lawyer I  personally worked with.

But I have encountered many a lawyer whose “ethic” is to extract from his every cent he can.  The principal way to maximize one’s fees is to fight as long and hard as possible on any and every issue that can be made into a fight. The truly sad part of this phenomenon is the belief among many, many people that the most effective lawyer is the nastiest lawyer.  Those people get their nasty lawyers.  They also make the cost of their representation as high as possible.

Nastiness is bad lawyering.

Are lawyers and artists completely different and atagonistic?

Wendy Duong of the University of Denver Sturm School has written an article entitled “Law Law is Law and Art is Art and Shall the Two Ever Meet? Law and Literature: the Comparative Creative Processes.”

It’s a fascinating article and well worth dowloading and reading, but here I’d like to take issue with one of her principle points.  As she puts it in the abstract to her article:

The two disciplines, Law and Art, remain divergent and incompatible in three core aspects: (i) the mental process of creation and the utilization of facilities, (ii) the work product or output, and (iii) the raison d’etre of law versus art. The Article points out that the mental process and utilization of facilities inherent in law has little to offer the creation of art, and the two creative processes are antagonistic to each other. In fact, the rationality and logic properties of law the objective of rendering certainty to uncertain future outcomes so as to achieve and maintain order — will interfere with, and can even destroy, the creation of art.

I will confess that I would not generally consider the product of legal practice “art” and it would be a stretch to fit even certain extraordinary legal products art –  Perhaps the Declaration of Independence? The Constitution? Certain influential legal opinions?)

But does law “render certainty to uncertain future outcomes”?  I passionately believe that an enormous part of the law does not do that at all, that what in fact it does is the kind of activity Ms. Duong attributes to art.

Life is infinite.  Each case courts decide are intended first, of course, to resolve the specific cases they are resolving.  But to the extent they render opinions, they are only contingently trying to address the future, and they know those contingent efforts are subject to irrelevance under new circumstances.

Moreover, life is constantly changing, and the law has to grow out of the material conditions it is always striving to govern.  In doing so, it is constantly striving to envision the future material conditions the law might apply to and to anticipate those conditions in making law.  Lawmakers then do not decide with a certainty what law they want to impose from above on the future; they collaboratively work out the best approach to whatever they can envision, knowing all the while that the law may well have to change in the future.

The practice of law too is the constant telling of stories — stories to persuade, stories to inspire, stories to justify visions of the future.  In doing so they are as constrained as artists in the “realities” available to them.  Lawyers are artists.  They may have to make decisions, but that doesn’t mean that in getting to those decision-making points they are not as creatively engaged as artists.

Finally, if lawyers aren’t engaging in the same mental facilities as artists, I don’t have a clue what mental processes artist and lawyers engage in.  I suspect if those ways of thinking are entirely divorced from one another, the lawyers aren’t practicing law well and the artists are not producing good art.

And if artists’ visions are irrelevant entirely from decisions people make in life (You must change your life.), what is it?

Good lawyers understand they are poets.

I wrote last week that lawyers are artists, not technocrats. Tim Nolan, a lawyer in Minnesota clearly agrees, and in an article focused on Wallace Stevens — one of the greatest American poets of the 20th Century and an insurance lawyer for the entirety of his professional life — goes on at length about the similarities of writing poetry and practicing law:

Writing poetry and practicing law bear similarities that are not often examined. In litigating a lawsuit, a lawyer is often overwhelmed with facts, documents, statements, memories (good and bad), emotions, a hovering concept of justice (good and bad), time lines, bullet points, visual aids, legal precedent, practical precedent, clients, judges, jurors. From all of this, the lawyer must draw out a story, with a cast of characters (sometimes stock characters), themes, partial resolutions and final outcomes. The good lawyer is able to not only marshal all these resources, but draw out and suggest the final conclusion for the good of his client.

The poet, facing a blank piece of paper, has a similar task. From endless possibilities, what must be said? What words will be used to say it? What images will convey what needs to be said? What kind of intent or insight will the music and sounds evoke? . . .

There is physical and intellectual malleability to both pursuits. As a lawyer, you can push facts and precedent around, or embrace them, or ignore them. You know there must be at least one jurist in some obscure court who thinks exactly as you do and supports your position.

As a poet, you can push lines around, invent language, make the reader laugh or cry, speak in a voice that is yours or is imagined entirely.

It is a mistake to think that the law is objective or scientific and poetry is merely subjective. Young lawyers, especially it seems those who clerk for appellate courts, often feel they can objectively predict what the courts will do. Experienced lawyers understand that while possible outcomes can be identified, the facts, the desires of the parties, the collective wisdom of the jury, the predilections of the judge, all wonderfully defy clear prediction.

The young poet thinks no one has ever felt this before; no one has ever said this so eloquently; the reader will be enthralled. With time, the poet comes to know that centuries’ worth of better writers have been mining the same territory, and while not much can be truly “new,” one’s own peculiar “slant” has never been here before.

Both poetry and the law involve the effort to move from the objective to the subjective — from fact to feeling — from observation to intuition. In a jury trial, how the lawyer presents his case is in some ways more important than what is presented. This is what drives the general public crazy about lawyers — how could they argue either side convincingly? What shamelessness! Lawyers know it is not difficult at all.

A lawyer and a poet must both be advocates and possess a strong sense of service toward the client or the reader. Accompanying this sense of service, there must be a generosity of spirit, a readiness to be empathetic. The lawyer must empathize with the client. The poet must have true empathy with the reader.

For both a lawyer and a poet, the imagination must always be present. Stevens, in reviewing an insurance claim, used the same imagination at work in his poems to determine whether or not to pay the claim.

Here is what a lawyer and poet must both be able to do — pick up a fact or image of nearly total insignificance — a mere marble along the way — and make it significant by the imaginative effort of paying attention. I am not advocating that lawyers or poets make up facts or images. Rather, I am saying that if the lawyer or the poet pays enough attention, he can learn that what seems insignificant hardly ever is, and, indeed, the outcome of the entire case, the meaning of the poem itself, may ultimately turn on it.

Law in Art/Law as Art

I’ve taught in law schools for 13 years. Before that I practiced in New York City for over 11. What I’ve largely found is that lawyers have little use for law professors, and law professors have little use for lawyers.  Where I am this year, the University of Detroit Mercy Law School, is an exception to this rule, and a rare one.  The far more common, if strange, disconnect between the academic world and the world of practice is illustrated by the academic field known as “Law and LIterature.”  Wikipedia accurately describes Law and Literature as both the study of law in literature and of the literary characteristics of legal writing.:

The law and literature movement focuses on the interdisciplinary connection between law and literature. Believed to have originally begun as a subcategory of jurisprudence, the movement encompasses the complementary ideas of law in literature and law as literature.

The problem, as Daniel J. Kornstein, a writer and a lawyer, is that the law and literature movement has had no impact on the practice of law:

The greatest shortcoming in Law and LIterature to date has been its failure to reach and engage the practicing lawyer. For the most part, Law and Literature has remained firmly entrenched in legal academia, its realm of origin. The shirtsleeve lawyer is essentially untouched.

I have from the start intended for this blog in large part to remedy this lack of connection between literature, and other arts, and the practice of law. Just as the Law and Literature movement examines both law in literature and law as literature, I try to focus on law in creative endeavors and law as a creative endeavor. I suppose part of what drives me to do so is that I have taught primarily first year law students, and they, like most people, have given very little thought to the art they have encountered and only begin under my watch to understand that, perhaps primarily, I am training them to be artists, not technocrats.

Support the troops!

Here’s some creativity in law, from my very own University of Detroit Mercy Law School:

Project Salute is a mobile law office which provides free assistance and/or representation to thousands of low-income veterans exclusively on federal benefits issues throughout the United States. As recounted this past February in the Detroit Free Press:

It was April 21 and UDM law students were rolling out a mobile clinic that would travel around metro Detroit to offer veterans free legal help in obtaining federal benefits.  “It was 6:12 a.m. That was our first call,” Dean Mark Gordon said.   They didn’t stop. A veteran from the West Coast phoned: “He was actually crying. . . .  He felt so abandoned and was so pleased that someone was listening,” Gordon said.  Now, less than a year after its debut, the service is going on a national tour. The clinic — for now in a converted Winnebago — heads out Thursday for an American Legion post in San Antonio. As it tours the country, it will be staffed by UDM students and faculty. UDM staff also will work with local attorneys in each city who will offer pro bono work.  UDM’s original van will continue to tour metro Detroit, Gordon said.

The media coverage continues unabated. You can watch some of it here. GM has donated a wheelchair-accessible, top-of-the-line 2008 Winnebago Outlook 31C to the project. Detroit Mercy law students and volunteer lawyers work out of the mobile law office, not only helping vets get their deserved government benefits, but also training lawyers in every locality they visit on the ins and outs of the work so that it will continue even after Project Salute departs. Here are the links to several news telecasts from the days Project Salute was in Houston:

• Day 3: Project Salute Passes Knowledge To Lawyers
• Day 2: More Local Vets Helped By Project Salute
• Day 1: Project Salute Helps Vets Get Benefits
• Hope Arrives For Houston-Area Vets
• Tour Project Salute Bus