Bench & Bar September/October 2025

LAWYER WELLBEING

S A L E T

BY DR. ERIC Y. DROGIN

L awyers—and expert witnesses—make a living by stringing words together, and once we get going, it’s kind of hard for us to stop. Jurors just have to sit there and take it. So did stenographers, many of whom continue to soldier on despite the advent of digital technology. I still recall turning on occasion and apol ogizing from the stand to increasingly grim-faced keyboard wranglers for using particularly dense and obscure forensic psy chology terms, especially when I needed a few extra moments to remember even denser and more obscure forensic psychol ogy terms. These adventures in prolixity aren’t con fined to real-time courtroom antics. We love to write almost as much as we love to speak, and sometimes it seems as if we adore lengthy sentences as much as our clients fear them. The longest sentence in 20th century English literature—clocking in at some 4,391 words—is found in Wil liam Joyce’s Ulysses . Joyce wasn’t a lawyer,

but perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it was a lawyer who put up the money to get Ulysses published. Appellate judges see us coming and typi cally seek to limit the volume of our written arguments, rightly concerned that if uncon strained our briefs would be anything but brief. Jurist, heal thyself, however: in 2010, an article in the New York Times (https:// tinyurl.com/nytimes-length) observed that compared to the 1950s, when “the median length of decisions” issued by the Supreme Court of the United States was “around 2,000 words,” this had mushroomed over the course of half a century to a point where “the lengths of decisions, including the majority opinion and all separate opinions” averaged 8,265 words. Restrictions on the length of briefs were once expressed solely in terms of page counts, before other forms of technology enabled us to reduce font sizes almost microscopically. Prescribing specific fonts

became a real hassle, as this began to inspire something tantamount to equal protection skirmishes between what we used to call “PC” and “Mac” users. The ensuing word count solution resulted in a bumper crop of psychotherapy referrals involving court clerks before electronic filing finally became the law of the land and allowed computers to do all the counting on their own. Sometimes the words that count are the ones with the lowest count. If one is the loneliest number, it can sometimes be the most consequential. One historically prom inent example of this is the password. During the Second World War, American soldiers were challenged at checkpoints to recite passwords that their German and Japanese adversaries would allegedly find too difficult to pronounce. Today’s most for midable adversary, however, is often one’s own password—in particular, the one we use for gaining access to electronic devices. In healthcare settings, for example, it seems

30 september/october 2025