From the beginning, lawyers are taught to reveal what they know to everyone. First-year law professors use the Socratic method, where the professor cold calls on students and interrogates them about a case and expects them to spew forth all of the facts, arguments, and the court’s reasoning.
This continues after the first year of law school; most assignments for first and second year associates at Big Law firms are research memos, where they’re expected to do a heavy dive on a given topic and let everyone know everything they learn via a file memo.
Here’s the thing: Responding to interrogation and expecting to always share how much you know isn’t a recipe for successful lobbying.
So, how does a lawyer become a lobbyist who can decide who needs to know what and why without boring everyone to death? The best piece of advice I got after my own transition from Big Law to policy was to make sure there is a lot of literal blank space on the paper.
Imagine my surprise at a project director’s baffled look after I gave her a mind-numbingly long, single-spaced memo on the Internal Revenue Code’s non-discrimination rules and the effect it could have on phased retirement programs. Having spent weeks on this memo, I was bewildered about why she seemed so unappreciative. She finally explained: You need to give staffers on Capitol Hill a lot of blank space on the page when you try to explain something.
Why? How could they possibly not want to know all the intricacies of the tax code’s non-discrimination rules and how these arcane rules impede employer’s ability to offer phased retirement programs within defined benefits plans? Easy: No one but me and a few other geeky employee benefits attorneys want to know this.
The Hill staffer you’re working with (especially those who don’t work for a specific committee) doesn’t have time for lengthy diatribes on arcane subjects. It isn’t that they don’t care; they just don’t have time or bandwidth. That long memo you just wrote isn’t what you are going to take to the Hill with you, if you still want to keep a job. You are going to take a one-pager at best.
Don’t get me wrong: You still need to fully understand the issue, and that’s why you write that file memo. But that isn’t what you’re going to give to a Hill staffer.
Do your research, write your file memo, then do the real work: Identify the problem, identify why it matters, and identify the fix. For the first cut, allow yourself the space to fully explain each of these in at least a paragraph or two. Then go back and cut down to the very basics.
I looked again at the single-spaced memo on the Internal Revenue Code’s non-discrimination rules and asked, “What is the problem here?” The answer: Older people want to keep working part-time and receive part of their pension and employers want to allow this.
This matters because we have a worker shortage and need to find ways to keep more people in the workforce and train younger people before they leave. The fix is to amend these arcane tax rules in a very narrow way to allow it.
When you put it that way, it makes a lot more sense.
I work in a highly technical area, so when I make my edits, I think, “Would the guy on the metro get this?” If not, cut and simplify. Don’t dumb it down, but get rid of the jargon and legalese—"thus,” “therefore,” and “whereby” have no place here (or really anywhere)—and get to the point. Remember, bottom line on top.
Once you’ve taken each point down to two to three sentences and the draft is no more than one page, sprinkle in a few stats relevant to the office. Boom: You just drafted your first leave-behind.
In the end, you do need to know everything on your topic. But you just need to be able to tell them what matters. In my case for my first foray into policy, it was even easier when I could find someone whose boss represents a district with a lot of older workers who work for employers who want phased retirement. Why? Because they vote.
This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.
Author Information
Chantel Sheaks is the vice president of retirement policy at the US Chamber of Commerce and has more than 30 years of employee benefits experience.
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