Writing articles can distract you from your day job
Julie and I regularly write articles updating our clients on new employment law issues. The updates cover new legislation, cases and problems that we have helped clients solve. You can see examples on our web site (www.employease.co.uk). The updates should be roughly monthly since employment law in the UK is active to say the least, but getting the time to sit down and write them can be a problem in a busy working week. The exercise tends to go like this:
I suggest that we should get on and write an update and Julie agrees. We spend some time off and on over the next week discussing and arguing about the subject. One of us then volunteers to write a first draft. After about a week of nothing happening the one who didn’t volunteer writes the first draft, usually to the great annoyance of the other.
The draft then gets torn apart and argued about until its in a fit state to publish. I’m writing about this today, because Julie and I spent about 45 minutes stripping down her first draft of an article about the Equality Act. Its difficult to condense a huge act into a relatively short space and still make it coherent and digestible and, more importantly, relevant to our clients.
The exercise also reminded me that Julie and I had been working together for a long time: anyone over hearing the conversation would have assumed that we were really not friends at all. Despite our best intentions, the conversation ended up in a heated discussion over which interpretation of a particular clause was right. Hmm…. Well, we do work in jobs that involves us arguing and debating and defending positions!
Still with a bit of polishing the update should be winging its way out to everyone tomorrow and will make an appearance here too.
Time to stop thinking about work for the night…
