Daily Diary

US tape worms meet their match

Posted 26/11/2007 by The Daily Diary

Easy ways of getting an answer to the question ‘Is the credit crunch here to stay?’ include measuring the breadth of litigators’ smiles or charting the rise in Tetris-playing skills among the associates twiddling their thumbs in finance.

Bored associates at one City firms last week found a novel way to keep themselves amused, involving a tape measure – and not in the ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ way you’d expect of, say, investment bankers. Well, sort of.

Sick of wading through megabytes of emails from their US colleagues, said associates decided to print out a series of emails sent by Yankee lawyers and compare them with those sent by English lawyers. The result was a fascinating study into just how verbose our colonial cousins can be. On average, an American lawyer’s email was found to be approximately seven times longer than that of an English solicitor.

The rest of the day was apparently spent debating which client they could charge this invaluable research to.