Publisher's Notebook

When your husband and your son are both named Paul E. Fletcher, and the big, burly man standing at your doorstep is trying to serve suit papers on Paul E. Fletcher, and you are 100 percent certain the man is looking for a different Paul E. Fletcher, you know it’s going to take a good long time for your heart to stop thumping.

Just ask my mother.

If you ever Google yourself, you can find out who shares your name.

Paul Fletcher is a member of the House of Representatives in Australia.

Paul Fletcher is a psychiatry professor at the University of  Cambridge in England.

Paul Fletcher pitched in the major leagues for three seasons, for the Phillies and the A’s.

If you have a common surname such as Smith, Jones, Williams or Johnson, and you have a common given name, you’re probably used to this happening.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Fletcher is the 352nd most common name in America. And Paul is one of those biblical names that show up with some regularity. So it’s no surprise there are men who share my name.

But when you have a name doppelganger out there, you find it can have a dark edge.

This isn’t a case of identity theft. It’s more identity confusion or mistaken identity. Either way, it can be a source of heartburn.

I grew up in South Florida. When I was about 20, I learned there was another Paul E. Fletcher on the loose in the area. Same name, same middle initial, no relation. I learned about him when the police called my mother, looking for him. No, no, she assured the officer, my son is away at college in Virginia.

I’m glad she realized they weren’t trying to find me.

That was merely the first time that Other Paul and I were confused. I learned in 1984 that he was a year older than I am: The organizers of Other Paul’s 10-year reunion at Stranahan High in Fort Lauderdale were kind enough to invite me to the festivities.

After I got out of law school, I stayed in Virginia. Other Paul stayed in South Florida, and he stayed in trouble – and before too long, he became a bother to my dad, also named Paul E. Fletcher.

My mother said that over a 20-year time frame they would get phone calls seeking Other Paul. Usually the caller was angry and refused to believe that Other Paul wasn’t there. One started in by assuming my mom was Other Paul’s wife, calling her “Diane.” We were learning more about Other Paul’s life than we wanted to know.

Other Paul started two plumbing companies about 1990 and the Broward County authorities started getting complaints. One company was the target of an investigation of plumbers who went in to fix a small job, then tunneled under the house, looking for a nonexistent problem and racking up a big bill. An 80-year-old woman complained about a $52,000 tab that started with a leaky toilet. A subcontractor who worked for Other Paul was charged with fraud.

The newspaper interviewed Other Paul and he brushed off the complaints as “insinuations,” adding that he had “thousands” of satisfied customers in South Florida.

Maybe so, but the Broward County online court records are littered with lawsuits brought against Other Paul and his businesses, with a common theme that he had somehow taken advantage of someone else.

All these claims would explain the phone calls to my parents’ house. And that day when my mother opened her front door and there was the process server, seeking to hang paper on Other Paul. After a long explanation that he had the wrong house and the wrong guy, the man left, papers still in hand.

Other Paul later went into the concrete business, and there he got into real trouble. A story in the Fort Lauderdale paper said he was indicted for grand theft in 2004, after taking a big check for a job he never started. He failed to appear in court, and he was declared a fugitive. A reporter found him in a hospital bed. He had cancer.

The next mention of Other Paul in the paper was an obituary. He died in March 2005 at the age of 48.

I never met Other Paul; I don’t know what demons may have driven him to try to take advantage of other people the way he did. His misadventures never caused any real harm to me or my dad, but the knowledge that he had troubles, and that we sometimes were mistaken for him, was, to use my mom’s word, disconcerting. Who knew when one of his “thousands” of customers would turn vengeful and come to my parents’ house?

You’re never happy to read about a death. But please forgive me if I admit that some tiny part of me was relieved when I knew he would no longer besmirch our shared name.

On May 18, 1988, I interviewed Dr. Rick Kern, director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission, for an article about a draft of new guidelines the commission was proposing.

Why the date? It was the day I started working here. Rick was the first interview I had for my first story published in Virginia Lawyers Weekly.

Rick Kern died last Sunday, Dec. 13, after a long battle with cancer. He was 58. The Richmond Times-Dispatch has an obituary in this morning’s edition.

Gov. Bob McDonnell issued a statement praising him: “Virginia has lost a brilliant scholar, devoted public servant and leading criminologist today. Dr. Kern was nationally and internationally known for his work in offender recidivism and risk assessment. He left a lasting legacy on Virginia’s criminal justice system, having lead in the development of the truth-in sentencing laws when Virginia abolished parole in 1994.

The governor added his condolences to the family. “While their personal loss is painful and immediate, they can rest assured that Rick Kern’s contributions to public safety in Virginia will have a lasting impact on generations to come.”

Indeed. RIP.

It’s finals week down at the College of Knowledge in Williamsburg.

And William & Mary’s main library, Earl Gregg Swem Library, has announced that it will remain open for 125 straight hours this week.

So what are the stressed-out students doing? A number of them have, well, moved into Swem. “Campus Overload,” a blog from the Washington Post, quotes a student-run publication that said some students have set up make-shift tents and have cots in the library. There was a small stampede last Sunday afternoon when the library opened for the duration; students were loaded down with bedding, clothes, and, oh yes, books and study materials.

Ever clever, some of the new Swem residents have set up a Twitter feed called #OccupySwem, detailing life in the stacks.

Here’s some valuable advice from the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, an outfit in London that describes itself as a “professional organisation based in the UK for editors and proofreaders – the people who strive to make text accurate and readable.”

USA Today takes honors for yesterday’s gem from its purple “Life” section, the hedder on a profile of musician Yo-Yo Ma:

“Yo-Yo Ma’s message: There’s always room for cello”

It’s Cyber Monday, the day when retailers hope to rake in the bucks online. It serves as a bookend to Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving filled with bargains and sales. Hopefully no one will get pepper-sprayed while rushing to the keyboard today.

Does your law firm allow employees to shop from their work computers?

If you say no, you’re not alone. According to a new survey from Robert Half Technology, 60 percent of the businesses surveyed forbid workers to shop from their desks.

And another 23 percent allow some shopping but monitor usage.

Robert Haft hired an independent research firm to do the study; they interviewed more than 1,400 chief information officers at companies with 100 or more employees.

The number of companies that bar at-work shopping is going up. Last year, 48 percent said they did not allow shopping at work.

But savvy shoppers may have a way around the restrictions. John Reed, executive director of Robert Half Technology, said in a statement,” With an increasing number of firms blocking access to shopping sites, many employees may turn to mobile devices to shop at the office.”

Warning: Employees who phone-shop may want to stay on the alert for the HR equivalent of pepper spray.

Actor Corbin Bernsen sued a Virginia Beach-based legal marketing firm in Norfolk federal court last month, claiming it owed him more than $600 grand on a million-dollar contract he signed to represent them in a marketing campaign aimed at lawyers.

Their answer: You were the one who broke the deal, pal. And now you owe us $600,000.

Sounds like a plot from “L.A. Law,” the show in which Bernsen played Arnold Becker, a high-rent divorce lawyer.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that in a counterclaim against Bernsen, Innovative Legal Marketing says that the contract with Bernsen includes what one could call a “good behavior” clause. Bernsen agreed not to commit “any act or do anything which may tend to bring Bernsen into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, or ridicule or which might tend to reflect unfavorably” on Innovative or its clients.

Bernsen broke the deal, Innovative alleges, by, among other things:
• Appearing on a Cartoon Network comedy sketch that made fun of personal injury lawyers.
• Talking about youthful drug use and sex life in an interview on “Celebrity Ghost Stories.”
• Getting into a bar fight on a film shoot in Ohio in August 2010. A local starting admiring one of Bernsen’s female assistants; the matter ended up outside a diner with Bernsen throwing gravel and telling the local man “If I had a gun, you’d be dead,” according to contemporary news reports.

Stay tuned.

A Fairfax judge has been found guilty of one of the most elementary computer security blunders. Read on.

Fairfax lawyer Sharon Nelson reports on her blog, Ride the Lightning, that she and her partner and husband, John Simek, were in one of the courtrooms at the Fairfax courthouse the other night giving a CLE session.

Simek was helping someone with a technology question, then he walked up to the bench. On the bench was the judge’s computer. And there it was: Attached to the judge’s monitor, for all to see, was a sticky note. With the judge’s user name. And the judge’s password.

Nelson’s response: “C’mon guys!” There is no rule of information security so fundamental, she said. You just don’t put a sticky note “with the keys to the castle” on your monitor, under your keyboard or in an easily accessible drawer, she added.

Wonder if the password was “123456.” As we have reported previously, that’s the most commonly used, and therefore most easily cracked, password.

Discretion being the better part of valor, Nelson didn’t name the errant judge or provide his/her courtroom number.

She did ask the rhetorical question, “Maybe we need to have a data security CLE for the judges?”

FAIRFAX—Last Friday, 11/11/11, was the day of the 10th annual “Jazz 4 Justice” concert at George Mason University. It also was Veterans Day, which gave this year’s performance its theme.

The GMU Jazz Ensemble played “The Music of World War II,” tunes from an era when bandleaders Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Woody Herman, among others, took the jazz genre to its “high point,” said Jim Carroll, ensemble director. Jazz was at its most popular during the war years.

Carroll told the audience that he really didn’t know how to say thank you enough to veterans, except through the music.

The GMU Jazz Ensemble did all vets in the audience proud – and there were quite a few at the GMU Center for the Arts, judging from the number of people who stood during an “Armed Service Medley” of all the service branch themes.

A trio of students channeled the Andrews Sisters in a rendition of the classic, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Other top tunes of the era included, Carroll said, a “song that needs no introduction,” Miller’s “In the Mood.”

Fairfax lawyer Ed Weiner, the founder of Jazz 4 Justice and past president of the Fairfax Law Foundation, took a turn at conducting the ensemble. The GMU music department honored Weiner with the Director’s Award, thanking him for 10 years of work on the concert, which raises money for the foundation and for the music programs at Mason.

Members of the ensemble bore gifts, too, presenting Weiner with a framed photograph of the group and their leaders in China during their recent visit. Weiner and his wife Maura were able to accompany the GMU students to the Far East.

At the concert, Weiner also announced the results of the Jazz 4 Justice hat contest – an annual exercise to see who can take a hat with the J4J logo the farthest from Fairfax. This year’s winners were Linda and Paul Hammack, who sported their hats in a snap in front of the Sydney Opera House in Australia, some 9,758 miles away.

Tortfeasor. I never had heard that word until September 1982, when it cropped up in my first-semester Torts class.

The guy who commits a civil wrong isn’t a wrongdoer, or a miscreant, or even a bad guy. He is a tortfeasor, a term that sounds shameful, possibly heinous. A guy to be avoided at all costs, unless perhaps when you are accepting his settlement check for your client.

I went to law school at Washington & Lee after a brief career as a high school English teacher. Part of that job was helping high school juniors gear up for the verbal portion of the SAT exam. Each week my colleague and I would review the books we were teaching and pull out 20-30 vocabulary words. Then we’d go over those words, give definitions and discuss synonyms and antonyms. We’d cover word families, origins and patterns.

So I went to W&L with a well-developed ear, and I wasn’t disappointed. The first year law student hears an array of strange new words and phrases, some in Latin. Tortfeasor. Res judicata. Metes and bounds. Quash. Caveat. Sua Sponte. Mens Rea.

I developed a group of friends who also were having fun with all the new language, one of whom went to the local office shop and got a sign made up, “Mens Rea.” He posted it on the door of the “Mens Room” at Lewis Hall. The sign stayed there our entire first year.

Despite our excitement over all these great new linguistic discoveries, at some point during the second semester, the reality hit us that most of what you do in law school is just read a lot words. Thousands upon thousands of them, often in cases written by people who use too many.

Once I was out of school and practicing law in Southwest Virginia, I ran into a similar problem. Howard McElroy, with whom I worked in Abingdon, said it best. Why, he asked, do lawyers insist on writing like this: “The vehicle was proceeding in a northerly direction.”

It’s so much simpler to say, “The car was headed north,” he said.

The reason is, frankly, it’s more work. It’s harder to write a short and direct paragraph than to dash off a meandering half-page, throwing in all the information you have. When I’ve schooled writers at Virginia Lawyers Weekly, that’s one of the first things they hear.

And the courts in Virginia cough up thousands of words every week, in new decisions, and they don’t always follow the rule that less-is-more. Finding a way to make sense of all that verbiage is what has made our newspaper successful: we turn them into an accessible package of case digests, so lawyers in the commonwealth know what happened and how, quickly and easily.

Lawyers can be a tough audience. Periodically we hear from the wordsmiths in the bar who keep us on our toes.

There once was a Henrico lawyer who railed when we wrote the phrase, “an Henrico judge,” on several occasions. Ultimately we decided we don’t write in Cockney and therefore he was right.

And several people have squealed when we’ve tripped on “more than/over” and “less/fewer,” things we really should have looked up in the AP Stylebook.

As an aside, proofing galleys of the newspaper can be an adventure, too, as any number of language gaffes have died in a puddle of red ink. Just be aware that there is a thin line between “inducted” and “indicted.” The same is true for “Hanover” and “hangover.”

I won’t say I’ve always liked hearing we’ve made a mistake, but I’ve always welcomed corrections, when they’re warranted. We want to get it right and use less – strike that – fewer words whenever possible.

Editor’s note: This article originally was written last year for the “Reflections” series collected by Jon Huddleston when he was president of the Virginia State Bar. A revised version was published in the Virginia Lawyer in October.