Work product gets reused by other attorneys all the time in the legal profession. No big deal, right? If someone crafts a good argument on an issue, and someone else is facing that same issue, it makes sense to present that good argument. I take no issue with that.

What I do take issue with, however, is false attribution of the original source of the argument. That treads into dangerous terrain. I note this distinction because it has come to my attention that an “enterprising” young lawyer out there copied a large number of very elaborately formatted and designed Microsoft Word templates and then began passing them off as his own to other employers. Re-using an argument I’ve created is fine. Who could blame you really? But to tell an employer that you bring value because of the hard work that went into creating the templates that you ripped? That’s just shady. I am providing this public service announcement while maintaining the anonymity of the little rapscallion in the hope that this friendly note will encourage more honest disclosures going forward. By the way, I have the very first versions of many of those templates (like the mediation brief format I devised to resemble an appellate brief, rather than a letter or a pleading), creation-date-stamped and all, so I could prove my point if I had no other option…

A word to the…wise.