How does a real estate attorney become the author of a children’s book? Haynes Boone Partner Jeff Dorrill spoke to Law360 Pulse on what inspired the book and how writing the book made him a better legal writer.
Read an excerpt below:
When he was a boy, Haynes Boone Partner Jeff Dorrill tackled his everyday life struggles through fantastical discussions with his English-teacher mother about an orphaned boy who is taken in by a friendly monster.
"We would go back and forth on this little boy being raised by a monster, and we created little scenarios where they had issues to confront," Dorrill said. "I would have an issue at school or with whatever sports team I was on, and Mom would take that and ask, 'What would Brunt and Eggbert do?'"
Decades after those talks with his mother, the Dallas-based real estate attorney is now taking readers on a journey with the boy, Eggbert, and the friendly monster, Brunt, in a new children's book published last month — roughly 30 years after Dorrill wrote the manuscript and then shelved it after getting rejected by publishers.
The overarching message of Brunt and Eggbert is resilience in the face of whatever life throws your way, Dorrill said.
"Children need to know that when things change or you have different caregivers, you just have to be resilient," he said. "Every person, even a person who is not the best, there's still positivity that you can pull out, something they can teach you."
Working with a publisher has helped him develop and hone skills he uses daily now at work.
"I always feel like lawyers write too much like lawyers and not like real people," Dorrill said. "Children like direct, children like conciseness, and you can't get away with anything other than that. We can take it up another level as an attorney, but writing should be direct."
Dorrill said his editors at Blue Balloon taught him that "all sentences must have impact, given the attention span of a child."
"The editor walked me through a host of my sentences and paragraph structure in explaining how they could be reworded to keep or heighten the reader's attention," Dorrill said. "It reinforced to me that these principles apply equally to legal writing — that legal writing should be less about the 'legal' and more about the storytelling."
Read the full story from Law360 Pulse here.
