“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~ William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology, 1963

In response to last week’s Bard of the Bar post (Build Your House Part 2 – Blueprint), a colleague who receives this blog asked me to clarify what I meant by “annotated outline of the brief” in task five of the Blueprint Time Estimation Checklist. I would like to share my answer, and expound upon it a bit, in this post.

We lawyers are not known for being good writers. Perhaps that is because writing is hard. Someone once said writing is easy—just open a vein!

The “preemption rule,” which has been adopted in a number of jurisdictions around the country, limits injured plaintiffs’ ability to prove wrongdoing against employers because, so long as an employer admits that it is vicariously liable for an employee’s negligence, the employer’s own potential acts of misconduct for negligent supervision, hiring, training, or entrustment are not disclosed to the trier-of-fact.