The only time I ever earned consultant money as a linguist came a few years ago when a local attorney phoned me at the university. He had written a contract for his client that another party was interpreting in a way harmful to his client's interests. That party's lawyer presented an extended parsing of one very lengthy sentence complete with a Reed-Kellogg diagram of it. This shook up the lawyer, and he asked me to analyze it. I told him a case could be made for a more favorable interpretation of the sentence, and I wrote it up, complete with a different diagram showing that interpretation. It worked, and his client won the case. The fact is that he wrote a badly ambiguous sentence, but apparently it came down to which parsing job the judge found more impressive.
Not being in the consultant business, I had no idea what to charge the lawyer when he asked, but I knew lawyers bill by the hour, so I pulled out the figure of $200 per hour for my time. He accepted this, so we were both happy.
Dick Veit
Department of English
UNCW
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