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2 & 3, though, are encouraging inefficiency, not awesomeness. The practice of high-end law is, to an unreasonable degree, about typesetting and formatting. You
by Digory 9y ago
2 & 3, though, are encouraging inefficiency, not awesomeness.
The practice of high-end law is, to an unreasonable degree, about typesetting and formatting. You pay your lawyers to sweat the local judges’ preferences for margins and Arabic numerals; I’ve seen five lawyers quibbling about curly quotes and footnote placement. And the law says the lawyer is, ultimately, responsible for getting this right - the typesetting part of the brief is the practice of law, just as much as developing the legal argument.
As much as possible, I do my drafting in markdown, to separate content from typesetting. If I don’t, I find typesetting can eat up an unreasonable proportion of the overall time.
But the sooner the courts figure out a way to format the lawyers’ text according to the courts’ own preference(s), the better. Style sheets aren’t quite there, but we’re close.
- rayiner 9y agoIn federal court, at least, it's hard to go wrong with 12-point times new roman for district court, 14-point for courts of appeal, and 1-inch margins. Supreme Court is Century font and booklet-format margins. In practice, you need to just develop a handful of Word templates. As to the other stuff, polish and consistency are more important. In my opinion, there's a good reason why courts place so much weight on that. Judges are in a weird spot--they need to sweat the details, but don't have the time to put every brief under a microscope. So they need to trust you, but develop heuristics to decide when they can't trust you. The big one is misquoting things. If the judge notices a couple of instances where you say a case says one thing, but the case says something else, your brief will get put under a microscope. Polish is another heuristic. If you can't be bothered to spend the relatively small amount of time it takes to make sure your footnotes are formatted consistently, why should the judge assume that you've thoroughly researched the law and the record and that she can trust that it says what you say it says? Of course, like most heuristics, it's a statistical inference rather than a logical one--like holding it against someone for showing up late to an interview. They could be reliable, but it's reasonable to think they might not be.
- dctoedt 9y ago> Judges are in a weird spot--they need to sweat the details, but don't have the time to put every brief under a microscope. Akin to the brown-M&Ms clause in the Van Halen contract technical appendix [0]. [0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/
- Digory 9y agoWell, "hard to go wrong" except when it's wrong. California central district wants 14 points, with line numbers. Arizona district wants 13 points, no line numbers. The 7th Circuit's typography recommendations say Times New Roman might as well be Comic Sans. The Supreme Court italicizes case names differently. Massachusetts state court wants 1.5" margins on two sides. Wisconsin wants 1.5" on just the left. Templates help, as does Butterick's Typography for Lawyers, and a good checklist. But it's still a slog to internalize all the local customs in a multi-state practice. And yes, these are heuristics to identify locals and repeat players, which might be helpful to courts. But, again, that's a separate skill from legal reasoning, and it comes at a high cost for clients.
- rayiner 9y ago90% of the time, you just apply tweaks to a template you already have. Then you reuse that template in what might be dozens of filings in a case.