Why Legal Proofreading is Crucial
The importance of proofreading in the legal field cannot be overstated. Unlike other fields, legal documents often carry significant implications for all parties involved. The legal nomenclature is vast, complicated, and often specific on a one-on-one close level to particular cases. When lawyers send out contracts, briefs, motions, or any other kind of correspondence, it is essential that what they intend to say is exactly what they do say.
Consider a simple contract for a new hire. In careful language, a lawyer or HR professional pens an offer with a $60,000 signing bonus . A typo in the document, however, could change 60,000 to six million dollars. Can you imagine the frenzy that this would cause upon the receipt of said document? Briefly, there could be mass panic about the company’s offending the entire hiring market, followed by even greater panic on the part of executives who just signed off on the offer, followed by eventual corrections, followed by embarrassment. This is obviously an extreme example, but it demonstrates how small grammatical and typographic oversights can have enormous implications in the legal field.
Legal Proofreading Pitfalls
Errors are the enemy of writing. They create confusion for your reader, which is the last thing you want when you’re making law.
We’ve discussed how common errors can compromise the quality of arguments created by even the most experienced lawyers, and nothing makes expert legal arguments harder for attorneys to lean on than typographic errors. Legal documents are structured in a precise way, often with specific formatting. For instance, a statute may have sections for particular issues. If you leave out one of those sections, it could make the entire document invalid. That’s a big deal to lose on a technicality.
Common proofreading errors in legal text include:
Typographic mistakes
Incorrect terminology
Formatting issues
Punctuation errors
All of these problems can go unnoticed at first glance. Fortunately for you they can be cleaned up in a proofreading round.
Best Practices for Legal Proofreading
One of the best methods for proofreading your work is to do so aloud. This is especially important when you are proofreading your briefs, pleadings, or other substantive documents, as opposed to email messages. It is effective because it allows you to hear the clear meaning of your words, in contrast to the incorrect meanings that are easy to read into the text when you proofread a document in your head. When proofreading aloud, be sure to do so as you would read it aloud to someone else, making sure not to emphasize or de-emphasize words in an attempt to edit the text as you read it aloud. This applies to everyone, including you, because the professional proofreader (usually called "your assistant" to avoid confusion) is an invaluable part of the process, as they have the knowledge, experience, and perspective of being able to catch how the document comes across to "someone else." This is probably the most important part of the proofreading process, because for most lawyers, the hardest part of writing a legal document is figuring out how to begin. To be sure, virtually every lawyer recognizes that it is often easier to recognize grammar and spelling mistakes and typos in a text that is complete than one that is incomplete, because it is so much harder to see the flaws in the text as if you were reading it for the first time under those circumstances.
If you are not proofreading aloud, the next best strategy is to do so by comparison. Put the text to be proofread under a document that has been printed out and made available to you on paper or otherwise. I do this all the time when proofreading opposing counsel’s briefs or motions, by reviewing the most current version of their brief against a copy of my response and/or answer. The idea is to keep a clean and unblemished printout of the document under review, or other source document, and move the active document around underneath it, comparing them. The advantage of this is that is allows you to more closely inspect the parts of the text where formatting anomalies appear (especially if they show up in several places), and also analyze your document more generally without the distraction of your monitor.
Be sure to take breaks during your proofreading sessions. A small break provides relief from an extremely intense mental effort, allowing you to review your work with a fresh set of eyes. Where you find most of your mistakes tends to be at the beginning or end of your document, so give yourself the opportunity to spend extra time going over those sections.
Also, many proofreading software programs are worth your time, including WordRake, Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and ProWritingAid, among others. These programs work by analyzing the plain textual content of your document, so any formatting and appearance issues, as well as most substantive issues such as citation errors, will not be detected. However, they are effective tools and can be used alone, or in conjunction with another proofreading method or program.
However, before you finish proofreading your document and submit it to the court or the other side, make sure to carefully consider any and all legal citations present in your document. Even if you do not have time to go over your document word-for-word in order to ensure that it is free from any typos and grammatical or other errors (like legal citation errors), you should at least perform a rough review to verify that the proper citation format is used throughout your document. Despite the best computational efforts of legal research professionals, it is extremely common for even attorneys to accidentally input the wrong citation into their briefs, and not have time to catch it before filing. In such a situation it is very easy, simply to swap out a list of improper citations for a proper list of citations at the last minute.
This is generally done by copying and pasting a properly formatted list of references into your brief, which you have created or compiled in advance. You may then compare the existing citation format on a document with the one prepared separately, so that you can be confident that the correct citation format is being used throughout your document. This is essential not only for brevity and conciseness, but also because some judges will not allow you to file documents as a matter of course if your legal citations are not in the format they expect.
Legal Proofreading Tools and Resources
Legal dictionaries abound, but sometimes you just need someone to open your mind to the right one for that specific matter — or to help you with an appropriate colloquialism. For instance, David’s Law Dictionary is a great resource for legal terms, as is Black’s Law Dictionary. However, researchers and legal professionals looking for a different take on a term might be interested in Wisblawg: The WI Law Library Blog over at the University of Wisconsin. The blog’s most recent post noted a "cheeky" addition to the Merriam-Webster dictionary of the term "trick or treat", a staple of many Halloween activities, defining it as follows: to request a treat (such as a small gift or candy) from a person by threatening the person with mischievous consequences (as by desecrating or damaging property) … ." (Emphasis added.)
These legal-specific blogs, in conjunction with general web sites that have terrific proofreading checklists are good places to start when proofreading legal documents, particularly if you are not sure you are identifying a specific error . The Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab has a great list and explanations of common writing issues authors should check for when reading their works aloud to themselves, which they should do after proofreading the original document and before sending the final draft off for a final review. The suggestions in that list include: how you use apostrophes, homonyms (or homophones) and other common linguistic pitfalls. One common problem is the use of "accept" vs. "except" in your legal documents, as both words are often misused. The American Writing Center also has a series of proofreading resources including links to several checklists. The basic proofreading checklists above focus on general issues. However, the American Writing Center’s proofreading checklist is more specific and tailored for legal or medical proofreading. It also includes links to other proofreading resources, both online and in print, for those who prefer that format to a digital one.
Legal Proofreading Challenges
The act of proofreading is a degree more challenging in law than in most of the media. For starters, there’s the sheer volume of statutory material that needs to be read, and carefully, before publication. Secondary materials pose their own challenges, in particular, that of which cases, if any, are relevant in supporting points made.
The language of legal material is also inherently complex. The "plain language" style of legal writing so aggressively promoted by recent administrations in Washington has not caught on with any volume. Indeed, the language is getting denser, as well as longer, with each passing day. There’s a fair argument that there really isn’t room for "plain" in American legal language. Because the stakes are so high when it comes to how a statute or a case is written, the people responsible for translating that complexity into plain English for a lay audience are those whose work is entirely dependent upon being as accurate, and as succinctly so, as possible.
Legal proofreading doesn’t just involve an understanding of the law – it also requires a thorough, nuanced understanding of the technical aspects of written language. The challenge is less understanding the law or even the legal language as it is working it into grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs. Contracts are built to be anything but. Being completely up to date in the most recent version of the Blue Book is an absolute necessity; so is being crystal clear on how far you’re allowed to stray into language that doesn’t conform to prescriptive conventions.
Cross-referencing those statutory materials is a whole separate set of challenges. Lengthy parentheticals flying off this or that way. Indented footnotes teeming with citation after citation. Creative incorporation of quotes and references into sentences. Because the sentences in legal writing are nearly all longer and more complex than their counterparts in other writing, monitoring the cross-references for accuracy, both in terms of the reference itself and the context of the reference are all the more vital. If you lose consistency here, you could be losing the gist of the sentence altogether.
Last, but certainly not least, there’s also psychological aspect – the client. Law firms these days are, even in the case of the BigLaw firms with the most money and the most time at their disposal, under a lot of pressure to get documents out quickly. That means pushing the editors, including the proofreaders, to cut corners to deadlines not driven by any traditional goal, such as the end of the day or the end of the week. In addition to reading documents to ensure they are free of grammatical errors and any other mistakes, the proofreader must be a moral force for accuracy and fairness. The plaintiff and defendant don’t always see eye to eye, so to speak, particularly when involving the sort of high-stakes documents involved in medical malpractice claims and other so-called "extreme" cases. The proofreading person must be not only accurate thus far, in the context of the documents, but also able to see them in the context of the entirety of the case.
The Importance of Professional Proofreading in Law
A role of a proofreader to correct any typos, grammatical mistakes or even errors in calculations for a business minded client. A crucial part of the proofreading stage is to uphold the integrity of the document. As with any other industry, if a legal document does not adhere to standards, such as in this case, spelling, punctuation and can quite often cause problems.
As with a normal proofing, the idea is to look for any mistakes that could lead to any embarrassing situations or even eternal damnation.(Eternal damnation is a little bit extreme but in a sense, it’s true).
For obvious reasons, being a proofreader in the legal sector requires a fairly hefty understanding of the legal jargon so this skill should be a must for a legal proofreader to make sure that the legal terms used are accurate. It’s also important to have a good grasp of the terminology and language of the various types of law .
When proofreading for the legal sector, a proofreader may have to proofread documents containing legal forms, briefs, motions and pleadings. With this level of understanding needed, as a legal proofreader you would need to have a comprehensive understanding of the types of documents, which are normally:
The terminology and language differ from each of these documents and having a basic understanding of the declarations and definitions can work a long way to help a proofreader create an accurate and flawless piece of work.
In order for a certified proofreader to fully understand and fulfil their role, it may be necessary to consult with a lawyer, paralegal or even judge of the court to clarify parts of the document that may not make sense.
Unfortunately, not everything is flawless and as with any proofreading job, there may be minor issues within a legal document that may be overlooked by an editor but as a proofreading job calls for much closer attention to "minutiae", these issues are highlighted straight away.
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