Legal Writing

On the Role of Editors in Legal Writing

Gary P. Rodrigues, a lawyer and publishing consultant, authored this article (?The full stop in legal citation ? has its time finally come??) about whether legal citations should be modernized (e.g., whether a citation should be set as ?LRC 1985 c 1 (5th Supp)? rather than ?L.R.C. 1985, c. 1 (5th Supp.)?).

What I found of particular interest was the author’s comments about the role of editors:

In print, editors review every citation in a manuscript to ensure that all of the elements are present and that every date, letter, bracket, comma or period is in its proper place. While this work appears to be of comparatively little importance to the average reader, it in fact plays a critical role in transforming mere words on a page into an authoritative (or at least ?authoritative looking?) statement of the law.

Confidence in the substance of a piece of writing can be undermined by poor presentation. In my early days in legal publishing, I observed manuscripts that superficially appeared to be of inferior quality being transformed by editors into publications of importance when the distractions caused by poor grammar and incomplete references to sources were eliminated.

Editorial standards serve the same purpose in the online environment as they do in the print world, i.e they enhance the authority of the document and the credibility of its author. 

Indeed, poor presentation can make all the difference in the world, and law firms should keep that in mind in all their publishing efforts — not just legal matter, but client alerts, seminar materials, Web sites, and the like.

If you wouldn’t send an attorney to court wearing dockers, then — for much the same reason — you wouldn’t publish a client alert he wrote with the copy set in Arial, justified, but not hyphenated.

That would be a rather poor presentation.

Full post as published by Set in Style on August 04, 2009 (boomark / email).