Style preferences are changing. If you’re not keeping up with the changes, the people who read your documents may assume that you’re outdated, too. This is the first part of a three-part series on using Find-and-Replace.

Lawyers are struggling with basic office technology and aren’t recognizing how this hurts productivity. This is particularly true with MS Word, a program that is ubiquitous throughout legal practice, and one that, as lawyers, we believe we already know how to use. Don’t let these six myths stand in the way of getting the training you need to work smarter and get more from each day.

When the duty of technology competence was introduced in 2012, the notion that lawyers would incorporate technology into legal practice felt more aspirational than realistic. Five years later, it is now clear that technology awareness, wisdom, and adoption are necessary. Ignoring the duty also has business, practical, and ethical ramifications.

Put simply, true AI software for editing does not yet exist, and there are two major reasons why it will never replace the human editor. Firstly, editing is about more than correcting text. It’s about understanding and manipulating linguistic shade, colour and nuance; software works in black and white.

Diversity is important to legal tech because it brings in different perspectives, which yield different solutions. Yet, diversity is often reduced to a buzzword and a checkbox. When that happens, the legal tech industry misses out on unique and compelling stories, dynamic expertise, and connections that could convince others to embrace technology rather than resist its adoption.

Nobody likes receiving criticism. However, the truth is that when it comes to legal writing, you can learn to understand feedback differently and make it useful for your career.

Technology competence is now a requirement for all lawyers. The majority of the states have adopted revised Model Rule 1.1, so it has reached a tipping point: Technology competence has moved from optional to essential. So what do you need to do to ensure that that your tech skills are adequate? This article discusses two options for gaining technology competence: delegation and training.

Technological illiteracy and generational bias in the legal industry is causing law firms to implement faulty strategies regarding technical training and education of their attorneys and staff. Co-authors Ivy B. Grey and Darth Vaughn discuss the myth of the digital native and tech bias and applicable ethical rules.

No part of legal work is unaffected by the duty of competency. And now that’s true for the duty of technology competence, too. It requires lawyers to be competent in every tech tool that we use to serve our clients, not just fancy data security tools, but regular tools like MS Word.

This is not yet another article about e-discovery. We will not discuss confidentiality issues. Technology competence is broad, it is more than data security, it is more than e-discovery—it is about everything that lawyers do and every tool that we use to serve our clients.

This article is Part II of a two-part series discussing ethics and technology. Part I explored the ethical duty of technology competence. At the end of that article, I introduced the idea that inefficient use of technology in doing billable work for clients could mean overbilling that client.

Going paperless requires research, planning, equipment, education and training. Though most advice written on this topic focuses on new tech tools and spending money, this white paper focuses on the fast, simple, free, first step to going paperless: establishing naming conventions for your files. The goal of this white paper is to help you understand what goes into creating naming conventions and to guide you through developing your own customized system.

The difference between good and bad legal writing is that good legal writing clearly conveys its message. If written work is sloppy, disorganized, or muddled then it fails because readers have limited working memory to consume and digest complex information. The more stumbling blocks in your writing, the less likely readers are to fully understand what you are trying to communicate.

Editing is a great career choice. You can be independent, have variety in your day-to-day routine, use your expertise, and contribute to the development of interesting and useful documents. However, working as an editor can also be isolating and it can make you feel powerless. That’s where a professional editor society comes in.

Non-breaking spaces, also known as no-break, non-breakable, hard or fixed spaces, are characters that look exactly like regular spaces. You cannot see the difference between a non-breaking space and a regular space either on the page or on most screens. The difference between a non-breaking space and a regular space is how it is treated if it happens to separate two words at the end of a line of text.

What’s the difference between a hyphen and a dash? Did you even know there was a difference? Lots of people use them interchangeably, but if you want to present a perfect document and stand out from the crowd, you need to understand the difference.

Let’s face it: life inside of law firms is contentious. Despite a recent focus on civility in the profession, many lawyers seem to delight in finding and highlighting mistakes in legal writing. Even the kindest lawyers chuckle a bit when a judge quotes an attorney’s writing and faithfully includes the error followed by the dreaded “[sic]” in the court’s opinion.

A major corporate transaction involves a multitude of details, each with the potential for error. “Detail” is an all-encompassing and daunting term that covers everything from the transaction itself, such as structure, financing, and indemnities, to documenting the transaction, which covers spelling and punctuation, formatting, and consistent use of defined terms.

A lawyer’s time and advice are her stock in trade, so billable hours are front of mind. But a focus on hours billed ignores the more useful metric: realization rates. Your realization rate is the percentage of the time you work that is billed to the client and that the client pays. And it’s a key factor in determining and improving your bottom line.

With each of these examples, you have a choice to make. Should you include these special marks, or leave them out? These are diacritical marks, or diacritics, and they include accents, cedillas and more. Often, the term ‘accents’ is used colloquially for all of them, and that’s the term we’ll adopt here.