I can vividly remember what my young associate days were like. As part of the class of 2008, I graduated with classmates who had offers rescinded or who were furloughed as the economy tanked. Good grades were no longer enough, an offer was not a guarantee of a job, there was no longer time to ramp up in an apprenticeship format, and our mountains of debt made failure not an option.

Your house style guide is the document that keeps track of all the writing style preferences at your organization. It includes everything from how your brand should be presented through to spelling, hyphenation, and capitalization preferences in documents.

Bluebooking is a menial task and a law school hazing ritual that has no bearing on actual law practice, right? Wrong. Citing is more than just an exercise in irrational obedience.

Most abbreviations do require a definition. In any case where readers might be confused by TLAs (three letter abbreviations), it's important that they be defined in the text or in a Table of Abbreviations. A research proposal or article with complicated and confusing abbreviations is one that will quickly face rejection. The problem is that authors become so familiar with abbreviations that they forget to define them. To test how prevalent the problem is, we used PerfectIt, the add-in for MS Word that locates undefined abbreviations, to check 3000 randomly selected documents.

Many law schools are failing to adequately prepare students for the profession. Historically, students were not required to participate in legal clinics, complete internships, or take practice management classes. In 2015, the American Bar Association (ABA) issued a guidance memo that clarified that schools must offer experiential learning.

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 If you’re not keeping up with the changes, the people who read your documents may assume that you’re outdated, too.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

The best way to self-edit a document is not to. Seriously: You should get an editor’s help whenever you can. The cost is probably less than you think. The work will come back faster than you think. And you are better off if you don’t try to go it alone. You can find more details in You Should Hire an Editor.

What should you do if you’re the lone voice of editorial standards in a company full of people who can’t even be bothered to put their dishes in the dishwasher or make sure their garbage hits the wastebasket, let alone follow your style guide?

Find and Replace is magic! Now, instead of spending hours searching and changing with the near certainty you’ll miss just one instance in the most embarrassing place possible, you can, with just a few clicks, make a much more hideously embarrassing screwup. Here are six cautionary tales for your edification.

When I was a teenager, my father taught me that as we go through life, the most important thing we possess is our reputation. I was just old enough to appreciate the idea: How do others assess what we do, then determine who we are, and therefore what we might do next time? Can they rely on us?

Language can be a potent force for good—or evil. It matters what we say, and how we say it. And writing matters even more than speech. Our words live on the page long after spoken words are forgotten. 

Discussion about new legal tech tools has reached a fever pitch. It seems that, every day, there are new applications for artificial intelligence and blockchain. Lawyers are dreaming big and imagining ground-breaking new technologies. But what about simple technology tools that already exist? There’s powerful productivity software available—and it’s probably already installed on your computer.

Hyphens are like little screws that hold words together. Now, if you’ve ever gone to a hardware store to buy screws, you know that there are a lot of different kinds of screws. But hyphens? They all look the same – well, within any specific font, anyway. So you might think there’s just one kind of hyphen. You’d be wrong. Full-on, abso-bloody-lutely wrong.

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 second part of a three-part series on using Find-and-Replace.

Spellchecking and proofreading are not the same. Spellcheck is just one part of the process.

If you’re bidding for a contract or responding to a request for proposals (RFP), it doesn’t matter whether it’s small or large. From research funding in the thousands to infrastructure in the billions, there’s always a great deal at stake. Whether it’s jobs that depend on a contract or research that can alter lives, the outcomes of proposal documents could not be more significant. That’s why it’s crucial that your words make the best impression.

Since 2012, lawyers and technologists have written much about the duty of technology competence. However, the promulgation and nationwide adoption of revised Model Rule 1.1 was not the end goal—the purpose was to encourage lawyers to actually become technologically competent. To date, authors have focused on describing the duty. This article aims to go beyond that to examining what it takes to become competent.

PerfectIt Cloud brings all of PerfectIt’s checking to Mac and iPad users for the first time. Users will have the same experience using PerfectIt Cloud on any Office 365 device, whether working on Mac, PC, iPad or Word Online. It integrates directly into Microsoft Word via the Office Store.

What users expect from a software product has changed in the decade since I introduced PerfectIt. In 2009, the iPhone was still new. There were no iPads. Mobile internet was in its infancy. And the ‘cloud’ referred to fluffy white things in the sky. Now customers expect a product to work across platforms, they expect it to sync across devices, they expect it to be easier to use, and they expect to pay less upfront.

Producing high quality legal writing is vitally important to success as a lawyer—but it’s difficult to learn. We have brilliant legal writing gurus, such as Bryan Garner, Ken Adams, and Gary Kinder to guide us, yet most legal writing isn’t good. How is that possible?