Dissatisfaction with the practice of law can often be attributed to the fact that lawyers spend nearly as much time acting as word processors as they do solving complex and interesting legal problems. Ironically, clients are also dissatisfied with the amount of time spent on document preparation. Combined it leads to lawyers facing extreme billing pressure, boredom, and burnout all at once.

The advantage of lists is that they jump out at readers. However, if lists contain typos or inconsistencies then those will jump out at readers too. So it’s crucial to format and punctuate lists correctly, or your entire document can look sloppy.

Establish ground rules. Start by meeting with your client and, if practical, the graphic designer and printer. Create a realistic production schedule and make sure everyone involved knows what they will be expected to do.

You’re more important to your company than you know. You’re also more important to your company than the rest of your company knows. Which is a bit of a problem. And a big part of it is how you—and others—see your role in the company.

Law review is an honor, a privilege and a highly coveted credential. Participation is a required step on the path to prestigious clerkships and securing permanent offers with the best law firms. It is also a great way to become efficient at Bluebooking, to become accustomed to detail-oriented work, and to learn to manage your time wisely.

What’s better than a company where the CEO answers support questions? It sounds amazing to have a direct line to the CEO. And anyone who has contacted Intelligent Editing for technical support over the last ten years has had literally that. What could possibly be better? Anything. Literally anything.

When junior and mid-level associates aim to improve their legal writing, most try to be better, clearer, more concise, more persuasive, or more precise. I have yet to meet anyone who declares that they want to be a more confident legal writer. Yet if you lack confidence then increasing it is key. Confidence in your legal writing will help you meet your objectives. Training providers should take note because confidence also improves productivity and efficiency.

We used PerfectIt, Intelligent Editing's add-in for MS Word that finds inconsistencies, to check 1200 randomly selected documents. Each document was 1500 words or more and was downloaded from the internet. The results were staggering. Everyone knows not to use two different spellings for the same word, but we found that more than a quarter of documents published online did exactly that. The worst offender was 'organise' and 'organize', which came up in more than 10% of all documents (including all the sub-variations, such as 'organization' and 'organizes'). But it was far from the only one. Here's the full top 10.

The first line of defense against consistency errors is simply being aware of them. The Top 10 errors listed below give authors and editors a reminder of important things to check before documents are published. However, the best way to improve consistency in documents is to run PerfectIt.

Written communication is the foundation of every law practice, but it is extremely time consuming—and when time-pressure is a factor, it can be an embarrassing stumbling block. So how can lawyers balance time and billing pressures with the perfectionism that the industry demands?

As a medical writer, your team depends on you to catch errors, large and small. It’s your job to make sure that months or even years of hard work on a regulatory submission, grant application, or research article aren’t undermined by small imperfections that make a bad impression and weaken your team’s credibility.

You want your self-published book to make an impression on your readers. But you want that impression to be based on your ideas and your writing, not on inconsequential errors and inconsistencies in spelling and punctuation.

I’m a practicing lawyer and I’m a legal tech entrepreneur. Living in both of those worlds, I’m always amazed when I hear people speak about lawyers as if we are rare mythical beasts to be tamed and tricked into using technology.

If you’ve been using PerfectIt 3, then you’re about to experience a dramatic improvement in how PerfectIt works and how much time it can save. The improvements bring Windows users in line with features that Mac users have had since the launch of PerfectIt Cloud.

If your work involves more than one style manual, or more than one set of style preferences, you’re going to love the changes in PerfectIt 4 (our Windows edition). The most exciting difference is the introduction of styles based on styles. However, it helps to understand the other changes we’ve made.

Bad writing – stiff, convoluted, inconsistent – can get in the way of communication just as bad handwriting can. Healthcare professionals take in a lot of information and must make important decisions based on it. Anything that increases the effort of taking in that information increases the likelihood of errors.

People resent being corrected. No matter how big or small the problem is, no one likes to feel scolded. You may be the office editorial expert, but your co-workers won’t welcome unsolicited instruction on how to use software they’ve been using for years; and they certainly don’t want to hear that words they’ve used their whole lives are offensive to company stakeholders.

The most important changes in PerfectIt 4 are: Faster initial scan saves time on every document; New user interface with detailed previews and one-click fix; GPO Style added to built-in styles; Major updates to American Legal Style and WHO Style; Base new styles on existing styles; Combine styles to create new styles; Online help.

Solo and small firm lawyers represent individuals and businesses, providing access to justice for clients whose needs would otherwise go unmet. It is a worthy practice in a profession experiencing rapid changes that are eroding the financial stability that lawyers once enjoyed.

If you have a cat or a dog, you know the first challenge in using medication to treat their health conditions is getting them to swallow the darn stuff. The same is true for health information with people, especially ordinary people with no special medical background. In order to be in control of your health, you have to be well informed about it. But people need that information in a form they can swallow.