Writing Matters

• Publication year: 2011
• Pages: 0062
• Citation: Vol. 16 No. 5 Pg. 0062

Writing Matters No. Vol. 16 No. 5 Pg. 62 Georgia Bar Journal February, 2011

Document Design for Lawyers:

The End of the Typewriter Era

by Linda Berger

You've written the perfect brief. The research was thorough; the arguments are imaginative and well-supported, appealing to both logic and emotion. You've revised, edited, proofread and revised again. It's the complete, persuasive product.

But it looks like it was produced on a last-century Smith Corona: the text appears in double-spaced 12-point Courier with ALL CAPS and underlining for headings. As Bryan Garner notes, the only reason to use Courier anymore is if the judge to whom you are writing requires it.

Lawyers today are not only authors, but also self-publishers. Even when court rules restrict lawyers' choices, word-processing programs free lawyers to design their documents to achieve several purposes:

1. Document design can pull the reader in and keep them engaged by enhancing the accessibility and readability of your document.

2. Document design can boost your credibility by conveying a knowledgeable and professional image of the lawyer and the lawyer's firm or company.

3. Document design can support the persuasiveness of your arguments by making your client's story easier to understand and your legal positions harder to dismiss.

The remainder of this article will discuss simple design rules that you can follow in documents that need not comply with court rules and some that you may use even in documents that must comply. Book and magazine publishers apply these tested graphic design principles to skillfully engage readers and amplify their publications' editorial content. As self-publishers, lawyers should make similarly thoughtful

choices about the key visual elements of their printed documents. The suggestions here apply primarily to choosing and using fonts, the visual framework of printed document design.

In Painting with Print, Ruth Anne Robbins argues persuasively that the application of principles of typography, headings and subheadings, white space and the spatial relationships between them is as "critical an element of persuasion as proper grammar and adherence to the codes of court and citation form." Judge Frank Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has written that "[d] esktop publishing does not imply a license to use ugly or inappropriate type and formatting," specifically criticizing the use of the commonly used default font Times New Roman as "utterly inappropriate" for long documents such as briefs. Legal writing expert Bryan Garner devotes a chapter of The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style to document design. Derek Kiernan-Johnson has argued that...