Templates for the home office

When I left my full time job at one of the big firms, I left behind a full time secretary and a word processing department. I wasn't too worried, because I'd always typed up my own briefs. However, I discovered that the problem wasn't the typing, it was the formating. In my law firm days, I'd type in the text, and my secretary would carefully align it to print it up on expensive pre-printed pleading paper. Or the word process department would insert custom-made pleading code at the front of the document and then, ever so carefully, line up all the text.

When I went out on my own, I had to figure out how to do these things myself. It was instantly obvious to me that I was not going to spend money on expensive pre-printed pleading paper. I could often take some from my clients -- it was, after all, their pleadings I was printing -- but that was cumbersome. Also, I hated the waste, since it was very difficult to get the lines to match, and my aesthetic sensibility was deeply offended when they did not.

What I ended up doing in the beginning was copying those custom-made codes from willing clients and applying them to my own documents. It wasn't a great solution because I still had a hard time getting things to line up. Sometimes it would take me an hour (not billed to the client) to get the darn thing to look right. Technology, though, has solved these problems, especially if, like me, you rely primarily on WordPerfect to prepare your pleadings. (Although, sadly, with the passing years more and more of my clients have gone to Word, since it automatically comes with the computers they buy.)

WordPerfect has a wonderful little macro entitled "Pleading." Once you've selected that macro, an easy-to-understand little wizard will walk you through the process. In just one box, it asks how many lines you want on the left and the right, what margins you want, how high the line numbering should go, what the spacing should be, what font, what justification, and what type of page numbering.

Answer all the questions and it automatically generates a perfect pleading page every time. If you stick to the line spacing you selected in the first place (and if you know how to toggle back and forth between single space, for quotations, and double space, as I do), your document will always align perfectly and it will look beautiful.

MS Word, typically, is more difficult. (As I've always said, Word is easy to learn and hard to use.) Some Word versions come with a Wizard that includes pleadings (which you'll find under File -> New), but it's an incredibly rigid device. It forces the user into certain parameters that almost never match my own requirements. To change the margins, the number of lines, the space allocated for the case caption -- these are all incredibly challenging tasks, that suck up enormous amounts of time.

I've actually found it easier simply to go to Word's legal template site and look for a pre-formatted pleading template that suits my particular needs. They're seldom as elegant as anything I would design for myself on WordPerfect, but they get the job done.

I suspect a lot of this sounds very fussy to you, but I think it makes a difference. When the judge sees a beautifully formatted pleading, with the lines matching and the text nicely balanced, he or she thinks (a) this is a quality law firm and (b) this is easy on my eyes. Both of those thoughts, I believe, provide a significant subliminal advantage for the attorney submitting the beautiful brief.