I was a stu­dent of Richard Wydick (Plain Eng­lish for Lawyer) and an early admirer of Byran Gar­ner, and I was glad to find TFL to add to the pan­theon. This exam­ple, how­ever, does not go far enough.

1. Find­ing aids should be less obtru­sive: (a) reduce the size of line num­bers and skip blank lines; (b) skip the em dashes around the page num­ber, put it on the same line as the footer and make the footer low­er­case, because the rule is suf­fi­cient to draw atten­tion to this part of the page.

2. Increase all mar­gins and reduce the text line length.

3. Reduce lead­ing to 20 pt (1.5 times font point size).

4. Reduce indents from 0.5″.

These changes appear at http://goo.gl/Or5aZ.

Try­ing to prac­tice typog­ra­phy with stan­dard office soft­ware is like enter­ing the Tour de France on a tri­cy­cle. My revised doc­u­ment was pro­duced using the LaTeX type­set­ting open source soft­ware. Most grad­u­ate schools require the­ses and dis­ser­ta­tions to be pre­pared this way. It is decid­edly not user friendly, but the goal is to make the result reader friendly.

In prac­tice, do you omit the right bor­der from your plead­ings? Is there a CRC re: this?

I know. Just curi­ous whether you include or omit a right bor­der in every­day prac­tice. I think it looks bet­ter with­out the ver­ti­cal line, but I don’t know how to elim­i­nate it. Essen­tially, I’ve been using a form that I got from another lawyer years ago.

I have read the rules. I’d like to learn how to cre­ate a new plead­ings form from scratch. Does your book include instruc­tions on how to do this? If not, can you point me in the right direc­tion?

On the use of word proces­sors vs a tool such as LaTeX.
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
Its 10 years old but still rel­e­vant.
” Word is a stan­dard that has lit­tle to com­mend it other than the fact that it is (or aspires to be) a stan­dard”

Derek, Latex is essen­tially worth­less in a law office. Lawyers need to pro­duce doc­u­ments that other lawyers can edit. Lawyers need to pro­duce doc­u­ments that their para­pro­fes­sional staff can edit. Lawyers need to pro­duce doc­u­ments (e.g., pro­posed orders) that judges and their staff can edit. Latex does not meed those needs.

Mike, the point I was mak­ing was not that peo­ple should start using LateX for edit­ing. I don’t think it is really designed for this pur­pose.

The issue is more about sep­a­ra­tion of con­tent from lay­out. Tools to be used should allow peo­ple to focus on the con­tent they are cre­at­ing and edit­ing and not on the lay­out. Light­weight markup sys­tems would be con­sid­er­ably bet­ter in this regard than a tool which mixes con­tent and lay­out … with the all-too-common result that peo­ple spend far too much time on the lat­ter (and still do not get it right) than the for­mer.

There was a bat­tle? Its not so much a case of “win­ning or los­ing” but enabling peo­ple to have choices. WYSIWYG is fine for every­day use; but for con­trol of lay­out (which I had the impres­sion was the issue here) you need to be aware there is a choice that does not nec­es­sar­ily involve that rather clunky option.

Do you mind shar­ing the fonts used in this doc­u­ment. In your book you men­tion that Serif fonts are best for body text b/c the ital­ics looks bet­ter in cita­tions. Is the font used here a serif font?

Really like the after. And I love your point about lawyers just using tem­plates because that’s what they were given. “Every­one” uses plead­ing paper (with the dou­ble line on the left side and the sin­gle line on the right). But no one knows why. And it’s not even required.

You put line num­bers in your exam­ple because the Cal­i­for­nia rules require line num­ber­ing. But even in Ari­zona, every­one uses lined plead­ing paper–but I have yet to find the Ari­zona rule that requires line num­ber­ing. It’s implied by the rule that says the name of the court is on line 6. But oth­er­wise, there is no ref­er­ence to num­ber­ing the lines.

Num­ber­ing lines is silly and use­less and I have no idea why “every­one” still does it.

just came across great typog­ra­phy in a brief: http://www.nylj.com/nylawyer/adgifs/decisions/121611govbrief.pdf

Look­ing at the Gupta brief noted by @AB made me think again about LaTex as a tool, so I took a close look at the US Attorney’s fil­ing.

The sec­ond thing that strikes you is the gen­er­ous mar­gins. The first thing that strikes you is the big, ugly pools of black ink.

It turns out that some of the warts and blem­ishes in this brief as an exam­ple of typo­graphic art are imposed, some are a by-product of the rules and oth­ers are self inflicted.

Fed­eral Rule of Appel­late Pro­ce­dure Local Rule 32.1(a)(1) “The docket num­ber of the case must appear in type at least one inch high.” This means that the designer is stuck with 72-point type, but noth­ing dic­tates that it be in Arial Black or sim­i­lar. Some alter­na­tives appear at https://skitch.com/technocrat/g1est/caseno .

FRAP 32 requires dou­ble spaced, 14-pt serif pro­por­tional type (or cer­tain mono­spaced type) and imposes a 30-page limit on a prin­ci­pal brief. Head­ings need not be in serif. Local Rule 32.1(a) relaxes those require­ments for printed pam­phlets 6 1/8 in by 9 1/4 in paper to per­mit 12-point type, with 2-point lead­ing between lines and 6-points between para­graphs. Pre­sum­ably, local prac­tice inter­prets the local rule as also relax­ing the 30-page limit if the 14,000-word con­tent limit is observed.

The black­let­ter “United States Court of Appeals” is entirely his­tory and tra­di­tion and prob­a­bly deserves a pass for that rea­son.

The open­ing page of the con­tents in the government’s brief, page 8 of the file at http://goo.gl/yT0OK, is much busier than needed. Before the reader gets to the text, there is the black­let­ter court name, all caps in bold sans serif, title caps in bold san serif, a heav­ier ruler, small caps serif (all cen­tered, so far), italic serif, right jus­ti­fied, then back to cen­tered, bold sans all caps, a lighter ruler, ad title caps bold sans serif in a smaller point size. That’s a lot of visual embell­ish­ment for very lit­tle aid to the reader.

In my rework at http://goo.gl/w6lxV, I sim­plify by using sans serif for every­thing except the black­let­ter line, and drop the caps down to small caps or title case.

On the sec­ond page, the page num­ber shouldn’t be the first thing that the reader sees, and I’ve dropped it to the footer. Text is bet­ter jus­ti­fied with hyphen­ation. With the lead­ing, para­graph first line inden­ta­tion is unneeded. Head­ers, in my view, are find­ing aids. So the should be eas­ily spot­ted, but they should not visu­ally dom­i­nate. Con­trast­ing font, bold­ing, lead­ing, cen­ter­ing and num­ber­ing are not all needed to set them off from the text, and I’ve sub­tracted the bold­ing and used serif, but kept cen­ter­ing and num­ber­ing.

Other changes were a mat­ter of per­sonal taste. For exam­ple, while I did num­ber the foot­notes, I made their sym­bols off­set slightly into the mar­gin, where they are eas­ier to spot, slightly.

So, how hard was this to do, start­ing from scratch with­out a tem­plate? — Mod­er­ately hard and I didn’t do the work for table of con­tents and table of author­i­ties.

Ninety per­cent was very easy and 10% was dif­fi­cult.

The easy part is get­ting text and head­ers to present well if you accept the defaults. The hard part is chang­ing the defaults, which is a mat­ter of fig­ur­ing out the magic phrases, and, well, cita­tion.

Here’s an easy para­graph, which is iden­ti­cal key­stroke for key­stroke for the text in the source file:

On July 26, 2010, the Dis­trict Court denied Gupta’s motions for bail and for a new trial. On July 28, 2010, Gupta filed a motion for bail pend­ing appeal in this Court, which was not con­tested by the Gov­ern­ment. This Court granted the motion on August 19, 2010.

This appears at the top of page 3 of my rework. It couldn’t be eas­ier to type and you get lig­a­tures and hyphen­ation for free.

On the other hand:

Instead of ana­lyz­ing the four “core val­ues” under­ly­ing the pub­lic trial guar­an­tee iden­ti­fied in \Peter­son and its prog­eny, the dis­sent crit­i­cized the major­ity for offer­ing “[a]s a pur­ported jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the clo­sure … that the clo­sure was brief and ‘noth­ing of sig­nif­i­cance hap­pened’ dur­ing that time.” \Id at 875 (quot­ing \Id at 868–69 (major­ity opin­ion)). Judge Parker elab­o­rated:

illus­trates some annoy­ances: Open­ing quote marks are two back tick marks. To avoid man­ual ital­i­ciza­tion (\textit{Peterson}), I wrote a macro to do this. Other spe­cial char­ac­ters require back­slashes: \$ being one.

Another annoy­ance is that while LaTex is very good at full pro­por­tional spac­ing, the nature of the beast is that if you have long words you may have to force hyphen­ation or spe­cially mark the begin­ning and end of the para­graph to allow “sloppy” spac­ing.

In think­ing about a bunch of lawyers work­ing on this brief and doing the type­set­ting in a law office set­ting, I have a wave of recoil from the idea of using LaTex, and I think that this level of type­set­ting should be left to pro­fes­sional print­ers (although they would do well to use LaTex).

Hey Matthew —

Nice book. I read it — cover to cover — this evening. I was actu­ally sur­prised how many of the guide­lines (ok, rules) I knew. I sus­pect my knowl­edge came not from the actual prac­tice of law, but my sev­eral years as a word proces­sor at sev­eral large firms in Boston and New York.

I’ve always been per­plexed, though, about how one should lay out a table of con­tents and table of author­i­ties. I reg­u­larly use them. I think Garner’s right: Any­thing more than 10 pages or so deserves a TOC and TOA. From what I gath­ered with tonight’s read, I sus­pect the TOA and TOC would ben­e­fit from large amounts of white space, large mar­gins (top and bot­tom) and short line lengths. Per­haps some bold? Have any exam­ples avail­able, either your own or some­one else’s?

I recall doing an inter­net search on “proper lay­out” for TOA and TOC. I recall either no guid­ance or a web entry some­where that said there was no stan­dard and few rules about them.

I have seen TOA done in a one line for­mat and a two line for­mat. Both for­mats use a tab leader (line of dots) set toward the right edge. I also recall work­ing for some attor­neys that insisted the year of the deci­sion must be omit­ted and oth­ers that insisted it must be inserted into the TOA.

Hmmm.

Thoughts appre­ci­ated.

–Craig.

Does any­one have a LaTeX plead­ing paper sam­ple (lines / num­bers) that I could have please? I like doing things the hard way, like leav­ing home on my 18th birth­day with $1,000.00 in my pocket and work­ing my way through under­grad and grad­u­ate school (as a legal sec­re­tary / para­le­gal) to become an attor­ney. Of course, I can use Word­Per­fect and Microsoft Word — how­ever, I want to try my luck at LaTex. I’ve already set up busi­ness let­ter­head (with sub­se­quent pages) in LaTex and I am just work­ing out the kinks. The next step is LaTex plead­ing paper. Any help would be greatly appre­ci­ated. There’s not much out there in the way of Google arti­cles, except for this web­page.

With some moral trep­i­da­tion of putting a dan­ger­ous instru­men­tal­ity into the hands of an aspi­rant who has not yet gone through the elab­o­rate haz­ing rit­u­als of legal train­ing (which will beat LaTex out of you mer­ci­lessly), here is the source code to the sam­ple in the first com­ment. God have mercy upon your soul.

\documentclass[12pt]{report}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\usepackage{soul}
\RequirePackage{lineno}
\RequirePackage{leading}
\usepackage[margin=1.8in]{geometry}
\begin{document}
\set­page­wise­li­nenum­bers
\linenum­bers
\defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}
\setmainfont{Goudy Old Style}
\leading{18pt}
\def\Id{\emph{Id}}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\thispagestyle{fancy}
\fan­cy­head{} % clear all header fields
\fan­cy­foot{} % clear all footer fields
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
\renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{0.4pt}
%\fancyfoot[R]{\small \thep­age}
\fancyfoot[R]{\footnotesize 2}
\fancyfoot[C]{\footnotesize \caps{Plaintiff’s Motion to Com­pel Finan­cial Records}}
\begin{center} \textbf{\caps{POINTS AND AUTHORITIES}} \end{center}
\setlength{\parindent}{0.0in}
Pre­vi­ously, the Court denied the Defendant’s motion for sum­mary adju­di­ca­tion of Caesar’s claims for puni­tive dam­ages. (Bru­tus Decl. \textpara­graph 1.) Cae­sar served the Defen­dants with timely notices to pro­duce finan­cial records at trial. (Bru­tus Decl. \textpara­graph 2.) The Defen­dants responded with boil­er­plate objec­tions. None of the Defen­dants pro­duced any finan­cial records. (Bru­tus Decl. \textpara­graph 3.) This motion seeks to com­pel the Defen­dants to pro­duce these records, and pay sanc­tions to Cae­sar of \$1,000.
\begin{enumerate}
\item
\textbf{Caesar is enti­tled to the finan­cial records under Civil Code \text­sec­tion~ 3295.}
\end{enumerate}

\setlength{\parindent}{0.2in}
Because this is a puni­tive dam­ages case, Cae­sar is enti­tled to sub­poena doc­u­ments “to be avail­able at the trial for the pur­pose of estab­lish­ing the prof­its or finan­cial con­di­tion” of the Defen­dants. Cal. Civ. Code \text­sec­tion~ 3295(c).

\setlength{\parindent}{0.2in}
Cae­sar has a right to these records even with­out show­ing that there is a “sub­stan­tial prob­a­bil­ity that [he] will pre­vail.” \Id. That’s the rule for pre­trial dis­cov­ery of finan­cial records, but not for records to be brought to trial. \Id.

\begin{enumerate}
\item[2.]
\textbf{Caesar needs the finan­cial records because they are evi­dence of the Defen­dants’ finan­cial con­di­tion and rel­e­vant to the sec­ond phase of trial.}
\end{enumerate}

\setlength{\parindent}{0.2in}
If the jury finds any of the Defen­dants liable for puni­tive dam­ages, the jury may then con­sider “[e]vidence of profit and finan­cial con­di­tion” of those defen­dants to deter­mine the amount of puni­tive dam­ages. Cal. Civ. Code \textsection\textsection~ 3294(a), 3295(d).

\setlength{\parindent}{0.2in}
Fur­ther­more, the Defen­dants were ordered to stand trial on puni­tive dam­ages. (Bru­tus Decl. \textpara­graph 4.) If the jury returns an ini­tial ver­dict for puni­tive dam­ages, Cae­sar will need these finan­cial records to prove the amount of puni­tive dam­ages. The Defen­dants can­not cir­cum­vent the trial by with­hold­ing evi­dence that the jury must con­sider. Cal. Civ. Code \textsection\textsection ~3295(d).

\end{document}

Thank you ever so much for the sam­ple LaTeX plead­ing paper — greatly appre­ci­ated! I look for­ward to try­ing out this new sys­tem in the com­ing days / weeks.

Thanks for post­ing the exam­ple, Richard. I think the changes you made mostly improved the final result, but I do have a quib­ble. Your tech­nique of explic­itly defin­ing the for­mat­ting for each head­ing vio­lates the fun­da­men­tal watch­word of LaTeX: sep­a­ra­tion of form and con­tent. If you define each sub­head­ing as a sep­a­rate list item, LaTeX has no way of know­ing that it’s a head­ing. That means, for exam­ple, that if you were to add a sec­tion in the mid­dle, you’d have to man­u­ally renum­ber each of the fol­low­ing sec­tions. It’s basi­cally like using Word with­out the head­ing styles.

The right way to do it is to define “Points and Author­i­ties” and the two sub­points as sec­tion and sub­sec­tion head­ings, respec­tively, and then edit their for­mat­ting glob­ally. (This is easy to do with pack­ages like titlesec.) Her’s a light edit of your exam­ple that shows it in action: http://pastebin.com/9g1nhsVz The out­put is almost the same as your code, but you can now declare new \sec­tions and \sub­sec­tions secure in the knowl­edge that LaTeX will han­dle the for­mat­ting and num­ber­ing.

(I notice there aren’t any time­stamps here, so I may be res­ur­rect­ing a long-buried thread. For the ben­e­fit of future gen­er­a­tions, this was posted on March 25, 2013, at 10:50 PDT.)

Hav­ing been a legal sec­re­tary for more than 10 years before becom­ing an attor­ney, I have writ­ten my own LaTeX code plead­ing paper from a sec­re­tar­ial ease-of-use point of view. The line num­bers should “always” remain con­stant, whether chang­ing from sin­gle space double-indent (e.g., long quo­ta­tions) or dou­ble space within the body.

http://www.latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=22708

@Raghav, thanks for the polite cor­rec­tion, the header treat­ment was not at all LaTex­esque.

MB, LaTeX is not an “aging” tech­nol­ogy it’s cur­rently the best tool of its class for any sec­tor that needs tight con­trol of visual out­put. This includes book pub­lish­ers, aca­d­e­mics, and any­body that pro­duces numer­ous doc­u­ments with the same for­mat­ting and doesn’t want to repli­cate that for­mat­ting on a per-document basis. You may not need LaTeX because your needs are not very demand­ing and Word can meet them, the same way that some artists can get by with MS Paint while more tech­ni­cal ones might need Pho­to­shop.

Also, I find LaTeX much eas­ier to use than Word. It is dif­fi­cult in Word to auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated tables of con­tents, indices, or bib­li­ogra­phies prop­erly. It’s dif­fi­cult to take a doc­u­ment for­mat­ted for one venue and change it to another for­mat­ting with­out chang­ing each indi­vid­ual ele­ment. In LaTeX, these are all one-line changes. The markup is dead sim­ple and any­body slightly moti­vated to under­stand the basics can learn them in under an hour. Cer­tainly any­body who made it through law school will have no prob­lem with it.

At any rate, a mod­ern cor­po­rate LaTeX envi­ron­ment would prob­a­bly be web-based with authors enter­ing text in Wiki markup, and the web­site chang­ing Wiki to LaTeX like Wikipedia does.

The hard part of LaTeX is writ­ing tem­plates, which the user should never have to do. Tem­plates should be pro­vided by the peo­ple who cre­ate the pub­li­ca­tion stan­dards and pro­vided for free. That’s how it works in the rest of the word that uses LaTeX. If that change were made, there would be no rea­son what­so­ever to use Word.

It’s worth men­tion­ing some of the more obvi­ous down­sides of Word (other than the fact that it wasn’t cre­ated to pro­vide more for­mat­ting pos­si­bil­i­ties than a type­writer). One is that MS delib­er­ately breaks back­wards com­pat­i­bil­ity on new releases. This makes it com­pletely unsuit­able for archiv­ing. Another is that it is dif­fi­cult to search mul­ti­ple Word doc­u­ments. You also can’t tell while search­ing whether the
text you found is part of a para­graph, a title, a sec­tion, or a quo­ta­tion. These can be very dif­fer­ent things. Finally, Word doc­u­ments don’t play nicely with ver­sion con­trol­ling (which could be built into the Web sys­tem in law firms) and so com­ments have to be embed­ded in the text, which makes them much less use­ful. In a ver­sion con­trol sys­tem, you could see not only com­ments made in that par­tic­u­lar text, but also com­ments made by the same author on related texts, and so forth.

Tom, a lot of the prob­lems you men­tion have either been ame­lio­rated in recent ver­sions of Word (styles and tem­plates), or have been solved at most law firms by third-party add-ins (ver­sion con­trol, search­ing across mul­ti­ple doc­u­ments). And while some technically-inclined lawyers may be pro­fi­cient in LaTeX, many legal doc­u­ments are pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with large groups of people—legal sec­re­taries, doc­u­ment proces­sors, co-counsel—who can’t all fea­si­bly be forced to learn LaTeX. Many of the usual advan­tages of LaTeX are less com­pelling in the legal field; for exam­ple, there’s no bib­li­og­ra­phy style for the most com­mon style of legal cita­tion in the U.S., the noto­ri­ously com­plex Blue­book.

That’s not to say it can’t be made to work; this ami­cus brief from the Soft­ware Free­dom Law Cen­ter was obvi­ously pro­duced using LaTeX, and it seems like LaTeX-using lawyers across the pond aren’t quite the rarae aves they are in this coun­try. (A bar­ris­ter named Paul Stan­ley has even devel­oped a very nice BibLa­TeX style for the OSCOLA cita­tion sys­tem.) But the func­tion­al­ity gap between Word and LaTeX has nar­rowed to the point where it doesn’t really make sense for most Amer­i­can lawyers to switch over.

Which is a pity, since even in the hands of a savvy user it’s hard to use Word to pro­duce LaTeX-quality typog­ra­phy. Word’s greedy word wrap­ping pro­duces infe­rior results to LaTeX’s Knuth-Plass algo­rithm, and while LaTeX’s hyphen­ation isn’t infal­li­ble, I’ve found it usu­ally pro­duces bet­ter results than Word does. Here’s a f’rinstance: The research memo exam­ple on this very site shows a mis-hyphenation in the third para­graph (“ma-lice”) and fea­tures four con­sec­u­tive hyphen­ated lines in the first para­graph (ugly!).

You said that you do not use the left side bor­der I court fil­ings. What about the right side bor­der?