Technological illiteracy and generational bias in the legal industry is causing law firms to implement faulty strategies regarding technical training and education of their attorneys and staff. Co-authors Ivy B. Grey and Darth Vaughn discuss the myth of the digital native and tech bias and applicable ethical rules.

No part of legal work is unaffected by the duty of competency. And now that’s true for the duty of technology competence, too. It requires lawyers to be competent in every tech tool that we use to serve our clients, not just fancy data security tools, but regular tools like MS Word.

This is not yet another article about e-discovery. We will not discuss confidentiality issues. Technology competence is broad, it is more than data security, it is more than e-discovery—it is about everything that lawyers do and every tool that we use to serve our clients.

This article is Part II of a two-part series discussing ethics and technology. Part I explored the ethical duty of technology competence. At the end of that article, I introduced the idea that inefficient use of technology in doing billable work for clients could mean overbilling that client.

Going paperless requires research, planning, equipment, education and training. Though most advice written on this topic focuses on new tech tools and spending money, this white paper focuses on the fast, simple, free, first step to going paperless: establishing naming conventions for your files. The goal of this white paper is to help you understand what goes into creating naming conventions and to guide you through developing your own customized system.

The difference between good and bad legal writing is that good legal writing clearly conveys its message. If written work is sloppy, disorganized, or muddled then it fails because readers have limited working memory to consume and digest complex information. The more stumbling blocks in your writing, the less likely readers are to fully understand what you are trying to communicate.

Editing is a great career choice – an editor can be independent, have variety in their day-to-day to routine, use their expertise, and contribute to the development of interesting and useful documents. However, working as an editor can also be isolating and it can make you feel powerless.

Non-breaking spaces, also known as no-break, non-breakable, hard or fixed spaces, are characters that look exactly like regular spaces. You cannot see the difference between a non-breaking space and a regular space either on the page or on most screens. The difference between a non-breaking space and a regular space is how it is treated if it happens to separate two words at the end of a line of text.

What’s the difference between a hyphen and a dash? Did you even know there was a difference? Lots of people use them interchangeably, but if you want to present a perfect document and stand out from the crowd, you need to understand the difference.

Let’s face it: life inside of law firms is contentious. Despite a recent focus on civility in the profession, many lawyers seem to delight in finding and highlighting mistakes in legal writing. Even the kindest lawyers chuckle a bit when a judge quotes an attorney’s writing and faithfully includes the error followed by the dreaded “[sic]” in the court’s opinion.

A major corporate transaction involves a multitude of details, each with the potential for error. “Detail” is an all-encompassing and daunting term that covers everything from the transaction itself, such as structure, financing, and indemnities, to documenting the transaction, which covers spelling and punctuation, formatting, and consistent use of defined terms.

A lawyer’s time and advice are her stock in trade, so billable hours are front of mind. But a focus on hours billed ignores the more useful metric: realization rates. Your realization rate is the percentage of the time you work that is billed to the client and that the client pays. And it’s a key factor in determining and improving your bottom line.

With each of these examples, you have a choice to make. Should you include these special marks, or leave them out? These are diacritical marks, or diacritics, and they include accents, cedillas and more. Often, the term ‘accents’ is used colloquially for all of them, and that’s the term we’ll adopt here.

Why do small mistakes slip through even when we try so hard to iron them out? Scientists are only beginning to come up with answers. For instance, psychologist Tom Stafford of the University of Sheffield explains that writers make errors because they are busy concentrating on the high-level task of conveying meaning, whereas readers pick up typos because reading requires less brain power.

PerfectIt is easy to use. However, some of its advanced functionality is only described in the help file (that almost no one reads). So even if you’ve been using PerfectIt for years, you might not have discovered everything it can do. Here are five tips and tricks that will help you get more from the program.

The ideal of a paperless office has been talked about for decades. In the last century it turned out to be nothing but a fantasy. However, a generational shift combined with improvements in technology has changed that.

Writing is a reflection of an attorney’s abilities. And loss of trust in an attorney’s written work is the beginning of the end for any attorney’s career. Surprisingly, it’s the cosmetic and seemingly non-substantive errors that cause the reader to determine that a junior attorney is sloppy, uncaring and untrustworthy.

With more than 11 million plays and incredibly catchy lyrics, indie rock band Vampire Weekend’s song ‘Oxford Comma’ has generated heated online debate about its meaning.

If you're writing an article, book, proposal, or any formal document, then muddling your geography is a bad mistake. Geographic mistakes can not only lead to the rejection of your document, but you're also likely to offend your reader along the way. You never know who will be reviewing your work, or what their background is; so even a seemingly small mistake (such as not knowing who the Dutch are) can be costly.

I've never understood why people think I must be a good editor just because I designed PerfectIt. PerfectIt is used by over 1000 professional editors around the world, including over 400 members of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. But I didn't design PerfectIt because I'm a good editor. I designed it because I'm a terrible editor!