What should you do if you’re the lone voice of editorial standards in a company full of people who can’t even be bothered to put their dishes in the dishwasher or make sure their garbage hits the wastebasket, let alone follow your style guide?

Find and Replace is magic! Now, instead of spending hours searching and changing with the near certainty you’ll miss just one instance in the most embarrassing place possible, you can, with just a few clicks, make a much more hideously embarrassing screwup. Here are six cautionary tales for your edification.

When I was a teenager, my father taught me that as we go through life, the most important thing we possess is our reputation. I was just old enough to appreciate the idea: How do others assess what we do, then determine who we are, and therefore what we might do next time? Can they rely on us?

Language can be a potent force for good—or evil. It matters what we say, and how we say it. And writing matters even more than speech. Our words live on the page long after spoken words are forgotten. 

Discussion about new legal tech tools has reached a fever pitch. It seems that, every day, there are new applications for artificial intelligence and blockchain. Lawyers are dreaming big and imagining ground-breaking new technologies. But what about simple technology tools that already exist? There’s powerful productivity software available—and it’s probably already installed on your computer.

Hyphens are like little screws that hold words together. Now, if you’ve ever gone to a hardware store to buy screws, you know that there are a lot of different kinds of screws. But hyphens? They all look the same – well, within any specific font, anyway. So you might think there’s just one kind of hyphen. You’d be wrong. Full-on, abso-bloody-lutely wrong.

Style preferences are changing. If you’re not keeping up with the changes, the people who read your documents may assume that you’re outdated, too. This is the second part of a three-part series on using Find-and-Replace.

Spellchecking and proofreading are not the same. Spellcheck is just one part of the process.

If you’re bidding for a contract or responding to a request for proposals (RFP), it doesn’t matter whether it’s small or large. From research funding in the thousands to infrastructure in the billions, there’s always a great deal at stake. Whether it’s jobs that depend on a contract or research that can alter lives, the outcomes of proposal documents could not be more significant. That’s why it’s crucial that your words make the best impression.

Since 2012, lawyers and technologists have written much about the duty of technology competence. However, the promulgation and nationwide adoption of revised Model Rule 1.1 was not the end goal—the purpose was to encourage lawyers to actually become technologically competent. To date, authors have focused on describing the duty. This article aims to go beyond that to examining what it takes to become competent.

PerfectIt Cloud brings all of PerfectIt’s checking to Mac and iPad users for the first time. Users will have the same experience using PerfectIt Cloud on any Office 365 device, whether working on Mac, PC, iPad or Word Online. It integrates directly into Microsoft Word via the Office Store.

What users expect from a software product has changed in the decade since I introduced PerfectIt. In 2009, the iPhone was still new. There were no iPads. Mobile internet was in its infancy. And the ‘cloud’ referred to fluffy white things in the sky. Now customers expect a product to work across platforms, they expect it to sync across devices, they expect it to be easier to use, and they expect to pay less upfront.

Producing high quality legal writing is vitally important to success as a lawyer—but it’s difficult to learn. We have brilliant legal writing gurus, such as Bryan Garner, Ken Adams, and Gary Kinder to guide us, yet most legal writing isn’t good. How is that possible?

Style preferences are changing. If you’re not keeping up with the changes, the people who read your documents may assume that you’re outdated, too. This is the first part of a three-part series on using Find-and-Replace.

Lawyers are struggling with basic office technology and aren’t recognizing how this hurts productivity. This is particularly true with MS Word, a program that is ubiquitous throughout legal practice, and one that, as lawyers, we believe we already know how to use. Don’t let these six myths stand in the way of getting the training you need to work smarter and get more from each day.

When the duty of technology competence was introduced in 2012, the notion that lawyers would incorporate technology into legal practice felt more aspirational than realistic. Five years later, it is now clear that technology awareness, wisdom, and adoption are necessary. Ignoring the duty also has business, practical, and ethical ramifications.

Put simply, true AI software for editing does not yet exist, and there are two major reasons why it will never replace the human editor. Firstly, editing is about more than correcting text. It’s about understanding and manipulating linguistic shade, colour and nuance; software works in black and white.

Diversity is important to legal tech because it brings in different perspectives, which yield different solutions. Yet, diversity is often reduced to a buzzword and a checkbox. When that happens, the legal tech industry misses out on unique and compelling stories, dynamic expertise, and connections that could convince others to embrace technology rather than resist its adoption.

Nobody likes receiving criticism. However, the truth is that when it comes to legal writing, you can learn to understand feedback differently and make it useful for your career.

Technology competence is now a requirement for all lawyers. The majority of the states have adopted revised Model Rule 1.1, so it has reached a tipping point: Technology competence has moved from optional to essential. So what do you need to do to ensure that that your tech skills are adequate? This article discusses two options for gaining technology competence: delegation and training.