Law firms and house styles.
Anyone in a law firm will probably have a smile on their face reading those words or possibly they will feel a shudder, it’ll all depend on what your job is in the firm.
For those that are new to law firms a short definition may be in order, so to quote Wikipedia:
a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organisation or field. The implementation of provides uniformity in style and formatting of a document.
I have one wish when it comes to house styles. One style to rule them all!
The wish for there to be one set of styles for all legal documents whatever law firm they’re from. If forced to compromise on that wish, then at least for all law firms to at least sign up to a common set of named styles within Word and an agreement to leave all direct formatting out of documents, so if a lawyer pastes from one document to another it has a matching style in the receiving document.
I’m sure I’ve heard that in Norway there are some legal documents that the state requires in one style only (please correct me in the comments if this is not so), so how about we start in the EU? Or even just England and Wales?
It’s not going to happen though is it?
I know there are plenty of tools out there to help. Two on the market I’m aware of are Microsytems’ DocXtools, Tikit’s House Style Manager and I’m sure there are many others. There are also some great bespoke applications in many firms used to apply styles. But when a document that to-and-fro’s between law firm to client you can end up with a document that has more styles applied to it than pages, unpicking this even with tools takes some skill in Word!
So what’s the answer? Well maybe Word 2010 can help a little.
When you right click to Paste in Word 2010, you get three options (click the image to zoom in).
Paste and keep source formatting (left icon). This option keeps the formatting of the original document from where you copied the text.
Paste and merge formatting (middle icon). This option will merge the formatting and slightly modify the style of the copied content to match the document you are creating.
Paste and keep text only (right icon). And the most useful is saved to the end! This just puts the text into your document and doesn’t bring any of the formatting from the source document!
And another great feature of Word 2010 is the preview, so in each image above I haven’t pasted the text into the document yet. Word is just rendering the new text in place, showing me what it would look like.
Maybe not an end to style woes, but a step towards.
http://ukdeg.org/ Been around for a while and trying to encourage the use of common style naming conventions.
It would certainly help those who were designing (and testing) legal software to have a common set of style standards and templates to work to (for reports etc.)
There are so many man-hours dedicated to debating the ins and outs of various looks that I am sure they could be dedicated to someone far more useful …. like making more cool software 🙂
Thanks for the link Iain, I knew of the Document Excellence Group but wasn’t aware they had a look at trying to get adoption of some standard styles.
Link to the styles pages here: http://ukdeg.org/standard-styles/standard-styles-legal-agreements
In Computer Weekly’s downtime section this week an article on a Word “text formatting glitch”! Is it just me or does anyone else suspect the formatting glitch had something to do with styles.
Apparently problems caused by the merging of Word files caused a trial delay of several days.
Jason, your wish is my command. As Iain mentioned, the UK Document Excellence Group has put together a standard set of style names designed for use in legal agreements. The aim was to make it easier for firms to collaborate on documents. With these styles you can create complex legal agreements with no direct formatting or restart numbering and the styles work using out-of-the box Microsoft Word. These styles are free for any firm to use. To find out more, go to http://ukdeg.org/standard-styles.
Great post Jason – this is actually one of the most useful things I have read for a long time as I signposted the DEG which I hadn’t previously come across.
What we really need is some kind of “legal markup language” – an agreed set of uniform standards (like HTML / XHTML) which can be applied to the basic text to provide formatting as required (and eliminate direct formatting, which is where things tend to go wrong). The DEG list of standard styles seems like a move in the right direction – although their adoption obviously needs to be driven somehow.
The feature in Word 2010 is called “Paste Special” in earlier versions and we use it every day. In fact, so much so that I’ve created an custom icon for it on my Word toolbar.
I think it’s the only solution to the problem – especially when you think that documents not only come from other lawyers, but also from other professionals, clients and other people generally. A universal style set will never come to pass.