Legal teams spend a lot of time writing, editing and formatting documents. Crafting a legible and consistent document or email can make an individual or group look more professional. What constitutes a professional-looking document can vary from person to person and from firm to firm. There are many sources that detail how a document should be formatted.
Adobe Business released a style guide with the following:
Choose a clean sans-serif font like Arial or a legible serif font like Times New Roman.
Body text sized at 12 pt with footnotes at 10pt font
For documents to be printed, keep 1 inch margins on all sides for documents
Paragraphs should be aligned to the left and justified to the right
Include headers with the document title and page numbers
Include footers with the document’s date, author, or confidentiality notice
Use bold and italics sparingly
Here are guidelines provided by the Court of Appeal of Alberta that are specific to court filings but can make documents more functional, readable, and helpful.
Font Style: Use a serif font that is proportionally spaced
Ex. Century School Book, Book Antiquita, etc
Font Size: Use 13 pt. Text (including footnotes)
Spacing: 1.2 spacing
Margins: 1.5 margin on all sides
Alignment: Left aligned (not justified)
Miscellaneous:
Use bold or italics rather than underlining
Do not use ALL CAPS
Use curly or smart quotation marks/apostrophes instead of straight
Our team at Prolegis understands the importance of document style edits based on your preferences. Within our document editor, you can make adjustments to the font, style, size, spacing, margins, and alignment. Preview your document before pressing save to make sure you have exactly what you want. From there, you can email the document, save it to your computer, save it in the matter’s storage for future reference, or export to Word.
What are some of your preferred document styling methods? Do you prefer double-space or single-space after a period? What’s your favorite font? Is 13pt font too large for you? Do you prefer left aligned or justified? Do you disagree with any of the above suggestions? Let us know in the comments below.
References:
https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/business/hub/formatting-legal documents.html#:~:text=You'll%20want%20to%20start,headers%20and%20paragraphs%20for%20readability.
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