How do I typeset legal documents correctly? (Do I care?)

Punch-you-ation

Back in law school one of my friends nearly had his job application rejected because of a missing period (full stop) in his resume. The senior partner reviewing the application was so irate he decided to blast my friend over the phone:

   “There is a missing period on line 12!”

    “I can see it on my copy...”

    “Young man, are you insinuating… That it escaped in transit?”

I believe this argument was resolved with the help of a magnifying glass. Still, the nice thing about being a lawyer is that you are allowed (and often paid) to make a fuss about punctuation. If it were up to me I'd make a fuss about white space and kerning too...

Anyhow, take a look at Matthew Butterick’s  Typography for Lawyers, as well as his Practical Typography. (The foreword is written by the editor of Black's Law Dictionary. So there.) I’ll be investigating these in depth. See the Resources page of this blog for more.

How do I edit a document properly?

They must teach this in editing school. Or on law review. In any case, I never learned it properly. Indeed, when I first started out I used to think that “Stet!” was an epithet you yelled at interns. (I was an atrocious typist.)

But it's about time I figured it out. Here, on a single page, is everything I need to know (for the moment) about editing documents, both in hard copy and soft copy.

Ellen Lupton's excellent site is a companion resource for her book, Thinking with Type. See the Resources page of this blog for related materials.