Formatting in legal work

Lawyering

While reviewing a lengthy document consisting of tables spanning just short of 100 pages, I pointed out to my team member that some of the columns in the middle of the document appeared not to be aligned with the preceding columns.

I was told that the columns should be aligned, since they were duplicates of the first table (which looked fine).

So we took out a ruler, not the ruler in Microsoft Word but a real ruler. 😆

I was right. Some of the columns in the middle of the document were off by about 1mm on the real ruler.

We don’t think about formatting in law school.

However, as a corporate lawyer, it is expected that legal due diligence reports and agreements drafted will be formatted properly.

If you are lucky, you may have a team who helps you with formatting but inevitably, you need to be able to do it yourself if you have to send out a document in the middle of the night and there is no support at that time.

#malaysiancorporatelawyer
#lawyering

This post was first posted on Linkedin on 28 December 2022.

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