GrammarPhile Blog

The legal field rests upon evidence and precedence. We respect that, because so do we.

We’ve proofread and copyedited (easily) tens of thousands of legal documents in the past 20+ years. Often dozens of legal and legal marketing documents in a single day:

Website copy, newsletters, press releases, pleadings, motions, briefs, blog posts, practice descriptions, emails, event/webinar invitations, internal communications, special reports, pitch decks/collateral, slide presentations, correspondence, miscellaneous court filings, RFP responses, and more.

The unfortunate verdict is in: Legal marketing teams and lawyers/attorneys, even at (especially at?) the largest of firms, commit a lot of writing errors.

The sheer volume of daily documentation flowing through the typical law firm is staggering. Combine that volume with the perpetual race against the clock that defines many law firm environments and it’s easy to see why writing quality and proofreading bandwidth suffer.

Our most recent survey of completed legal proofreading jobs revealed an average of 118 errors per document, ranging from 39 to 191 errors. (Have mercy, Your Honor.)

While typos aren’t capital offenses, they are an easy but preventable way to ruin your credibility, embarrass your firm, drive away prospective clients, annoy a judge, and damage or even destroy a case (here are nine such examples).

Lawyers know better than most that the devil is in the details: One tiny error in a contract can upend a multimillion-dollar deal. That’s why lawyers and paralegals themselves are often natural proofreaders – they dedicate much of their time to reading reams of documents with an eagle eye.

Still, as proofreaders themselves will tell you, it’s invaluable to have an outsider’s perspective and a fresh set of eyes to catch errors you might overlook. That’s also why we have two proofreaders go through every document our clients submit – we have found that it greatly reduces the chances that a mistake will slip through.