The Akron Legal News

Login | March 29, 2024

App adds legal proofreading to Word

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: January 15, 2016

For a $100, law firms can now purchase a Word add-in that acts as a proofreading department for the entire enterprise.

The add-in is called American Legal Style for PerfectIt, from Chicago/London company Intelligent Editing (http://intelligentediting.com), a developer of proofreading software.

American Legal Style is a new (October 2015) style sheet for the underlying proofreading product that checks for consistency on style and can be programmed to check for “house styles.”

“Lawyers have been using PerfectIt for years and they’re happy with the program. But we got the sense that they would be happier with a more tailored approach. So we worked together to re-shape PerfectIt for use on legal documents,” said Daniel Heuman, CEO and founder of Intelligent Editing.

It “enforces correct legal style usage across the firm,” operating from an easy-to-find icon on the Word ribbon or toolbar. It acts sort of like spell-checker, quickly locating consistency mistakes, and then offering choices for each error that it finds.

Features include one-click changes to an error that occurs in multiple locations, as well as flagging erroneous citations, misspelled legal words and terms of art, words that require italicization, and common dictation and speech recognition errors.

This allows a law firm a consistency in writing style that should be good news for anybody reading that firm’s documents, including judges, clients, and other attorneys in and outside of the firm.

Intelligent Editing’s development team worked with New York lawyer and law review editor Ivy C. Grey on this new product, deconstructing numerous legal style guidelines, including the Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation; The Red Book: A Manual On Legal Style by Bryan Garner; The Elements of Style by Strunk & White; and Black’s Law Dictionary, among others.

The website states that, “After numerous page-by-page reviews of each source, we selected the most common errors and tricky or hard-to-remember rules to build into American Legal Style, such as italics, hyphenation and capitalization. We also used real world law practice experience–and legal documents–to anticipate mistakes and recommend intelligent corrections.”

The product license is $99 for one lawyer with significant discounts for multiple lawyers.

Thanks for the tip to the great Neil Squillante at Technolawyer.


[Back]