Got roasted by a paralegal about my contract formatting and it actually helped

Was at a small law firm meetup in Austin last month and this paralegal looked at my lease addendum I'd drafted. She pointed out how I was burying key dates in paragraph 4 instead of keeping them upfront. Told me judges and clients both skim past dense blocks of text. I spent 3 hours reformatting my templates to put termination dates, payment terms, and liability caps all in bold at the top of each section. Has anyone else had someone outside your practice area give you a better tip than your own partners?

2 comments

2 Comments

jake1912d ago

Paralegals and legal secretaries are honestly the best people to get formatting advice from because they actually read this stuff all day. I had a legal assistant show me how to use consistent bold headers for every clause and it cut down on the back and forth with clients asking "where does it say that" by a ton. The other thing that helped me was putting all the dates in a small table at the very start of the document, even before the parties section. Just a simple two column table with "Event" and "Date" so nobody has to dig through paragraphs to find the deadline.

sage_morgan752d ago

That table idea is genius and I'm stealing it for every single contract I touch from now on.