Team Editing

Introduction

Editing is an important part of legal writing. Lawyers can become so immersed in their own writing and analysis that they fail to recognize that the meaning is unclear to an outside reader. It is important for a legal writer to be able to scrutinize his/her own work for substantive problems and technical errors. Even if a supervising attorney checks your work before it goes out, you want it to be as good as possible when you submit it for review.

Technical errors can create major problems. A court may refuse to allow you to file a motion if the margins do not meet court requirements, if you exceed the page limit, or if you use the wrong color cover. Even if a document complies with such rules of court, you will do your client a disservice if your papers are unclear, poorly reasoned, or badly written.

The LW&R team edit helps students to improve their work by allowing three or four other students in the section to do a "fresh reading" of a memo draft. Team editors check the draft for large-scale organization, logic and reasoning, IRAC structure, mistakes in grammar, punctuation and spelling, and citation errors.

Verifying citations for form and substance is an important part of a team edit. An incorrectly cited case or statute can frustrate a judge and/or her clerk, and this can have an adverse effect on your client's chances. An incorrect citation or unsubstantiated point of law indicates that the entire argument may lack merit because it is inadequately researched. The team edit is intended to sensitize you to such sloppy errors so you can avoid them in future law school assignments and in practice.

How to do the Team Edit

1. Divide students into groups of four or five.
2. Exchange papers. Each student should receive a copy of every team member's paper, so each student should receive three or four papers. Each student should be on the technical team for at least two papers and the substantive team for the other two or three papers. That is for each paper, two or three readers should perform a technical edit of the memo and two or three readers should make substantive comments. Since each student has three to four other papers to read, this division should allow everyone to have the opportunity to do both technical and substantive edits.
3. Getting started. Whether you are editing for technical errors or substantive problems, you should read the entire paper before making any comments, to obtain an understanding of the subject matter and the overall structure.

Technical Edit

• Check all citations thoroughly for proper use.
  • make sure names are spelled correctly.
  • make sure dates are correct.
  • make sure all elements of the citation are in proper ALWD format, checking abbreviations, spacing, and order.
  • make sure subsequent history of the case is included in citation.
  • make sure parantheticals in the citation are provided if necessary (check Bluebook for explanation).
• Make sure cited case is good law by cite checking.
  • check quotations.
  • check ellipses.
  • if quotation is more than 50 words, it must be blocked according to ALWD.
  • make sure quotation is accurate.
  • check hyphenation.
• Make sure the citation supports the author's assertion. If the citation seems questionable, review the cited case; briefly state why it is inconsistent with the author's argument.

Substantive Edit

• Stylistic changes
  • only make stylistic changes if the author made a grammatical mistake, if a passage is awkward or if the writing is really unclear.
  • revise phrases that are wordy, convoluted or otherwise awkward or unclear.
  • make sure authority is provided when needed.
  • grammatical errors
  • check sentence structure.
  • check spelling.
  • check punctuation.
• Structural or organizational comments:
  • if the overall organization of memo is flawed, suggest an alternative structure.
  • if the writer has not used an IRAC structure in each section, note the problem in the margin.
  • if the reasoning is hard to follow, comment on it.
  • if the memo could be more concise and clear, suggest how the author might achieve this end.
  • include an endnote pointing out the strengths of memo. Don't just focus on the weaknesses.

For further information, Hastings Library has the following books:

• California Style Manual: A Handbook of Legal Style for California Courts and Lawyers--Reference Desk KFC75.J47 2000.
• The Chicago Manual of Style for Authors, Editors and Copywriters--Z253.U69 2003.