Check Your Spelling YOUNG LAWYERS DIVISION
By: Seraphim D. Sparrow, Esq. Jones,Skelton & Hochuli There is a lot of legal advice on the internet. Experienced lawyers take to LinkedIn or their own blogs to post advice to the younger generation of attorneys. While these experts do not always agree on the pathway to a successful legal career, all seem to agree a young lawyer’s work product is crucial. Unless you start your own law firm right out of law school, the chances are high that a supervising attorney will be reviewing your work. And this supervising attorney should be checking your work for issues you don’t have the experience to know yet— how a local jury might value the case, whether experts are necessary, whether a specific judge might grant your motion, etc. But you, as the young attorney, already have all the tools you need to spell words correctly, use the correct grammar, and to eliminate formatting errors. When I was a law student, I thought I understood this concept. I thought it was important to do good work for good work’s sake. To stand out, even. And while this is true, I didn’t realize that there was more to this idea.
Remember that, at the end of the day, you and the supervising lawyer will be charging a client for your work. Not only is the supervising attorney’s time wasted on correcting basic mistakes like spelling, but the client should not have to pay for this. When your supervisor has to correct these errors, it adds time and money to the client’s bill. Additionally, each written project you submit to your supervisor represents an opportunity to make a good impression. When you take care of the little things, your supervisor will trust you more. And this increased trust will lead to bigger assignments and more responsibility. So if you wouldn’t trust someone who recommends suing the “Untied States of America,” neither will your supervisor trust you when you write a memorandum about the “Govenor’s power to regulate local businesses.” With this in mind, I have provided a few tips that I follow when proofreading my work: Finish your work the day before it is due and proofread it the next morning with a fresh set of eyes. Print your work out and proofread a physical copy. You might be surprised to see what errors you missed when you were reading on your computer. Don’t rely on spellcheck. In the above examples, spellcheck did not catch the word “Untied” because it is a real word. When you have spent countless hours on a long project, proofread it backwards. Start with the last sentence and work your way backwards until you reach the beginning. Our brains start to skip words when we are used to reading something, and this trick will force your brain to read your sentences in a new way. Check your word processor’s settings to ensure spellcheck is enabled for capitalized words. This is particularly important for briefs with capitalized headers.