Peachtek Legal Solutions

Formatting Tips

Make a Good First Impression

Your HotDocs launch provides a perfect chance to decide/re-evaluate how your documents should look, since the formatting of your HotDocs template is transferred to the word processing document that it generates. Peachtek can help you project and maintain your look.

Some Practical Suggestions

You can make lengthy documents easier to read by using headings and subheadings to break them down into bit-sized pieces.

Bolding in Title Case is the best way contrast headings from the main text. All-Caps is the worst. More than one method, i.e. underlined-italics is redundant.

A proportionally spaced, serif (ornamented), typeface is the best way to present your main text. Times New Roman is a ubiquitous example. However, it is a narrow typeface that was designed by the Times of London to squeeze text into newspaper columns.

A creative suggestion is to use a naturally-heavy, unornamented Sans Serif typeface, like Arial Black, for the headings, and a lighter ornamented typeface, like Times New Roman for the text.

Sometimes the Rules Make Sense

Modern-day word processing equipment gives you all the tools previously derived from handset type. In many cases they are squandered with formatting that’s carried over from the manual typewriter.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has posted its Requirements And Suggestions For Typography In Briefs And Other Papers, online. It takes the time to explain the reason behind the rules it imposes. It turns out that the rules make sense. The Court relies heavily on an article by Ruth Anne Robbins, a Law Professor, entitled Painting with print: Incorporating concepts of typographic and layout design into the text of legal writing documents, 2 J. Assn. Legal Writing Directors, 108 (2004), which is posted on the Court’s website.

A recent blog entry on minimalist web design echoes many of the Seventh Circuit's main points.

Peachtek Helps You Make It Happen

Word’s Style command is the best tool for formatting text in a standardized way. However, the feature is quirky and underutilized. We can help you tame the quirks, so that standardized formatting becomes automatic.