Law Technology Today From the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center
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Zero of the paralegals and attorneys, at three separate small law firm events, found every mistake in this sample-draft Challenge. Can you be the first to find them all?
It’s no mystery why there is so much emphasis on drafting perfection in the small law firm community. Reputation, case outcome, even job security can depend on it—for the individuals creating a draft as well as for the attorney whose name is on the final filing.
But at the same time that accuracy in a draft remains a top requirement, client demands and time pressures are increasing. Those are time and client demands that can affect any person’s ability to focus on writing and editing a draft quickly and accurately.
That’s why 88% of law firm leaders believe that “helper” technologies will increasingly be used to check the content generated by their firms, according to the Legal Technology Future Horizons report, published in 2014 by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) and linked here. That means that after you craft a document for filing, new technologies can save hours of time on such tasks as:
- Alerting you to potential conflicts between the clauses within the document
- Verifying citations and quotations for accuracy and good law
- Locating authority for a particular legal concept or area of law, via direct Westlaw integration
- Formatting a document for a particular court
- Checking for mistakes or inconsistencies in client information
Moreover, with the most advanced drafting products, you can generate and share reports that list detailed findings of those mistakes with your colleagues, even if they don’t have or use the same technology that you do.
Take the test: How many mistakes can you find in this Drafting Challenge? Then see how many—and how quickly—mistakes are found in the same document by legal Drafting Assistant software that could be installed into Microsoft Word.
