A client service manager shares her love for proofreading outsourced legal documents
We’re a team of individuals who share a common love of English and particularly, for the rules that define our beautiful language. Proofreading for fluency is a new addition to our service offering. It evolved from working with several international firms. Lawyers across the globe work in different time zones and have various mother tongues, but they all use English as their common language. Our job here is to help create fluency and ease of understanding in what are often long documents and correspondence.
There are several reasons why we enjoy what we do and the tight deadlines (that are all too common in the legal industry) keep us on our toes.
As language is dynamic, we never stop learning and improving our skills and being introduced to new words such as the Oxford Dictionary naming of ‘emoji’ as ‘word of the year’.
The documents we examine are interesting and challenging and we can flex our language muscle while incurring thanks from our clients instead of the usual resentment from friends and family.
Here are 11 of my favorite corrections:
- Inverted quotes – because they’re quite sneaky
- Numbering – so it follows strict rules
- Semi-colons – to separate items in a list starting with a colon – to make it crystal clear
- Italic brackets – because it takes a good eye to catch them
- Cross-references – because working them out can be a puzzle
- However – because its punctuation partners are clear
- Conforming definitions – because it can be challenging
- Missing full stops – because they’re essential and are often not where they’re supposed to be
- Deleting white spaces – because they’re taking up unnecessary space
- Formatting – because it greatly improves the presentation of the document
- Alphabetical order – because it’s clear
