Defending People

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Book Review: Typography for Lawyers

If I were not a lethally gen­er­ous guy, I would not be writ­ing this. If I thought that what we do was a zero-sum game, in which any­thing that makes my col­leagues bet­ter some­how hurts me, I would keep this lit­tle gem to myself; I might even qui­etly put the word out that the book was a waste of time.  But that’s not the sort of guy I am.

A cou­ple of weeks ago I hap­pened upon Matthew Butterick’s Typog­ra­phy for Lawyers web­site. But­t­er­ick is a Harvard-educated typog­ra­pher and a UCLA-educated lawyer. Here’s the premise behind his treat­ment of typog­ra­phy for lawyers:

Even though the legal pro­fes­sion depends heav­ily on writ­ing, legal typog­ra­phy is often poor. Some blame lies with the strict typo­graphic con­straints that con­trol cer­tain legal doc­u­ments (e.g. court rules regard­ing the for­mat of plead­ings). But the rest of the blame lies with lawyers. To be fair, I assume this is for lack of infor­ma­tion, not lack of will.

Typog­ra­phy is the art of mak­ing doc­u­ments work well. But­t­er­ick makes the case for lawyers learn­ing some typog­ra­phy: it is a nec­es­sary tool for hold­ing read­ers’ atten­tion. Fil­ing an impor­tant doc­u­ment with­out con­sid­er­ing how it looks is like (in Butterick’s words) show­ing up for an oral argu­ment dressed in jeans and sneak­ers, then slouch­ing at the lectern, eyes cast down­ward, while read­ing from a script in a monotone.

Eas­ily per­suaded that form mat­ters, I incor­po­rated some of Butterick’s sug­ges­tions into my doc­u­ments. I chose a new font (and bought the real small caps). I start­ing using smaller point sizes and larger mar­gins. I set up Microsoft Word’s styles to make chang­ing for­mat­ting details of one por­tion of a doc­u­ment eas­ier. It was like word-geek Christ­mas. Then Jason Wil­son emailed: would I like a copy of Butterick’s book, hot off the Jones-McClure presses?

Is a frog waterproof?

I received the book, and devoured it imme­di­ately. Bro­ken down into basic rules and advanced rules in each of the areas of type com­po­si­tion, text for­mat­ting, and page lay­out, it lists 28 key rules on the front fly­leaf. A pass­ing famil­iar­ity with just a few of those 28 rules (put one space between sen­tences; use curly quo­ta­tion marks; don’t con­fuse hyphens with dashes) would make 99% of the motions and briefs I’ve ever seen much more read­able. But the book will give much more than a pass­ing famil­iar­ity. For each rule (many of which are broad guide­lines) But­t­er­ick pro­vides a ratio­nale and exam­ples, as well as instruc­tions for accom­plish­ing the desired effect with Word­Per­fect, Word, and Pages.

I’ve got a Peti­tion for Dis­cre­tionary Review to the Court of Crim­i­nal Appeals due on Wednes­day, and I put what I absorbed from the book to work mak­ing the words eas­ier to read, within the ham­per­ing lim­its of the court’s rules (13-point type, where smaller fonts are eas­ier to read; double-spaced text, where less-than-1.5× spac­ing is opti­mal). I fixed my line spac­ing (Word’s “dou­ble” spac­ing is actu­ally about 233-percent spac­ing), applied real small caps judi­ciously, adjusted spac­ing before and after para­graphs, con­verted ersatz ellipses to the char­ac­ter designed for the pur­pose … and the tweaks go on and on as I learn typog­ra­phy by try­ing it out, print­ing it, and refin­ing it, all the while set­ting up para­graph and char­ac­ter styles that I can eas­ily import into the next appel­late pleading.

If I were design­ing the cover of Typog­ra­phy for Lawyers, it would be Typog­ra­phy for Lawyers. While lawyers are the largest mar­ket for a book on typog­ra­phy, and while the exam­ples in Butterick’s book come from the law, the rules, sug­ges­tions, and advice in the book would be as ben­e­fi­cial to any­one in the busi­ness of pub­lish­ing on any scale (I look for­ward espe­cially to see­ing some of Butterick’s typo­graphic knowl­edge incor­po­rated into the Jones-McClure books that I buy yearly). The book is aimed at lawyers, but the typog­ra­phy is not for lawyers; it is just typography.

Speak­ing of lethal gen­eros­ity, before Typog­ra­phy for Lawyers became a book But­t­er­ick pub­lished much of it on his web­site. Order the book, and read the web­site while you wait for its arrival: “much” is not all, and the depth and breadth of the book’s con­tent com­pared to the website’s, as well as the tac­tile and visual plea­sures of a well laid-out book, make it well worthwhile.

I’m order­ing copies of Typog­ra­phy for Lawyers for the lawyers I col­lab­o­rate with. The rest of you will have to buy your own.

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This entry was posted by on Monday, November 15th, 2010 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About The Author

Mark Bennett got his letter of marque from the Supreme Court of Texas in May 1995. He is famous for having no sense of humor when it comes to totalitarianism.

Comments

6 Responses to “Book Review: Typography for Lawyers”

  1. Ric Moore says:
    15 November 2010 at 10:12 pm

    Have you ever given Open Office a go?? It’s seems that using Microsoft Word and dot-doc (.doc) for­mats, which is pro­pri­etary, needs to tran­si­tion to the open-document (.odt) for text for­mat, just so one com­pany doesn’t have a strangle-hold on legal doc­u­ments in general.

    Just think of how much the gov­ern­ment is spend­ing keep­ing older Word for­mat­ted doc­u­ments updated to the “lat­est and great­est” ver­sions of word. More than just a small for­tune, I bet you. Just thought I’d toss in my two-cents worth. :) Ric

    Reply
  2. Anna Durbin says:
    15 November 2010 at 10:33 pm

    Sounds inter­est­ing, Mark. I thought the point behind larger fonts was that they were eas­ier to read for old eyes, like those of judges. We don’t want our briefs to look like the phone book to them. Can you enlighten me? Thanks.

    Reply
    • Mark Bennett says:
      16 November 2010 at 11:09 am

      There’s a huge gap between phone­book text and 13-point Times New Roman. Like James says, check out the fonts in the pro­fes­sion­ally pub­lished mate­ri­als that we (even those with old eyes) read every day, and con­trast them with the fonts required by some court rules.

      But­t­er­ick argues that, rather than page-number lim­its com­bined with mar­gin and font-size lim­its, courts should have word count limits.

      Reply
  3. James Miller says:
    16 November 2010 at 1:15 am

    Anna: it’s my under­stand­ing that smaller fonts become much harder to read the longer the line of text becomes. Thus, it’s quite easy for the eye to read a col­umn of text in a reporter even though that font is much smaller than 13 pt Times New Roman.

    If my spi­der sense is cor­rect, But­t­er­ick is going to rec­om­mend approx­i­mately 2′ mar­gins on both sides of a doc­u­ment with a smaller font than is cus­tom­ary. I tried this out a few years ago in school and was amazed at how much eas­ier it was to read. And you actu­ally save paper doing it the new way.

    The eas­i­est way to ver­ify this for your­self is to go pick up any of the books in your home that come from a major pub­lisher and try and judge how large their fonts are.

    Reply
    • Mark Bennett says:
      16 November 2010 at 6:52 am

      10–12 points, 1.5−2.0 inch mar­gins. Aim for an aver­age line length of 45–90 characters.

      I haven’t seen a phone book in a while, but I guess it uses about 6.5−7 point type.

      Reply

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