Six tips for more effective proofreading

For newer lawyers who are still struggling with the rigor with which senior lawyers require documents to be perfect, six tips for reviewing documents:

1. Eliminate pride of authorship. Most of us fall in love with what we write, whether it's poetry or an officer's certificate. Don't fall into this trap: turn your heart to stone. Imagine that the work product that you are reviewing was drafted by your worst enemy, and each error that you find sends him or her to a deeper circle of hell.
2. Let as much time pass as possible between drafting something and reviewing it. This will make it easier to follow tip no. 1. So, if you are asked on Tuesday to prepare a first draft of an agreement for review by a senior lawyer on Thursday, don't wait until Wednesday night to draft it: if possible, draft it on Tuesday and review it at the end of the day on Wednesday.
3. Don't assume others will find and correct mistakes. It's not that they won't: they will. And they will hold it against you.
4. Ignore that little voice that tells you "It doesn't really matter." It does, even if the mistake has no substantive effect, and even if you are sufficiently wise to understand that it won't make any difference to humanity in the long march of history. Part of your job at this stage in your career is to make things perfect. It doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. To the people you work for, it does matter. And, sometimes it really DOES matter (a subsequent issue of this newsletter will look at the fight over a multimillion-dollar typo).
5. Don't rely blindly on spellcheck. It will find typos, but it is helpless against words misspelled as other words. This can result in mistakes such as the following not getting fixed:
   • "Dear Sir or Madman . . ."
   • "I will distribute the remaining documents shorty."
   Also, be conscious of words that sound the same but are spelled differently and mean different things: principal/principle; capitol/capital; their/they're/there; its and it's. If you don't know the proper use of each of these, learn them.
6. Make sure that the names of people and entities are spelled correctly. In particular, clients will feel unloved (and will therefore be unloving) if you get their names, or the name of their company, wrong.