Today sees the launch of American Legal Style for PerfectIt* – the result of a collaboration between US practicing lawyer Ivy Grey and Intelligent Editing, a leading US-based provider of proofreading software.
PerfectIt is an Microsoft Word add-in that spots consistency mistakes in documents and can be programmed to check house styles. PerfectIt is used by thousands of professional editors around the world, as well as Fortune 500 companies and major institutions such as the OECD and the European Space Agency.
American Legal Style is a style sheet that helps lawyers to improve the process of editing and proofreading legal documents. With American Legal Style, PerfectIt enforces style preferences such as italics, hyphenation and capitalization to conform to guidance for legal writing in the USA. It catches consistency errors that arise from collaborative efforts or the use of form documents; and it searches for common errors that may arise from autocorrect, spellcheck, dictation or talk-to-text tools. It makes proofreading faster, easier, and helps to ensure that complex legal documents are delivered on time. Here’s a video that explains the product in more detail…
Ivy Grey developed American Legal Style with Intelligent Editing based on the Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation; The Red Book: A Manual On Legal Style by Bryan Garner; The Elements of Style by Strunk & White; and Black’s Law Dictionary, among others. Drawing from the style guides, the creators selected the most common errors and tricky or hard-to-remember rules to build into American Legal Style. The creators also worked to anticipate mistakes and recommend intelligent corrections based on real world law practice experience and actual legal documents.
“For technical legal editing, we found that American Legal Style for PerfectIt was amazing. It picked up all the technical punctuation and legal style issues that would excite a law review editor,” said Nick Critelli, one of the first attorneys to test American Legal Style, and one of very few practicing American lawyers who is dually qualified as barristers at the bar of England and Wales.
“Lawyers have been using PerfectIt for years and they’re happy with the program. But we got the sense that they would be happier with a more tailored approach. So we worked together to re-shape PerfectIt for use on legal documents,” said Daniel Heuman, CEO & Founder of Intelligent Editing.
“I was drawn into this project because I know how it feels to draft documents under intense time pressures and worry about whether I’ve made style or consistency errors. With PerfectIt, I feel confident that my work is clean and error-free, and I cut down on proofreading rounds that are often the cause of late nights and early mornings in the office,” said Ivy Grey. Grey told the Insider that three things stand out that make PerfectIt different:
(1) At $99 for a single license, it costs a fraction of the price of other legal software. (There’s a 30-day free trial available.)
(2) PerfectIt is intuitive and doesn’t require any training.
(3) The initial beta trials by practicing lawyers have generated a lot of enthusiasm.
Links:
http://www.intelligentediting.com
http://www.intelligentediting.com/resources/the-benefits-of-checking-with-american-legal-style-for-perfectit/
http://www.grifflegal.com/ivy-grey
* That’s PerfectIt as is “perfect it” rather than “perfect IT”