Common Errors in Law Firm Publishing (#7)
While a computer is not an old typewriter, most law firms do their best to make it seem so. They use tick marks for quotes, hypens for dashes, and underlines for emphasis. They put two spaces after a full stop, and they set subscripts and superscripts on baseline. They use headline type for body copy. They fully justify everything they can, but they do it without hyphenation. To top it all off, they use Microsoft Word to set final copy.
Take a look at the copy at most any law firm’s Web site, and compare that to the copy at a newspaper’s Web site.
The copy at the newspaper’s Web site looks quite a bit different than the copy at the law firm’s Web site. The newspaper uses a serif typeface for the body copy; the law firm uses a sans-serif face, such as Arial (i.e., a face designed for heads, not body copy). The newspaper uses quotes and apostrophes; the law firm uses tick marks. The newspaper uses en dashes, and the law firm uses hyphens. The spacing between the words in the newspaper is very uniform; the spacing between the words in the law firm’s copy is not.
Does it matter? Sure it does, especially when the law firm claims that it’s expert in the use of computer technology, and that it “strives for excellence” in all it does.
Here are some sources of information on how to set copy like the pros:
A Practical Guide to Web Typography
Typographica. A Journal of Typography
InDesign Type: Professional Typography
