Do the legal documents prepared by your outside counsel sometimes look like a fifth-grader wrote them? Kenneth Grady of Seyfarth Shaw says quality issues such as misspelled words, poor punctuation and even incorrect names of corporate entities are creeping into work prepared by both big firm lawyers and solo practitioners.
“As with productivity, quality is largely an undocumented phenomenon in the legal industry,” notes Grady. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything that can be done about it. He suggests coming up with quality standards to be used by both law firms and corporations. “Getting lawyers to rigorously apply standards will be difficult, but not impossible,” he says. “If clients hold outside lawyers accountable, change will happen.”
