Hello, I am looking for a Word template for legal briefs/statements which will include automatic numbering and all the recommanded tools from the book. Do you know where I could get such a document ?
I donāt think that a premade one exits. Even if one did, you would have to make sure that the template complies with your juris Court rules. You eventually build your own template experimenting with the tools and suggestions in the book.
For example, here is how I my civil captions:
The line spacing is set at multiple and 1.14. The Court is set at 14 pt, which might be a little big, the rest except the parties names is 12 pt and the parties are at 12.5. The title āMotion to Dismissā is 12.5 with 30 pts para spacing before and 24pts after. My margins are set to 1.5 on the right and left. The font that I have been using is Amasis MT Pro. I donāt know how this font would rank in MBās font rankings.
I went through like 4 different ways of formatting my caption before I found one that I liked that was minimal. The format is trial and error. If doing a brief, I recommend first line indents v space between paragraphs. If doing a pleading with numbered allegations like a Complaint, I would use space between para v first line indents, but this is subject to change based on personal preference.
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I didnāt even know that word had templates for legal pleadings lol. It would be a good start for someone with updates to line spacing, line length, etc.
Iām note involved with the legal profession but someone had asked me if I could create a pleading paper in Affinity Publisher. I had to look up with it was first.
Once I found it the rest was easy. Using a Master Page I was able to create a top narrow text frame down the left side with a line feed after each of the numbers, 1ā28 on US Letter with them right justified so all the ones digits lined up. Then I added the two thin lines just to the right and another one down the right side and set their color to red.
I then added anything else that a blank page without text would need.
For the main body of the document I simply set up a few text frames to hold any needed text. sized and placed them where they needed to be for the first page, with a single text frame on the second page and applied the Master Page to both pages.
Publisher has a feature called āBaseline Gridā which automatically puts every line on that grid if itās turned on, which I did. This set not only the numbers but every line of text exactly on that grid for perfect alignment of every number with every line of text in the document.
Affinity Publisher makes this so easy to do. Publisher can also import any text from a Word document too, in addition to easily doing data merge that can easily merge in client data into any document once it is set up for that purpose.
I can supply an example PDF if anyone is interested. Iād just need to figure out how to add it within this forum.
MaxClass