Legal Editing Requires a Specialist Editor
When it comes to your legal editing needs, you can trust the highly trained legal editing experts at Capstone Editing. As specialist editors, we are familiar with the nuances of legal writing, including all the intricacies of presentation, terminology, structure and referencing. Many of our team members at Capstone Editing have completed law degrees, worked in the legal sector or possess a multitude of experience in legal proofreading and copyediting.
Accordingly, all our legal editors are familiar with the explicit requirements of legal style manuals and will ensure that your legal documents are scrupulously edited to comply with the specificities of legal conventions and referencing, whether you are following the Australian Guide to Legal Citation, the Bluebook, the Chicago Manual of Style, the Redbook or another style manual or guide.
While all our academic editing services require acute attention to detail and precision, legal editing requires a specific combination of skills and specialist knowledge. At Capstone Editing, we understand that there is no room for error when publishing legal documents and that words and punctuation attach very specific meanings in the legal world. Thus, there can be no ambiguity, inconsistency or lack of precision.
This can be exemplified by a 2017 case in which a Portland-based company, Oakhurst Dairy, was found liable to pay US$5 million in damages. The case involved a class-action lawsuit in relation to four years of unpaid overtime wages to truck drivers. The case hinged on the omission of a single Oxford comma. The appellant judge held that the missing comma in the employment contract created enough uncertainty to uphold the appeal in favour of the employees. Our specialist legal editors know better than anyone else that thought must be given to every single aspect of a legal document, no matter how small.
Who Can Benefit from Our Service?
Our legal editing service is suitable for academics, postgraduate law students, researchers, law firms, private practising lawyers, legal centres and legal writers.
Law Thesis Editing
This service can be used by law students undertaking their Honours, Masters or PhD degree in law. Our thesis editing service will ensure that your research is presented in the absolute best light, paying particular attention to the specific requirements of law schools and law theses, which of course differ from those of other academic disciplines. While our thesis editing page outlines exactly what is included in our copyediting service, you can rest assured that we approach legal editing with the precision and specialist knowledge that it requires.
Our team of specialist legal editors have edited literally thousands of law theses between them. We have assisted postgrads from every law school in Australia and many in New Zealand. When you work with Capstone Editing, you can be confident in the quality of the editing you will receive.
At Capstone, where we have edited literally thousands of law theses, we often boast that our editors are Australia’s foremost experts in the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (AGLC). Indeed, it is a system that most postgrads and even many freelance editors struggle to implement perfectly. This isn’t the case at Capstone Editing, where every legal editor must routinely refresh their skills in AGLC by completing rigorous training programs and quality assurance tests.
After we have worked diligently to help you to submit your law thesis to your university successfully, we can further assist you should you wish to adapt a chapter or chapters of your thesis for publication as a peer-reviewed journal article. We can even work with you should you wish to transform your thesis into a manuscript and have it published as a book.
Journal Article Editing
Our legal editing service is particularly useful for academics or postgraduate students who need their law journal articles copyedited to meet the meticulous standards and requirements of scholarly law journals. Our service includes not only full and complete language editing, but also the precise application of your target journal’s specified language and referencing style manual/s. Peer-reviewed journals may require articles to be written in British/Australian or American English. They may require you to follow one style manual for matters of language (such as grammar and punctuation) and another for referencing. And they will almost always have additional requirements in relation to how your article must be formatted. You can feel at ease knowing that our specialist editors are published academics themselves; thus, they know exactly what needs to be done to prepare your article for submission. And we are here to complete all those tasks for you, to the highest possible standard.
Further, every peer-reviewed law journal has its own requirements in terms of language, referencing and formatting. This means if your article happens to be rejected by your target journal, you will have to amend many aspects of it before it can be submitted to the next journal. Our world-class legal editors can do all this work for you, leaving you to work on your next research project (or a myriad of other academic duties!). You can read more about our journal article editing service here.
Law Firms
Our service is very practical for law firms wanting to ensure that their legal documents are perfect prior to disseminating them to third parties such as Courts, clients or judicial officers. Our exceptional legal editing team will ensure that your legal documents are rigorously edited and compatible with the needs of you and your clients. One of our most popular services is helping lawyers to ensure affidavits meet the new page requirements by reducing the word count without removing any important information.
We also work with law firms and private practising lawyers to ensure that the information on their websites and other advertising materials is clear, concise and professional, while also promoting trust.
Why Choose Capstone Editing?
Capstone Editing understands the need for accuracy when editing legal documents. We offer a unique editing service—not only do we have a team of highly qualified academics who are specialists in editing, we also have team members who are leaders in the legal editing profession. Our legal editors have law degrees or have worked for renowned legal publishers, and most certainly possess decades of experience editing in this specialist field. Our knowledge of the law, coupled with our expertise in academic editing, make us the logical choice for all your legal editing needs. We know that editing your legal work can be a cumbersome process for the author of those document. We can help you by removing dispensable legal jargon and ensure your writing is succinct in order to achieve the desired result, which will ultimately save you time and money.
All team members are familiar with the specific requirements of legal referencing and citation standards including the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (3rd Ed.) (AGLC), the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (McGill Guide), the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA) and the Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (20th Ed.) (the most widely used legal citation system in the USA). The law editors at Capstone Editing are comfortable editing using these different styles and will ensure that your legal documents are meticulously edited to comply with your preferred referencing manual.
Types of Legal Editing
Capstone Editing will ensure that your legal document is clear, concise and error free before publication, completion or distribution. Our legal editors can copyedit documents including, but not limited to:
- Law theses and dissertations for Honours, Masters and PhD students
- Peer-reviewed journal articles
- Affidavits
- Legal blogs
- Legal briefs
- Lawyer bios
- Websites for law firms and legal centres
- Advertising material to attract clients
- Legal letters
- Contracts
- Case summaries
- Case commentaries
- Legislative comments and law reform
- Case judgments
- Brochures.
Confidentiality
At Capstone Editing, we pride ourselves on having a strong commitment to protecting your privacy and complying with legal professional privilege standards. This privilege protects the disclosure of certain communications between a lawyer and a client when these communications are for the dominant purpose of seeking or providing legal advice. This fundamental privilege is upheld by all professional members at Capstone Editing and any privileged information submitted to our services will be treated with utmost confidence. We value all our clients’ right to privacy and confidentiality and this extends to third parties that may be mentioned in your legal document (clients, witnesses, confidential research and any other matters you wish to be kept private).
Our confidentiality policy, included in our terms and conditions, includes a non-disclosure agreement. We are also happy to sign any additional non-disclosure agreement you require. If you have a particularly sensitive document and are concerned about privacy, you can also contact our Client Support Manager, Rebecca Walraven, who can assist with the redaction of material before submission to our adept legal editing team.
Our Reputation
We are proud of our reputation as the highest-quality academic editing service available. Testimonials from our past clients and the examples of our editing we provide here demonstrate the quality of our work.
Editing examples
These documents provide representative examples of our work for past clients.