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Wild Strawberry Communications has worked with the Legal Services Commission readying a series of papers for consultation with legal practitioners and other stakeholders on proposed reforms to the administration of the legal aid system.
The consultation covers wide areas of the legal aid system and Commission had developed the documents through an exhaustive drafting process with inputs from many authors. Consequently the drafts contained a variety of different styles and the Commission needed to impose uniformity both in layout and expression.
The Commission's first requirement was to develop a style guide that defined basic look and feel - fonts, alignment, spacing, punctuation, lists, numbering, dates and use of upper and lower case. The guide also listed names, spellings and terminology. We helped develop the guide by identifying what needed to be included and then looking at convention and best practice to arrive at workable standards.
Subsequently we had to proof and sub edit the draft papers to put them into the house style - and ensure that the complex ideas and expressions used in legal matters were expressed clearly and as simply as possible.
Because the time scale for the project was extremely tight - only two weeks from start to the publication of the papers - some elements of the guide were derived as the editing progressed. As the Commission had engaged a team of editors, the guide required constant updating and reissue to ensure that everyone worked to a common set of standards.
In total we edited around 300,000 words and delivered the marked up proofs back to the Commission, enabling the papers to published in time for the consultation to proceed on schedule.