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Is it me or did they just scrap the DOL law?
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Biglaw transactional here, gotten handwritten comments plenty of times. Purely a matter of chance w/r/t applicable partner preferences. Nothin deeper than that.
A couple old partners at my firm do this, but it seems to just be them.
I did both. I preferred to red-line drafts, but if I were dealing with an associate with especially bad writing skills, I would give them handwritten changes, as that would force them to focus more attention on the writing and maybe figure out why it was coming back slathered in red ink.
This is a very good idea.
Just get a legend re what edit symbols mean and a rosetta stone and you’re set
Highly partner dependant. I have one senior partner that does hand markup. Another that only uses an iPad without Word so he does hand written comments on the PDF. Most others do track or clean comments inline though.
I have one older partner I work with who does this. He doesn’t even write neatly.
They never do
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Yes—send them to a secretary first and ask them to type in everything they can make out in Track Changes or a new version. It should save you some time.
Yes - ask secretary to take first stab at making the changes.
Transactional, but for data points: as a junior, midlevel, and counsel in Biglaw until around 2017, I almost always received hand markups from seniors/partners. Those of us working for said seniors/partners were constantly asking each other to interpret handwriting! But I think it helped me to learn much more so that just accepting track changes.
That being said, fast forward to recent years after making partner and I most often used track changes to make comments in cleans, but then I moved to a Biglaw firm where it was common practice to make track changes comments in blacklines. That was even better for me, tho I’m not sure how the juniors feel about it and whether it’s better for them vs handwritten.
I am in big law and have received hand written edits by three different partners. They’re older, but they’re allowed to because they are super intelligent. Also, reviewing hard copy docs catches errors that your eyes may be too glazed over that you otherwise would not have seen.
I've always wondered whether it's morally okay to bill hours trying to read a partner's handwriting. The secretaries get off work after 6. I have no one who can help.
Perfectly billable !
Maybe T&E is mostly an older lawyers field, but I've never received redlines back. If anything I have been asked to convert handwritten edits into redline to provide to client. Though I've never worked big law, so maybe that does play some role.
I’m in big law lit and have two partners (one older one younger) who do this and it’s v annoying and messes w version control too
I was at a very small firm where the partner was only like a year older than me but she had never seemed to learn tech stuff so everything had to be printed onto paper (even when prepping for depos and stuff) and she would make edits in a literal red pen like a 6th grade teacher.
When I was in big law I got handwritten edits from two partners. One would only do it sometimes and only when we were both in the office at the same time so he could hand it to me, but it was rare we were in the same days so it happened rarely. The other one would hand write edits and scan docs to me. But one time she hand wrote edits on a brief and took pictures of each page with her phone and emailed them to me in no particular order. At that point just use track changes. On the flip side, I’m at a small firm now that is paperless, so that doesn’t happen. My boss would probably think it’s stupid anyways.
Perhaps the partner who sent the photos was away from her computer.
I never received handwritten edits in Big Law litigation.
In the litigation practice at a Mid Law firm, handwritten edits were more common. This was largely because the partners didn’t know how to use the firm’s document management system. Instead, their practice for decades had been to rely on legal secretaries to turn edits.
These partners would treat their female associates like legal secretaries — but not their male ones. If you’re a female associate being asked to basically transcribe briefs for male partners, and the male associates are not asked to do this, this be a sign of a discriminatory litigation practice.
Fully a thing in corporate
I’m at a small law firm and our managing partner (older, non-tech savvy) does this. He has recently transitioned to digitally handwriting comments on PDFs (versus printing, handwriting on the print copy, then having his legal assistant scan and send) so… small progress?
When I was at a small firm in office everyday it was all handwritten edits left in my chair. Now that I work a remote job at a larger firm it is all track changes in word but that is due to a much more complicated practice area and the necessity due to remote work. I feel handwritten notes are still very common. I am a fifth year for perspective.