[texhax] Recommended "document class" for legal documents

[Alan T Litchfield]

My experience with producing documents that include content produced by 
lawyers is that there is no special style guide. Lawyers often have 
their own preferences and will not deviate far from them. That means, if 
you have to produce legal papers from a range of lawyers, you will most 
likely face significant variance in how they are structured.

Additionally, once legal papers have been passed into statute or law, 
you cannot change the format. For example, some time ago our government 
was faced with the task of digitising all the statutes in our legal 
system. Rather than scanning them all, the decision was made to produce 
a print on demand system. The project failed at least two times because 
of the difficulties associated with the various methods for structuring 
and laying out content. The statutes were all quite inconsistent, 
despite that they look the same.

I would guess, that if you are able to work within a context that is 
consistent, then it may be better to make your own class file. You could 
call on article and make changes to suit your needs.

Alan

On 16/01/13 7:08 AM, Jerry wrote:
> I frequently have to write legal documents. I am wondering if there is
> a specific "documentclass" for this? Recently, while writing up a set
> of By-Laws I was forced to change the "Chapter" heading to "Article".
> While that is not a big thing, I was hoping that there might be a class
> that does that all ready.
>

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