How We Audit Legal Content Briefs Before Drafting Begins
When a legal content brief comes in, we don’t open a blank document and start writing. We read the brief first and spend some time with the assignment before we touch the draft.
We’ve worked from legal content briefs for years, and one thing has become pretty obvious: a good brief can give you exactly what you need and still deserve a closer look before you start writing. You may understand the assignment perfectly and still notice something that needs to be addressed before it becomes part of the page.
That’s why we review every brief before we draft from it. We want to know what we’re being asked to write and whether there’s anything we need to deal with before the writing starts. Sometimes there is. Sometimes there isn’t. Either way, we’d rather know before we’re halfway through the page.
A Legal Content Brief Can’t Answer Every Question
A brief has to stop somewhere. If it tried to answer every question that could come up while writing the page, it would probably be longer than the page itself.
And it still couldn’t tell us everything.
Some answers depend on what we find after we receive the assignment. Say a brief asks for a section explaining a particular legal issue. On paper, the section makes perfect sense. But when we review the firm’s website, we may find an entire page dedicated to the same issue. Now we have something to think about before we write another version of information the firm already has.
The person who created the brief didn’t miss anything. The assignment simply gave us a reason to look more closely.
We’ve seen situations like this even with incredibly detailed briefs. Once you start reviewing the assignment alongside the website it was written for, you can learn things that wouldn’t necessarily belong in the brief in the first place.
For us, that’s enough reason to give every assignment its own review instead of assuming a completed brief means there’s nothing left to check.
Acadia Reviews the Brief Before Writing the Page
Once you start writing from a brief, you’re already working inside the assignment. You’re thinking about what to say under the first heading instead of stopping to ask whether that heading should be there at all.
We want to do that part first.
After thousands of legal content projects, we’ve learned how easy it is to keep moving once the draft has started. If something in the brief feels a little off, you may still write it because you’re already in the middle of the page.
Reviewing first gives us a chance to catch that before we get there.
Sometimes everything in the brief works exactly as written. Other times, there’s one part we want to look at more closely before we draft from it. Either way, we’d rather make that call while we’re still looking at the assignment than after we’ve already started writing the page.
Once the review is done, we can move into drafting without still wondering whether something in the brief needs another look.
The Brief Gives Us a Place to Start
Reading the brief tells us what we’ve been asked to write. Reviewing it is when we get a chance to question something before we follow the assignment onto the page. We’re not looking for problems. Usually, something in the brief simply makes us stop and think, Do we know enough to write this the way it’s been assigned? A few questions come up often:
Does the assignment match what someone searching for this topic actually needs? A brief may focus heavily on explaining the law when the person searching is more likely to be wondering what they can do next. We want to notice that difference before we spend most of the page answering a question they didn’t come to ask.
Are we being asked to give something more attention than it needs? A brief can devote an entire section to a point that only needs a short explanation on the finished page. We don’t assume the amount of space something gets in the brief has to determine how much space it gets in the draft.
Is anything missing that would leave the reader confused? Sometimes the brief gets us almost all the way there, but one answer is needed to make the rest of the page make sense. We want to catch that before we start writing so the answer has a place on the page.
Is anything in the assignment unclear to us? We don’t guess our way through instructions we aren’t sure about. If we need an answer from the client before we can write what they asked for, the review is when we want to find that out.
We won’t have all four questions on every assignment. Sometimes we won’t have any of them. Giving the brief its own review simply gives us a chance to ask. The reader will never know which questions came up before we wrote the page. They’ll just know whether the page gives them what they came looking for.
Readers Never See the Review, but They See the Results
By the time someone reads the finished page, they’ll never know what changed between the brief and the draft. They’ll only see the version that made it through the review. Sometimes the change is tiny. Other times, one question during the review changes a whole section. Those changes can show up in a few different ways:
A long section in the brief may end up much shorter on the page. Once we look at what someone really needs from that section, we may realize a few strong paragraphs are enough.
The page may answer something the brief never mentioned. If we notice a question the reader is likely to have, we can make room for it before the draft is written.
A section may move. Something can make sense in one place on the brief and work better somewhere else once we think about how the page will read from top to bottom.
The explanation may get more specific. A short note in the brief can turn into a much more focused section once we understand what the reader is actually trying to figure out.
Most readers will never know any of those changes happened, and they don’t need to. They’re there to read the page, not the brief behind it. After seeing the same kinds of changes come out of review again and again, we eventually built a consistent way to do that work before drafting begins.
The Review Became Part of How We Work
For a while, reviewing a brief more closely was something we did when the assignment gave us a reason to stop. After enough projects, we realized we didn’t want to wait for a reason.
We had seen too many cases where a brief looked ready to go until we spent more time with it. Nothing was necessarily wrong with the assignment. We had just learned that the first read didn’t always tell us everything we wanted to know before writing from it.
After planning more than 20,000 legal pages, that was enough for us to make brief review part of every assignment. We stopped waiting for something to catch our attention first.
That review eventually became part of The Acadia Method™. We took something we had learned from years of doing the work and made it a consistent part of how we prepare to write. Once the review is finished, we can move on knowing the brief has already had a closer look.
See What Happens After the Brief Review
Once the brief has been reviewed, we know whether anything needs to be clarified before the assignment moves forward. From there, the rest of the planning can begin. The Acadia Method™ is where that work comes together. And throughout the Library, we’ll keep breaking down what happens before a legal page is ready to be written.
