Why So Much Legal Content Fails Even Before Drafting
You get a legal page back from drafting, read through it, and immediately start making changes. The introduction feels off, so you rewrite it. Two sections say almost the same thing, so you combine them. The page feels thin in one spot, so you ask for another section. A few rounds later, the writing is cleaner, but you still have the same nagging feeling: this page is not what you wanted.
Sometimes the problem was never the writing. We have seen projects where the writer was asked to cover too much on one page, where two pages were assigned nearly identical jobs, or where nobody had decided what a page needed to accomplish before the draft was ordered. A writer can follow those instructions well and still produce a page that needs major changes afterward. Editing can absolutely improve the draft. But if the trouble came from what the page was assigned to do in the first place, changing sentences alone will not fix it.
Revising the Draft Doesn’t Always Fix the Page
Revision can make a real difference in a legal page. An introduction can take too long to get to the point. A section can repeat information the reader already got three paragraphs earlier. Sometimes the explanation is right, but the way it is written makes it harder to understand than it needs to be. Those are writing problems, and editing is exactly where you should fix them.
The trouble starts when you keep editing and the same problem keeps coming back.
We have worked on city-level car accident pages, for example, where the firm already had a statewide page covering the same practice area. If the assignment never explained what the city page needed to do differently, the writer has to make that call while drafting. You can rewrite the page afterward, add local details, or rearrange what is already there. None of those changes answers the question the assignment skipped: why does the firm need both pages, and what should someone find here that they will not find on the other one?
We have seen the other side of this, too. Some pages come back from drafting and need very little changed because those questions were answered beforehand. Everyone already knew why the page was being written, where it fit on the website, and what belonged on it. Revision could then stay where it belonged: making good writing better instead of trying to decide what the page should have been.
Writers make plenty of decisions once they start drafting. But they do not start with a blank slate. A surprising number of decisions about the page have already been made for them.
Every Draft Starts With Decisions Already Made
When you send a legal page to a writer, you are not handing them an empty page and asking them to decide what belongs there. You have already made some of those decisions.
You chose the topic because you want a page about it on the firm’s website. If you provided an outline, you also decided which sections the writer should cover. Even the title tells the writer something about how specific the page should be and which questions belong somewhere else.
The writer still has plenty of decisions to make. The assignment determines how many of those decisions they have to make without your input.
Imagine you order a page for a law firm that already has 200 pages on its website. The writer receives the title, target keywords, word count, and outline, but nothing about those existing pages. They now have to decide how much background information to include without knowing where else you have covered it. If the outline calls for a section on damages, they have no reason to know you wanted this page to approach damages differently from the firm’s other practice area pages. They can follow the assignment exactly and give you something you did not intend to order.
We have seen versions of this across thousands of legal content projects. The instructions a writer receives determine what they know before they start researching and which decisions are left to them during drafting.
So when a choice in the finished page feels wrong, it helps to look at what the writer had in front of them before deciding where the problem came from. Sometimes the assignment made the choice. Other times, it left the writer to make a judgment without enough context.
Either way, the draft is showing you the result of decisions that started before the writing did.
Some Problems Exist Before the First Sentence
You can approve a legal content assignment without seeing anything obviously wrong with it. The firm handles the type of case, and the outline looks reasonable enough to send to a writer. Problems can be much easier to spot when the draft comes back and you see what the writer actually had room and permission to cover.
Here are a few ways a page can run into trouble before the writing starts:
Another page already gives the reader most of the same information. A firm has a detailed car accident page and orders another page about what to do after a crash. If both pages explain what someone should do immediately after an accident, rewriting the second one will not give the reader much they could not already find on the first.
You know the topic, but not what the person searching for it wants to know. “Felony drug possession” gives you a subject. Someone facing the charge could land on the page trying to find out what happens after an arrest. If the assignment never accounts for that question, the draft can spend most of its space explaining the offense instead.
The firm wants another city page, but changing the city does not change the information. If the existing personal injury page and the new location page are both assigned the same general material, adding local references will not keep the pages from repeating each other.
A related question needs more room than this page can give it. Imagine a DUI page briefly mentioning license suspension when the firm has no separate page explaining the licensing process. Either the writer interrupts the DUI discussion to explain it or leaves the reader with only part of the answer.
The outline gives valuable space to information the reader can already find elsewhere. If several hundred words of a wrongful death page are reserved for a general negligence explanation, there is less room to explain who has the legal right to file the wrongful death claim.
Two assignments allow writers to cover the same ground. Separate workplace injury and workers’ compensation pages can both reasonably discuss what happens when someone gets hurt at work. Without a clear dividing line between the assignments, both writers have a reason to include it.
Once the draft comes back, you finally have words in front of you that you can change. You can cut a repetitive section or ask the writer to replace it, but the next version still has to fit the same assignment unless someone goes back and changes what the page was asked to cover. The draft is often where you notice the problem. It is not necessarily where the problem started.
The Draft Can’t Correct the Wrong Starting Point
You read a draft and find a section that takes up far too much of the page. You send it back and ask the writer to cut it. The revised section is better, but the rest of the page still feels underdeveloped.
The writer made the change you requested. Cutting the section just exposed something the original assignment never answered: what did you want the page to spend that space discussing instead?
Say you ordered a 2,000-word medical malpractice page and the outline gave a large portion of it to common medical errors. Once you read the draft, you realize the section is taking attention away from questions about whether someone may have a claim and what they’ll need to prove. You ask the writer to shorten it.
Now the writer has room to give another subject more attention, but the assignment never said which one. They can make that decision themselves, or you can give them more direction and review another revision.
Either approach can improve the page. But at this point, you’re not asking the writer to make the existing writing stronger. You’re deciding what the page should cover and how much space different information should get. The draft didn’t cause either of those questions. It just gave you something concrete enough to finally see them.
We kept seeing revisions turn into decisions that could’ve been made before drafting started. Eventually, we stopped waiting for a finished page to make those questions obvious. We started asking them before the writer began.
The Same Issues Kept Showing Up
We didn’t change how we planned legal content because of one difficult project. By the time we had planned and written more than 20,000 legal pages, we had seen enough drafts go through revision to recognize how many questions could be answered before a writer ever opened a document.
Eventually, waiting for a finished draft to answer those questions felt backwards. If a decision could change what the writer researched or how they used 2,000 words, we wanted to make it while we were still planning the assignment.
That’s where architecture-first legal content development came from.
We stopped treating everything before drafting as preparation for the writing and started giving it more attention of its own. Instead of handing the writer an assignment and dealing with unanswered questions as they appeared in the draft, we wanted to answer as many of them as we reasonably could beforehand.
Architecture-first legal content development is how we do that work at Acadia today. It gives us time to make decisions about the page before those decisions have to become paragraphs.
Fix the Right Problem First
If you want to see what happens before we draft, keep reading through the Acadia Library or take a closer look at The Acadia Method™. If you’re already planning legal content and want another set of eyes on it, contact Acadia. We can review the assignment before drafting starts and help you decide what needs attention first.
