Line Numbering in Trial-Court Pleadings and Motions

Many trial courts expect line numbers in pleadings and motions to appear on the left. Since the text is double-spaced, the line numbers are generally likewise double-spaced.

But in my experience, it has been hard to keep the line numbers (entered through a special text box on the right-hand margin, for instance) aligned with the text, especially when some parts of the text (such as headings and block quotes) are single-spaced. I understand that courts don't mind that the single-spaced text itself doesn't match the double-spaced numbers, but often the single-spacing throws off the alignment of double-spaced text later on the page. One can fix this by hand-tweaking the spacing after the single-spaced text, but that's a pain, and can get thrown off when changes are made.

Word, to be sure, has its own line numbering feature, under Layout / Line Numbers, and that yields double-spaced numbers for double-spaced text and single-spaced numbers for single-based text. I think that actually makes the most sense—but it's different from what I've seen to be the norm, and I know many lawyers are reluctant to do something like that.

Any suggestions on the best way to deal with this? If so, please let me know.

Comments

[Bored Lawyer]

Line numbering is a royal pain and should be abolished. When I first encountered it when we had a case in California, where federal and state courts require it, I thought it was nuts. Courts in many jurisdictions function just fine without it.

Then again, California practice is bizarre. I once had to ask for an extension on the time to file an answer in a California federal case. That required four different documents totalling sixteen pages. In New York, that would have been a one-page letter to the judge. Our local counsel told us if you write a letter to the judge here, you will be sanctioned. It is not for nothing that they call it La-La Land.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

IANAL and you’ve piqued my curiosity: what four forms did California require, and any idea what their rationalization was?

[Bored Lawyer]

1. Ex Parte Application to Extend Time To File an Answer
2. Memorandum of Law in Support
3. Declaration of Local Counsel
4. Proposed Order.

[Jon S]

Get better local counsel. Documents 1 to 3 should be combined into one document, just with different sections (and frankly, you don’t really need a separate memo of law for just an ex parte to extend time, you can just put in the application itself and attach the declaraiton behind it).

The proposed order needs to be separate in federal court, not state, for administrative reasons that the clerks (not law clerks, “courtroom clerks”) decided upon.

California practice is definitely more formal than New York. That said, our courts move 10x faster too. File a case in New York federal court and they never even set a trial date a motion hearing date (just file motions and they sit there). Even though hearings are usually taken off calendar in federal court, the judges still decide at or around the set hearing date 90 percent of the time. In New York, the just sit there for months – I have a motion to transfer in EDNY – simple motion on forum selection clause – and it has been sitting there for 8 months. Local counsel says it’s hardly a long wait so far. Case has no schedule, no discovery, no nothing. I’m defendant so it’s fine with me but if I was plaintiff I’d be pissed.

In California, state and federal, the judges move things along super fast, though Covid has slowed things down a ton.

[Jon S]

Also, New York’s “pre-hearing conferences” are some of the biggest wastes of time and paper known to the legal profession, a profession which already exceeds in that.

[Jon S]

That all said, line numbering is silly.

[Bored Lawyer]

“Documents 1 to 3 should be combined into one document, just with different sections”

That’s trivial. I still had to draft four documents, totalling 16 pages, when in NY I could have done with a 1 to 2 page letter to the judge.

My experience, albeit limited, is that CA courts are as slow as NY courts. And this was pre-Covid. It does tend to vary by judge. One NY judge, the late Harold Baer, would set a trial date (actually, a month) at the initial conference, and he would rarely move it.

[Don Nico]

“Line numbering is a royal pain and should be abolished. ”
Nonsense.
In any circumstance in which one expects the readers to make item by item comment, line-numbering is the most effective way of communicating those comments to the authors or to go back to one’s original reading when making a written analysis.
Good document preparation software can do this task regardless of the line spacing or font size used.

[Rossami]

If you want to make item-by-item comments, then you should be implementing item-by-item numbering. Line-numbering is a crude proxy that made some sense for the printing technology of the day but makes little sense anymore.

Perhaps you could implement a numbering system similar to that used in the Bible – Section:Paragraph:Sentence denoted as superscripts. That would be less bad. But you still haven’t addressed the original point that many (most?) other jurisdictions do just fine without any line numbers at all, yet lawyers in those jurisdictions have the same need to make item-by-item comments, etc.

[Don Nico]

“Line-numbering is a crude proxy that made some sense for the printing technology of the day but makes little sense anymore.”
You say that as a blanket statement. However, I will tell you that the vast majority of peer reviewers of journal papers complain loudly, if the manuscripts are not line numbered.
Does it make sense? depends where and for what purpose of the reader.

[Bored Lawyer]

Federal courts nowadays required searchable PDFs. So if you refer to the page number, and make clear what you are referencing, it will not be hard to find.

[Don Nico]

BL,
Not hard in short documents if yo know the exact phrases and they are not too numerous.

[Don Nico]

BL,
But if you wish to become inactive from the NY Bar, you can’t. You can resign, by motion to the Court of Appeals, which is its own time-consuming process.
In CA, that process is trivial and you can become active again if you change your mind without taking the bar exam again.

[Kleppe]

Line numbers should match the lines they correspond to. How is this even a question lol

[Drewski]

La-La Land is just the Los Angeles area. It’s a play on words, see?

(Also, if you think filing mildly burdensome routine forms is “bizarre” you probably should get out more.)

On topic, Word’s line numbering works fine for me, and is much better than the complicated WP macros I used to use. Not sure why EV is wringing his hands over it. If a firm wants it done a certain way, they won’t be shy about saying so. I feel like learning multiple line-numbering techniques “just in case” is not time well-spent.

[mydisplayname]

One possible way to do this is through the use of “baseline grid” spacing. The variant captions/whatnot will be aligned to the “double-spaced” (14pt, perhaps) grid, as will the body text and “line” numbers.

In most advanced Corel products, the option is found under Layout/Page Setup/Grid, but in some products can be found under Format/Typesetting/Word-Letter Spacing. LibreOffice has a similar feature. For MSWord, see mid-way of https://thegoodpage.net/2015/04/26/between-the-lines-with-word/

[Stuart]

Are you familiar with Typography for Lawyers by Matthew Butterick? It’s wonderful. He has a whole section on Line Numbering which I think address your question. It’s too long to describe how to do it here, and I did not want to cut and paste his work, but this resource is great for all kinds of formatting tips.

[Bored Lawyer]

Off topic, but I saw a funny article about a group of America tourists in London who met the late Queen and did not know who she was. They even asked her to take a picture of them!

https://www.westernjournal.com/queens-bodyguard-american-tourists-didnt-recognize-monarch-perfect-response-handed-camera/?ff_source=Email&ff_medium=PTbreaking&ff_campaign=wj-breaking&ff_content=libertyalliance

One funny line from the article (told from the POV of the Queen’s bodyguard):

“And I could see it coming, and sure enough, he said to Her Majesty, ‘And where do you live?’” Griffin said.
Queen Elizabeth kindly replied that she lived in London but had a holiday home nearby.

Now that’s class!

[Bored Lawyer]

I meant in Scotland, not London.

[Bob from Ohio]

I saw the interview with the ex-bodyguard at the 70 jubilee, he really tells the story well.

God sent rainbows to both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle yesterday to mark the passing but even He cannot send sunshine to Scotland [Balmoral], no rainbow.

[_Nobody_]

Write in LaTeX and use the lineno package.

[Don Nico]

That will also work.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Give the final line number at the beginning and the beginning one at the end. That way, the readers knows as he goes how many lines are left.

[Barry Sullivan]

I use Word for all my pleadings(federal and state (which includes California among others)). I have solved the line-numbering problem as follows:

1) Even though California allows 12-point font for text, I always use14-point font for all my pleadings because the federal courts in California require it. By doing so I avoid the problem of mismatched text if I cut-and-pate some text from a state-court brief (that may have used a smaller font) into a federal brief (which. Mismatched-sized text throws off line-numbering..

2) I also double space my headers to avoid the line-numbering problem. Occasionally, the double-spaced line-numbering in headers causes the line-numbering to get off-track after a header. I solved that problem my making sure “smart quotes” are turned off. The use of “smart quotes” in a header uses a slightly larger text height and that causes the line-numbering to go wrong.

3) On block quotations, I double–spacing as well. Yes, double-spaced headers and block quotations eats up valuable briefing real estate, but I find that I can always edit my edit my briefs to accommodate that requirement — i.e., shorter arguments are more effective arguments.

Other than those three situations, I have no problem wit off-kiler line-numbering in my pleadings.

If you want, I can email you a copy of my boilerplate Word pleading template that has all the styles needed to accomplish the foregoing.

[MatthewSlyfield]

1) you can do a raw text only paste so you aren’t pulling through formatting from the source document.

[Mr. Bumble]

Forgive the non-lawyer question, but when did line numbering begin and why?

[Brancron]

Our firm uses Crowther Macro Systems, which populates Word with a “macro menu,” a “litigation menu” and a “forms menu.” One of the options is to “adjust text to line up with numbers,” and it works like a charm.

[Juste Milieu]

On the last read-through before filing, I’d look over the doc for the sole purpose of inserting or removing whatever line-spacing was necessary to bring all double-spaced content following single-space content (headings and block quotations) line up with a whole line-number in the margin. This isn’t ideal, as it is tedious and causes the spacing between headings/block quotations and double-spaced content—however beautifully aligned with a number in the margin—to be nonuniform within the document. I wasn’t concerned about extra returns causing me to come up against rule-imposed length-limits (which generally weren’t a problem for me anyway), as the rules now typically set those limits in words not pages. I grew less obsessed with perfecting text alignment when I started receiving orders from the federal district courts in which the only line in the entire document in which it appeared extra care was taken to ensure correct alignment with the numbers in the margin was the one on which the judge’s electronic signature appeared.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I just thought – I suppose that if the lawyer doesn’t number the lines he’d get sanctioned, but what happens to the lawyer’s client? Is the client disadvantaged for the lawyer’s behavior? If so, is it his fault for not getting a better lawyer?

[orin ed deniro]

Whenever I get an opposing brief that has the problem EV describes, I cite (Opposing Brief, p. 4, ll. 10.4-11.8.)

[MoreCurious]

Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps I’m just showing my age. I retired last year, and used WordPerfect up to the last day. I just pulled up one of the last briefs I worked on on my laptop, and I formatted it to show line numbers. It took way less than a minute, and it seems to have worked perfectly. It skipped over the spaces between lines when the text was in double-space mode, and it automatically went into single-space mode when there was a single-spaced quotation.

[MoreCurious]

I forgot to mention that in more than 40 years I don’t recall ever having to number lines.

[Beldar]

Any suggestions on the best way to deal with this?

Move to Texas. We don’t do those silly, anal-retentive line numbers in trial or appellate courts, state or federal — and in fact, using them is the quickest way to prove you’re an out-of-state lawyer too contemptuous to look into local practices and norms.

[Ragnar]

In case no one has said it already, microsoft word makes this really easy to handle automatically.

Click into the layout tab, and line numbers will be an option near the left.