Give yourself—and, even more importantly, your team—adequate time to complete the finishing touches on any brief, letter, or other court filing. The editing and filing process always takes longer than you would expect.

After spending weeks researching, outlining, and drafting a document, it can feel so satisfying to enter your conclusion or closing words, hit save, and walk away from your workstation. But even then you are not finished. The writing is only part of the process.

There are typically many additional steps to be completed (not to mention the unexpected challenges that inevitably arise) before a document may be filed, on top of the physical act of filing itself.

This is sometimes easy to forget. I am fortunate enough to work with an outstanding team of non-attorney legal analysts who make the editing and filing process at our firm run smoothly and efficiently. Documents at our firm go through a stringent, multi-step editing procedure before they are filed, but my colleagues have the procedure down to a science. Thus, it can often feel like the final steps in creating a brief or other filing take no time at all.

But when I’ve been faced with navigating the e-filing portals on my own, or, even more trying (and fortunately, only rarely), attempting to use the automatic formatting functions of my word processing software to create a table of authorities, I am reminded that, in order to do it correctly, the editing and filing process takes a substantial amount of time, focus, and experience.

And then there are the unexpected occurrences that make the process even more complicated. ECF and the other online filing systems seem to have minds of their own at times. Uploading two documents of the same length can take twenty seconds or twenty minutes, depending on the whims of the program. A call from a client can require last minute changes that alter the structure of whatever you are working on. Allowing adequate time for these surprises to occur (which they inevitably do) can save you and your team a lot of stress and allow you to create a better final product.

As litigators, we are not only creating a finished product for our clients, but we are helping to establish and interpret the actual law of our states and country. Nearly every document we create becomes a part of the public record in some form, and remains accessible as part of that record for decades. We owe it to our clients, the public generally, and ourselves to ensure that what we produce and put out into the world is polished, accurate, and error-free. Thus, editing, properly formatting and filing these documents is important and deserving of our attention. This requires time. Take it.

Jillian L. McNeil was an attorney at Balestriere Fariello, a trial and investigations law firm which represents clients in all aspects of complex commercial litigation and arbitration from pre-filing investigations to trial and appeals. You can reach firm partner John Balestriere at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.