How do lawyers, judges etc. work with 1000+ pages long documents?
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I don’t know about lawyers or judges.
But I worked in accounting for an old persons home, and the amount of beurocratic nonsense I had to sift through on a daily basis.
I don’t think I’ve done anything close to a 1000 page document, but heaps and heaps of 300 page documents, 2 or 3 every other day.
The thing is, I don’t really have to read the entire thing word by word cover to cover.
Usually when I get access to these documents or I’m asked to run through them I’m looking for *specific* information.
Maybe 10-15 pages are actually relevant to what I need in the whole document, and using the index or by flipping through and searching for keywords I can usually find most of what I need in under half an hour.
Mostly, you have to determine which ones you actually need to read. I have a co-worker who just needs to rifle and scan through the pages, while I personally need to read and reread 3 times
By being good at skim-reading, good at picking out the important points that need reading, and – if necessary – hiring other people to read parts and pick out bits that matter.
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At the risk of breaking the “Recent or Current Events” rule, I suspect this links to the 1,794-page document Donald Trump’s legal team filed to get out of having to pay a multi-million dollar judgment in New York. You can [read the document here](https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docIndex=oor8_PLUS_SyilUVorLgVywrDfQ==) (obviously a very long pdf).
The first page is the summary. If we’re the court or lawyer we can skip over most of that, picking out a couple of key lines. If we do a lot of this work we’ll know which lines to jump to; we don’t have to read the form, just the response.
Pages 3-4 are the proposed order (staying the judgment). That’s in fairly standard language, so we just have to skim it to make sure it says what we think.
Pages 5-16 are the main arguments. But a lot of that is the statement of facts, setting out what has happened in this case. Anyone familiar with the case (such as the lawyers and judges) can skip over much of that (or get the minions to read it, just in case there are mistakes).
Pages 17-1,479 are attached exhibits, covering applications, judgments, filings etc. from earlier in the case. Again, anyone familiar with this case (the lawyers and judges) have probably read all of these already; they are included for completeness and because they are referred to, but there’s nothing new there.
Pages 1,481-1,508 seems to be a bunch of correspondence between Trump’s lawyers and the judge arguing over things. The Government’s lawyers might need to read this, but the judge doesn’t – it’s not new.
Pages 1,509-1,617 are a load of newspaper articles, tweets, opinion pieces, quotes from videos etc. saying how the judge was being mean to Trump. They’re probably referenced in the legal arguments, but no one needs to read them unless they turn out to be relevant to the actual arguments (for example, if the argument itself is legally nonsense it doesn’t matter how many Fox News articles are written to support its factual claims).
Pages 1,618-1,741 are a bunch of the procedural stuff – the notices of appeal (standard forms, standard wording) along with a load of attached documents that have probably already been filed.
At page 1,742 we finally get the memorandum of law, setting out the legal arguments for the stay. The first few pages are the contents, lists of cases and laws referred to etc. and the background to the case, so the actual argument starts on 1,754. The detailed legal arguments, point by point, begin on 1,763 – the first few pages were a summary – and they conclude on 1,793.
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So what do we actually need to read to understand this document? Page 1. Skim bits of pages 5-16. We can then read pages 1,754-1,763 to see a summary of the legal argument, and if we want to, go into the details from 1,763-1,793.
So of nearly 1,800 pages of document, we only really care about 30-60 of them. Although maybe we get the interns to skim the rest.
There‘s multiple things to help you.
Firstly, you should be really good at getting a general understanding of the text by skimming through it, and identifing the specific part that you need right now to read much more carefully.
Secondly, you hire someone to do tedious research work. During my time studying law , I worked at a law firm for one to two days a week. All I did was research court decision to a specific topic to identify which decisions are relevant to a question, and write abstracts of them, research academic literature to a specific legal question and write a summary of it, and the like.
I spent 10 hours working with 500 pages, so that the actual lawyers need only spend 1 hours reading the product of my work, if at all.
In general, most “long documents” have an organization that is familiar to relevant experts. So there’s sections that you can jump around to in order to work with them.
But if the question is “how do you write a 1000+ page document” the answer is with lots of assistance. If you’re a judge, you may have several clerks, who despite the name, have all gone to law school, and usually take such jobs before becoming practicing lawyers. Given the judges broad strokes, they can assemble and create drafts of sections that the judge can edit or read, or take drafts from the judge and add the relevant work. For law documents, some of them have lots of in-line citations, so while a document may be about a page of text, it could grow to several pages more in citations in line.
If the question is “how does one quickly get the gist of a 1000+ page document” then the answer is that one is trained in reading such documents and quickly learns which sections contain the juicy bits that are needed, and so can quickly skim through this document looking for these sections to pull quotes from.
If the question is “how does a practicing lawyer use several 1000+ page documents to support their argument” the answer is two part: first, in law school and in the practice of law, you get to know your “citations” for various cases, so you don’t need to re-read decisions that are commonly understood to support a specific legal precedent, theory, or holding. In the case of doing a deep dive because you’re a strong legal team, you’ll send an army of associates and paralegals to pull these cases and read through them all to find the snippets you need to win an argument. Over time though, these snippets become known so you don’t have to read them again.
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