How do lawyers, judges etc. work with 1000+ pages long documents?
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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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