It's just a matter of font

In court papers, font size matters. The smaller the font, the more information an attorney can jam into a document. Trial judges and appellate courts sometime require attorneys to file papers using the same size, and type, of font. In South Carolina's closely watched dispute with the Justice Department over voter identification, the judges earlier this year told the attorneys to use 13-point Times New Roman font. Double-spaced. With one-inch margins. There wasn't any dispute about the font and size — until last Saturday. At that point, after DOJ and South Carolina traded briefs about the case, the federal government noticed something peculiar. South Carolina's "proposed findings of fact" papers, submitted by a team from Bancroft, had a 12-point font. But as long as they were consistent with the formatting throughout the document, I wouldn't recommend being so anal about the exact formatting used. In fact, Department of Justice lawyers had used a 12-point font in other court papers in the case. And if the smaller font was just a way to circumvent the 50-page limit, they should change the limit to a maximum number of words, and maybe then a smaller font size, along with single spacing and smaller margins, could be used in an attempt to save on paper.