“As someone who learned from WordRake founder Gary Kinder early in my law firm career, I’m excited to bring his editing expertise into the classroom and to make this collaboration a reality. “I use WordRake on my own writing, and it’s easy to see how students would benefit from it, too,” adds Professor Dyane O’Leary, associate professor of legal writing and co-director of Suffolk’s LIT Concentration. The software flags common phrases that lawyers use such as “pursuant to” and “in accordance with” and suggests omitting or simplifying them. Jim Figel, CEO and president of WordRake, says the software’s complex, patented algorithms help students produce clear and concise legal writing and avoid “legalese” before it becomes a bad habit. It also has a higly ranked writing program. 1 in the country for legal technology by National Jurist magazine. It houses the nation’s first Legal Innovation and Technology (LIT) concentration, and was ranked No. Wordrake is better than Grammarly if youre looking for an online writing assistant that focuses on clarity over grammar. Suffolk Law is regularly listed on shortlists of the nation’s most innovative law schools. “We’re always looking to find innovative tools that help our students learn and grow and enable them to do their work more efficiently and effectively.” “WordRake is a great fit for the Law School,” says Dean Andrew Perlman. “Our goal is that after seeing the same types of edits flagged repeatedly students can improve on the basics and focus more attention on substantive legal analysis.” The students have to decide, edit by edit, whether each change makes sense contextually, says Suffolk Law Professor Kathleen Elliott Vinson, director of legal writing, research, and written advocacy. WordRake’s suggested edits appear as an add-on in Microsoft Word through Word’s track-changes feature. Nearly 360 students of this year’s entering class is receiving a free license for the software as a result of the school’s collaboration with WordRake. What would Strunk and White think? (Um, law school students, you might need to Google them …) Suffolk University Law School will be the first school in the country to provide its students with WordRake, legal editing software that offers suggestions to reduce wordiness, improve awkward phrasing and increase clarity. How cool! It’s sort of like a robot editor.
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