New font requirements for appeals briefs take effect Jan. 1

On January 1, 2021, new appellate rules from the Florida Supreme Court will convert longstanding page limits on briefs and other appeals filings into word count limits for all computer-generated documents. They also require the use of specific fonts chosen for readability on computer screens – Arial 14-point or Bookman Old Style 14-point.

The change comes as the state’s top appeals judges again confront the ever-changing technology of desktop typography that first sparked a lawyers’ “battle of the fonts” some 30 years ago.

Appeals briefs really are meant to be brief. But how do judges keep them that way and still get readable text in a digital age?

There is a surprising amount of history behind the question. Fonts and font sizes in Florida appeals court filings have vexed the Florida Supreme Court since it first confronted the issue in 1992.

When lawyers abandoned typewriters and began using computers to draft documents in the 1980s, a lot of creative legal wordsmiths found they could cram more words into the page limits of briefs by using different fonts or by shrinking font sizes.

Fonts had never been an issue before. Typewriter font choices were few and usually came in a fixed width. So, most all typewriters produced roughly the same number of words per page no matter what the actual font was. In those days, page limits made sense.

But desktop computers ushered in proportional fonts with variable width. The number of words per page could vary a lot. And that opened the door to mischief.

Starting in the 1992, the Florida Supreme Court responded by restricting font sizes. It did so after finding that lawyers were shrinking the size of fonts to pack more words into each page.

But as word processing became more sophisticated, the relationship between words and pages became harder to police.

By early 2001, the high Court ramped up the regulations in a new effort to get tough. It settled on specific fonts – Times New Roman 14-point and Courier New 12-point. The goal was to produce printed documents that gave each brief roughly the same amount of text within the page limits for appeals briefs.

That seemed to work well enough when most everyone was still printing out paper documents to read. But as the 2000s moved forward, everyone began to read more and more on the computer screen itself. Eye strain became a problem.

One of the issues was the lack of white space on pages. By cramming so much into a specific number of pages, lawyers abandoned things that make documents more readable like the use of shorter paragraphs, bulleted lists, indented quotations, and so forth.

Readers also complained that fonts required by the 2001 rule were harder to read on a monitor. The Arial and Bookman Old Style fonts were chosen as replacements after a Florida Bar rules committee asked judges, lawyers, and others for their preferences. Feedback favored these two fonts for their readability.

So now, starting at exactly 12:03 a.m. on January 1, the Court will abandon page limits in favor of word limits for computer-generated filings. The hope is the lawyers once again will make their documents easy on the eyes.

Page limits still will apply to hand-written documents and those prepared on manual typewriters. And filers also must include a certificate of compliance at the end of each computer-generated document to say they have followed the font requirements. 

Why, you ask, does this new rule take effect exactly three minutes into the Year 2021?

The Florida Supreme Court makes a lot of new rules effective in the early hours of every new year. Each of them is staggered to take effect over succeeding minutes. The idea is to avoid potential conflicts as old rules fall and new rules take their places.

This precision in timing became important after electronic court filing began a decade ago in 2011. With eFiling, anyone can file court documents even during the wee hours of New Year’s Day.