Standard Styles Framework

Our objectives for the Standard Styles were to:

  • create a set of styles which contained all the styles you would need to create a legal agreement from something very simple to more complex documents where the Schedules contain forms of documents with parts and their own schedules
  • use meaningful style names – it should be fairly intuitive to work out from the style name what that style is for and where to use it in the document.  For example, “Level 1 Heading” “Level 1 Number”, “Definition” or “Schedule”
  • create a flexible scheme that could be extended or adjusted to cater for different types of documents.

Below is a brief description of what is included and why:

  • Definition styles – with these, you don’t need to re-number definition sub-paragraphs.
  • Numbered heading and numbered paragraph styles – this gives you more flexibility in legal agreements, so you can have a mixture of numbered headings and numbered paragraphs in the same document.  This also enables you to include headings but exclude numbered paragraphs from tables of contents.
  • Schedule styles with numbering – with this, you don’t need to restart numbering in each schedule.  It also gives you a choice of which levels to include in the table of contents.  The structure even caters for more complex documents with different numbering schemes in different schedules and for schedules containing an entire separate document with its own table of contents.

For the full list of styles: DEG List of Standard Styles for Legal Agreements

Keep your identity

Keep your identity - use your own branding and colours, formatting and fonts, numbering and indents, style ordering
Keep your identity – use your own branding and colours, formatting and fonts, numbering and indents, and style ordering