How to Improve Your Team’s Legal Drafting Through Better Feedback—Webinar

Let’s be honest: giving feedback on writing is often just more emotional or provocative than feedback on almost any other aspect of lawyering.

In a recent webinar with Today’s Managing Partner, Ross Guberman, founder and CEO of BriefCatch, discussed how legal teams can move away from frustrating, conflicting edits and toward an actionable, growth-oriented approach to mentoring.

The session, “Better Feedback, Better Writing: How to Improve Legal Drafting Across Your Team,” emphasized the importance of changing day-to-day workflows to ensure your feedback actually develops people’s skills and gets you better drafts the next time. It also called for an understanding of how technology and generational shifts are altering how professionals process critique.

The conversation centered on a major shift: moving away from vague statements like “this is wordy” toward actionable feedback. Guberman mentioned an interesting development in how modern white-collar employees perceive critiques from humans versus artificial intelligence.

“People trust positive feedback more from humans, but negative or constructive feedback more from gen AI,” he said. “That tells you something about where feedback and mentoring is probably headed and what the best most overall effective division of labor is going to be in let’s say six months, a year or two.”

Key takeaways from the session:

• Replace vague complaints with actionable mantras: Instead of writing marginal notes like “don’t repeat yourself” or “awkward,” give the writer a specific strategy to apply. Look for two, three, or four patterns of changes across a document and attach a quick, three-to-five-word tactic they can internalize for the next draft.
• Sort your edits into distinct buckets: Explicitly separate ironclad writing principles from your own stylistic preferences. Disclosing that a change is simply “your thing” increases your credibility, reduces associate anxiety, and helps the writer separate negotiable style preferences from life-or-death errors.
• Establish a shared team vocabulary: Align with other supervisors in your firm or agency on a few general categories of writing problems (such as “flow,” “punchiness,” or “plain language”). Utilizing a unified rubric ensures that less-experienced attorneys aren’t left paralyzed by conflicting feedback from multiple senior partners.

Ultimately, transforming your team’s writing is about making your day-to-day feedback loops more deliberate and structured. Watch the full recording to learn how to shift from reactive track changes to actionable, bucketed guidance, legal ops and firm leaders can turn everyday markups into powerful professional development.

Read more about legal writing in Ross Guberman’s Today’s Managing Partner columns here.