Human Rights Law Editing and Proofreading Services

"It started around the time my mother got sick." That is how a complainant's account of eighteen months at work often begins, and it is the sentence an advocate has to turn into something a commission can act on. The account is true. It is also undated, out of order, and built around the moments the person remembers most sharply rather than the moments that carry the claim. Somewhere in the eleven pages is the day a schedule changed, the name of the supervisor who changed it, and what was said the following Monday. Finding those and setting them in order is editorial work, and it happens before anything legal can be decided.

Charges of discrimination and the narratives behind them make up most of what we see in this area. Accommodation requests and the correspondence answering them arrive with them, along with position statements, rebuttals, and the chronologies advocates prepare for their own use. Tribunal submissions, complaints to state and municipal human rights agencies, affidavits, witness statements, and country-conditions material for asylum and refugee matters come through the same route.

A charge has a stated content, and the regulation setting it out is plain about what the writing has to do. Under 29 CFR 1601.12(a)(3), a charge should contain "A clear and concise statement of the facts, including pertinent dates, constituting the alleged unlawful employment practices."¹ Clear, concise, and pertinent dates are three separate requirements, and a narrative written from memory usually meets none of them. The same section then sets a much lower floor: a charge is sufficient when the Commission receives "a written statement sufficiently precise to identify the parties, and to describe generally the action or practices complained of."¹ The gap between those two standards is where the editing happens. A document can clear the floor and still be a poor instrument, because the person reading it has to reconstruct the sequence themselves, and there is no guarantee they will reconstruct it the way the complainant intended.

Dates carry more weight here than in most writing, and not for stylistic reasons. A charge under Title VII is filed within 180 days of the alleged unlawful employment practice, extended to 300 days where a state or local agency enforces its own fair employment law.² That turns every "later that spring" and "a few months after" in a narrative into a question somebody has to answer. The regulation permits amendment to "cure technical defects or omissions" and to "clarify and amplify allegations", and provides that such amendments "relate back to the date the charge was first received."¹ Whether an amendment is available, and whether a particular allegation relates back, are questions for the representative. What an editor can do is make sure that every event in the document has a date or is marked as undated, so that nobody has to guess which it is.

Accommodation matters turn on the same discipline for a different reason. The Americans with Disabilities Act defines discrimination to include "not making reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified individual with a disability", unless the employer shows undue hardship.³ Known is doing a great deal of work in that phrase, and known is established by a record of what was asked for and when. Complainant narratives tend to compress that record into a conclusion: "I asked for help and they refused." The underlying documents almost always contain more, and it is specific. A request made in person on a date, a follow-up email, a form submitted, a reply that granted part of it, a second request. Writing those out as separate dated events, each attributed to the person who made or received it, is not advocacy and adds nothing. It puts on the page what the correspondence already shows.

Terminology drifts across a long complaint, and it drifts in a way that matters. A document may describe the same protected characteristic three different ways, or use a term of art in one paragraph and a colloquial equivalent in the next, so that a reader cannot tell whether two allegations concern one ground or two. Where a complaint is brought under more than one statute, the same conduct may be pleaded twice under different labels, and the two versions rarely say quite the same thing after several rounds of revision. In actions under 42 U.S.C. 1983, which reaches deprivations committed "under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory", the identity of each actor and the capacity in which they acted has to stay fixed through the document.⁴ Names, titles, and the relationships between them are exactly the details that shift when a draft is revised in pieces.

Much of this work is done for people who are self-represented or supported by a small advocacy organization, and the documents arrive in that condition: written under distress, often at length, sometimes with the most important paragraph on page nine. Restructuring that into a chronology is the single most useful thing an editor does here, and it is done without changing a word of what the person says happened.

What we do not do is decide the case. Whether conduct amounts to discrimination, whether a ground should be added, whether an accommodation was reasonable, whether a deadline has run, and whether an amendment relates back are all legal questions, and they belong to the representative or the complainant. We do not add allegations, we do not characterize conduct that the client has not characterized, and we do not supply a date the record does not contain. Where the narrative implies an event that no document confirms, or where two accounts of the same day disagree, it goes back as a query with both versions set out, and the client decides which is right.

Everything sent to us is confidential, including draft complaints, medical and accommodation correspondence, and material about people who are not parties.