Contract clauses, Latin phrases and case citations, timed. Legal drafting has punctuation, capitalisation and vocabulary that general typing tests never touch — this one is built from it.
Three things. Defined terms, which capitalise ordinary words mid-sentence — the Agreement, the Effective Date, the Parties — so the shift key appears far more often than in prose. Citations, which are dense with numbers, periods, section symbols and parentheses in a fixed order that must be exact. And the sentences themselves: long, subordinate, semicolon-separated, with the Latin — inter alia, prima facie, mutatis mutandis — dropped in without warning.
A general typing test hides all of this. The text here does not: it is drawn from the Lawyers & Legal course and reads like a real clause.
Legal text typically comes in ten to twenty per cent below prose speed. If your gap is larger, the live counter during the test will show where: for most drafters it is the capitals and the citation punctuation, both of which are shift-layer habits rather than vocabulary problems, and both of which respond quickly to targeted practice.
Accuracy is the number to care about. An error in a defined term or a citation is not a typo to a reader — it is a different term or a different case.
The Lawyers & Legal course drills citation formats, boilerplate clauses and Latin phrases separately before mixing them, and the Practice Lab can write practice text for a practice area — a lease, a share purchase agreement, a witness statement. The Students & Researchers course covers the related problem of academic citation formats.
A case citation is a sequence like 410 U.S. 113, 116 (1973) — numbers, periods, a capital pair, more numbers, parentheses — and it has to be exact. Citations are the part of legal typing that behaves most like data entry: the number row, the period and the parentheses in quick alternation with the shift key. If your speed collapses on them, the Data Entry course's number-row lessons are a faster fix than more prose practice.
Latin phrases are the other special case. They are short, but their letter patterns — the double consonants of mutatis mutandis, the endings of res judicata — are not in an English typist's muscle memory. The course drills the two dozen that appear most often in drafting until they type as fluently as ordinary words.