Q. When preparing correspondence in which our client’s name is frequently referenced, our firm spells out the first instance of the client’s name, and in parentheses we include the term we will be using throughout the remainder of the letter (the “Company”). My question is, should the word Company be in quotation marks or not?
A. Yes. The quotation marks and capitalization say that from that point on, the word Company is going to stand in for the client’s name. Legal documents feature quotation marks like this in boilerplate to define a generic term so it can be plugged into personalized letters or contracts. It’s a shortcut that eliminates having to type a client’s name into many passages.