What Pupils Get Wrong About Court Document Formatting

Pupillage is where most of what you learn about litigation happens on the job, not in a lecture hall, and formatting is one of the areas where that shows. Nobody hands a pupil a copy of every court's practice directions on day one. Instead, you learn by copying whatever template is already on the firm's shared drive, and that's exactly where most formatting mistakes start.

Mistake 1: Assuming one court's rules apply everywhere

The most common mistake is treating formatting as a single, fixed standard. It isn't. The Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, and High Court each set their own typing format, margins, and numbering rules in their own practice directions, and a document formatted correctly for one court can still be wrong for another.

• Supreme Court: Times New Roman, size 12, double-spaced, margins of 3.0cm left, 2.0cm top and bottom, 1.5cm right (Paragraph 12).
• Court of Appeal: Written submissions at 1.5 spacing, font at least 12 points, no mandated typeface (Paragraph 5(a)).
• High Court: Times New Roman, Arial, or Century Gothic at size 12, black, fully justified, 1.5 spacing, with margins of 1.5" top and bottom and 1.75" left (Paragraph 9).

A pupil moving between departments, or helping out on a matter in a different court from the one they usually work in, needs to check the rule for that specific court every time, not assume the format used last week still applies.

Mistake 2: Copying an old precedent without checking if the rules changed

Firm precedent banks are useful, but they're also where outdated formatting quietly survives for years. A pleading template saved in 2018 was formatted against whatever practice directions were current then. If the court has since revised its rules, and Kenyan courts do revise their practice directions periodically, a document copied from that template inherits the old formatting along with the good drafting. Always check the precedent's formatting against the current practice direction, not just its substance.

Mistake 3: Getting page numbering in the wrong corner

This is a small detail that's easy to get backwards, and it comes up constantly because the convention differs by court.

• Supreme Court and Court of Appeal: pages numbered top-right.
• High Court: pages numbered bottom-right, with annexures numbered separately, top-right.

If you learned page numbering at one court and then move to a matter at another, the muscle memory works against you. Check the corner, not just whether a number is present.

Mistake 4: Misapplying every-tenth-line numbering

This is the mistake with the most serious consequences, because getting it wrong in either direction causes a real problem. Applying tenthlining where it isn't required makes a document look non-standard. Skipping it where it is required risks the document being rejected at filing.

• Supreme Court: required on all documents (Paragraph 11).
• Court of Appeal: required generally, and specifically on applications and affidavits (Paragraphs 1(e) and 3(a)).
• High Court: not required for ordinary pleadings (Paragraph 11), but required specifically for Records of Appeal in civil appeals (Paragraph 14(iii)).

That last distinction trips up even experienced clerks, not just pupils. The High Court doesn't apply tenthlining uniformly; it depends on the specific document type. Read more on this in Why Kenyan Courts Reject Improperly Formatted Pleadings.

Mistake 5: Not checking the case heading against the current e-filing format

At the High Court, the case heading has to match the format expected by the Judiciary's electronic filing system, which is a live standard, not a fixed one in a PDF you saved once. Pupils drafting from an old template sometimes carry forward a heading format that no longer matches what the portal expects. Confirm the current format before finalizing, especially if it's been a while since you last checked the portal directly.

Mistake 6: Treating formatting as the last five minutes of the job

The formatting pass often gets squeezed into the time right before filing, when there's the least attention left to give it. That's backwards, because formatting errors are among the most preventable and most avoidable causes of rejection at the registry. Building the check into the drafting process, rather than bolting it on at the end, catches problems while there's still time to fix them properly.

What actually helps

None of these mistakes come from not knowing how to format a document. They come from applying the wrong court's rule, working from an outdated template, or running out of attention at the end of the process. A short personal checklist, kept next to whatever template you're working from, catches most of it: which court, which document type, does tenthlining apply, which corner does the page number go in. Our full pre-filing checklist covers this in more detail and works for pupils and clerks alike.

For the numbering itself, once a document is drafted and the wording is final, Tenthliner applies court-matched every-tenth-line numbering as an automated last step, so at least that part of the checklist is one upload rather than something to get right by hand under time pressure. See What Is Tenthlining? for the background on why this specific rule exists in the first place.