Is there any tradition in the US to put commas outside the quote marks as in British usage? My company has an important doc like this, and I want to see whether that’s a mistake or not before shooting my mouth off about it. The document was written in the US for use in the US.
Normal American usage, as you’re well aware, is to place trailing commas and periods, but not trailing semicolons, inside quotation marks, even if the actual material quoted is not so punctuated. “‘We have nothing to fear except fear itself,’ FDR said,” even though the manuscript from which he spoke follows “itself” with a period.
However, in a legal document, anything supplied by the person quoting is either put in brackets or placed outside the quotation marks, so that the material quoted is a precise transcription of the material quoted. This is done so that any legal action taken in which that document plays a part may be done on the basis of the exact content of what was quoted. In a brief quoting the Fifth Amendment, for example, one would cite “[N]or shall any person…” indicating that the capital N is supplied to correspond with normal English typography for the beginning of a sentence, not present in the original.
For this reason, it’s regularly done (though I hesitate to say standard practice or always) that punctuation supplied by the quoter follows British rather than American practice.
Except ellipses, apparantly. 
[Red bigness added. --l.]
Um, no offense, but I never bothered with such claptrap as Polycarp has put forth. I followed standard usage. I don’t recall having been barraged by a ton of difficulties for having incorrectly quoted anyone.
Suits. I was merely echoing what I was given to understand was proper in legal transcription, where precision in producing results, rather than merely what is acceptable, is striven for. If there’s a lot more flexibility, good!
Ah, transcription, now that would be a whole different animal from, say, pleadings. I understand. 
I always follow the British (or “logical”) quoting style: if the comma isn’t part of the quote, it goes outside the quote marks.
I think this is a growing trend, partly based on the popularity of the internet, where (1) the use of straight quotation marks instead of curly ones means “, is no harder on the eyes than ,”, and (2) a lot of stuff is written by geeks like myself, whose years of programming experience have led them to be precise with the content of strings.