Word's Hidden Productivity Tools

by Joe Ulm

Documents are the lifeblood of most law firms.  Firms spend more time and labor creating, editing, and revising documents than any other single activity.  Yet many firms take this process for granted.  They don’t look at it critically like they do other aspects of their business.  I’m really not sure why this is, but most firms just don’t invest the time to look at the best, most efficient ways to create their documents.  Generally, a firm selects Word or Word Perfect (or both) and expects their staff to be able to efficiently use whichever tool they’ve been given.  If staff members aren’t familiar or comfortable with the word processor the firm uses, they are simply expected to learn on their own.  This method often leads to decreased productivity, a lack of uniform documents, or worse yet, documents that are formatted poorly or have mistakes in them.  For a law firm, poorly created documents are unacceptable.

The good news is that familiarizing staff with how to utilize the tools in Word or Word Perfect requires little in the way of costs and can provide a significant boost to performance.  And these performance increases are tangible, measurable changes to productivity.  With so many firms moving to Word, I thought it may be helpful to go through some of the tools Word includes and discuss how firms can use them to their advantage.

The (first and probably greatest) impact firms can make to their document creation process is to incorporate the use of Styles in their documents.  Styles are basically memorized, named groups of formats. They are used to quickly apply complex or detailed formatting to different document elements – usually paragraphs.  Additionally, they are fairly easy to use.  Creating and manipulating them is pretty simple, and when they are deployed firm wide, they can be very effective in creating complex legal documents quickly and accurately because they completely eliminate the repetitive formatting tasks that can take so much time.

For example, it is common for a legal document to require multiple formats throughout the document.  Perhaps, you need your title to be Times New Roman, size 16, bold, and centered.  Next, you need your subtitles to be left justified, numbered, and contain other different formatting specifics.  Finally, the paragraphs within your document need to be numbered and formatted with their own specifics.  With the use of Styles, Word allows you to save these formatting specifics for each portion of your document.  Because you can create and name a Style according to your own specifications, you can easily apply the style you need at any time within your document.  Applying a style applies all the formatting characteristics contained within the style to the part of the document you’ve chosen.

As I mentioned above, Styles can also be deployed firm wide and, although the specifics of doing so are outside the scope of this article, having everyone using the same styles can dramatically improve document consistency and formatting, while simultaneously shaving lots of time off the document creation process.

Aside from Styles, Word also contains a number of automatic functions many firms don’t take advantage of.  For example, Word provides a built-in Table of Contents generator and a Table of Authorities generator.  Although the Table of Contents generator does take a little time to become familiar with, the Table of Authorities generator works great and it is a snap to use.  For longer documents that require a Table of Contents, there is no faster or more reliable way to create one using the Table of Contents generator.

On it’s most basic level the Table of Contents generator works by simply recognizing certain styles within your document.  Once recognized, Word will create your Table of Contents with the click of a button, formatted to your specifications.  Generating a Table of Authorities is even simpler.  By activating the generator, Word will go through your document and find all the citations within your document.  You assist Word in marking the citations and then Word will create your Table of Authorities, again, formatted to your specifications.

Another feature Word provides that firms don’t often take advantage of is the built-in reference tools.  Most legal professionals are familiar with the spelling and grammar checker in Word, but few are even aware of the reference tools.

Word includes a number of reference tools most people recognize even if they haven’t used them such as a dictionary, a thesaurus, an encyclopedia.  The dictionary can be a huge help and the thesaurus and encyclopedia work great. But, the tools most people don’t know about can be the most helpful.  Words includes some specific research tools like Factiva iWorks, Gale Company Profiles, eLibrary, and Word’s translation utility.  Granted, these tools aren’t as commonly used as the dictionary, thesaurus, or encyclopedia, but they are incredibly useful when needed.  The eLibrary, for example, is fantastic.  It provides information from newspapers, newswires, magazines, reference books, and a variety of transcripts from an online database.  Although legal specific research tools from Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw are still necessary components in any law firm, the eLibrary can be a huge help in certain situations.

The Factiva iWorks tool provides news about companies, industries, and general business topics that can be helpful for firms practicing business or corporate law while the Gale Company Profiles tool provides general information about a business such as the address, phone, revenue, stock exchange information, and more.  The translation utility is rarely needed, but can often translate a word or a series of words fairly accurately.  All Word’s reference and research tools are available from the task pane (press Ctrl +F1 to activate the task pane, click the drop down arrow and select Research).

No matter which tool or combination of Word’s tools you employ, they can each save you time when creating your document – especially Styles.  Firms that apply and utilize Styles universally create cleaner documents and do so faster than firms that do not use Styles.  This can provide an incredible boost to productivity.  Certainly, there are more tools Word contains that many firms aren’t taking advantage of, but employing the ones discussed in this article is a great start.

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