Jim Calloway's Law Practice Tips Blog

Time-Saving Microsoft Word Customizations and Tools

I recently published Time-Saving Microsoft Word Customizations and Tools in the Oklahoma Bar Journal. As Barron Henley of Affinity Consulting frequently notes, one of the challenges of Microsoft Word is that you can work with it for years and your skills won't improve much because so many of the powerful tools within Word are hidden so deeply you would never stumble across them.

In this column I discuss a few basic features of Microsoft Word that are very useful for lawyers. But for those who have not done so the real "gold" in this column is learning how to add the items you frequently use to the Quick Access Toolbar and how you should customize the Status bar. Many Word users will find that they will save several minutes every day just by adding the email Command to their Quick Access Toolbar because, in my world at least, you often want to email a document immediately after you have completed and saved it.

 

 

Implementing the Gold Standard

Most law firms maintain a brief bank or forms library. Operating from prior work as a starting place has been a long-established work practice in many workplaces. As I previously noted in my Law Practice Magazine column Your Document Czar (July/August 2015), the way law firms produce documents is evolving as document assembly tools enter the workplace. We also can appreciate some risk with using “the last time we did this” as a starting point instead of using an established best practice starting point.

Whether you’re going to automate the creation process or manually generate a document, every lawyer in every law firm should be operating from a flawless standard starting point. I’m far from alone in noting that law firms should invest in creating “gold standard documents” as this common starting place for the lawyers in the firm.

Certainly there will be a continuing need for handcrafted and unique pleadings, briefs, contracts and other legal documents. But many of these creations may be improved if the drafter always starts from a gold standard. When we talk about the future of law, Implementing the Gold Standard, the subject of my column in the May/June 2017 issue of Law Practice Magazine, is a common sense practice for law firms.

No matter what your view of the future, this is an important practice for your law today as well as for the future. What policies do you have in place to make certain your unique documents being created now are preserved as a future gold standard?

The Barron Henley Tour Stops in Oklahoma - Mastering Microsoft Word in The Law Office

What tools do you primarily use in your law office? For most law firms, high up on the list of most-used tools are email and Microsoft Word. Law firms produce documents−lots of documents. Considering how much effort is expended each day producing documents, it is somewhat surprising that many law firms and their support staff are not that skilled at using Microsoft Word. Many of us started out as WordPerfect users. But Word and WordPerfect work entirely differently and  skills with one program do not translate to the other.

One of the very best instructors I have ever seen on Microsoft Word for lawyers is Barron K. Henley with the Affinity Consulting Group. He is coming to Oklahoma this month to teach Mastering Microsoft Word in The Law Office this week. This is a great program to improve office productivity.

Here are the links to see the schedule with all of the topics covered and for registration. 
Tulsa on April 20 http://bit.ly/BHenleyCLETulsa
Oklahoma City on April 21. http://bit.ly/BHenleyCLEOKC

April 21 will also be a live webcast that will not be repeated or rerun. This is the enrollment link for the webinar. http://bit.ly/BHenleyWordWebcast

I already know of at least one lawyer who has enrolled for the webcast with the plan that his legal assistant will be "auditing" the class along with him, learning as well. If you are not an Oklahoma Bar Association member and want to attend the webcast on Friday, you will need to call Renee Montgomery at 405-416-7029 before 1:00 p.m. on Thursday April 20th to enroll.

I interviewed Barron for my column two years ago in Law Practice magazine, Your Document Czar. Go read that if you need any additional motivation.

“You can use Word for twenty-five years and your skill level will be the same as it was approximately 2 weeks into using it,” says Henley. “Many of the features are hidden, so you won’t stumble onto them.”

Digital Edge podcast: The Importance of Legal Writing

Does quality writing really make you a better lawyer? On this episode of The Digital Edge, The Importance of Legal Writing, hosts Sharon Nelson and Jim Calloway discuss legal writing with Gary Kinder, founder of the editing program WordRake. Together, they explore lawyers’ biggest writing errors, why this is important in the  courtroom, and how writing well can help build a positive reputation for a firm. In their conclusion of the episode, they shift the focus to WordRake itself, expanding on what it is, the cost, and why it’s effective. They even include a treat especially for Digital Edge listeners.

Gary Kinder founded the software company WordRake in 2012. The company’s eponymous software is an automated editing program that suggests changes to improve brevity and clarity.

On a personal note, I write a column, a CLE paper or a book chapter almost every week it seems, and consider myself a fairly accomplished writer. I always get some usable edits and suggestions from WordRake. You probably will, too. Enjoy your "free treat."

Big Data, Little Data: It’s All Useful Data

We hear a lot about big data these days. But what about our "little data?" By that I mean the routine information that we discard because we have never thought of trying to capture it. Here's my post on Attorney@Work Big Data, Little Data: It’s All Useful Data where I discuss how using document automation on something routine, like client intake information, can actually be a way to become more efficient and capture client data for valuable reuse later.

My Big Idea: Shall We Cut to the Chase?

If you are wondering how something can be both a cliché and a big new idea, I'll concede that is a good question. Bear with me.

Since 2013, Law Practice Magazine has featured its "Big Ideas" themed issue in July. I was the issue editor on the first issue and, since then, that has been my favorite issue of the magazine. The July/August 2016 "Big Ideas" issue of Law Practice Magazine has been posted. As always, it contains some coverage of some interesting and cutting edge topics in law practice management. If you enjoy this type of content, you can join the ABA Law Practice Division if you are an ABA member or subscribe to the electronic version of the magazine via the free app if you are not.

But today I want to talk about my "Big Idea," which is definitely something that has been discussed in legal circles for some time: how we can improve legal documents?

How do we avoid the trap of a longer document always being viewed as a better document? In my column, Shall We Cut to the Chase?, I ask some questions about our legal documents today. Not only is 20 page legal document more expensive to produce than a 10 page one, but it is also more expensive to consume, whether it is being read by another attorney billing for the time or a corporate executive or general counsel who also has other tasks to accomplish.

As I noted in the column, I was assigned to review a contract with a major technology company. As is common, the first several pages contained the identification of the parties and many, many definitions. I was already tiring before I got to the operative pages of the agreement.

So why would it not be a good idea to put all of the definitions in the final pages of the contract? One could include a provision at the beginning that many of the terms used in the contract are defined in section 10 or a very cautious draftsman could include a list of all the terms that were later defined in section 10 in one long sentence. It seems equally logical to review the language of any needed definitions after the substance of the contract has been absorbed as it does to place the definitions all at the beginning.

Why wouldn’t the law firm associate with a talent of summarizing any legal memorandum in two or three paragraphs be more highly prized than one who could easily crank out a fifty page memo on any obscure topic?

I also think that standardization of many types of industry related contracts could be a great thing for law firm clients. I note some experimentation by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) in this area.

We lawyers have been trained that a legal document should cover almost every conceivable possibility. Going forward that should continue to be true with an added goal of doing so “as concisely as possible.” To end with another cliché, time is money, particularly in the legal profession.

Automated Document Assembly is Critical for Law Firms

Your attention is directed to Choosing a Document Automation System by Marc Lauritsen via AttorneyatWork. I've know Marc for many years and he is a recognized expert in this field. So it is very significant that he has shared his goal-setting checklist with us.

Lawyers are often chided as a group for not responding to technological innovations quickly enough. And while there is undoubtedly some truth to that, it is also important to remember that lawyers are often in the risk mitigation business, especially when preparing legal documents. Complain as you wish, but that is why legal documents are often overly long. Every time a new potential risk is identified, some new standard verbiage gets added into legal documents. That is also the reason why lawyers do not rush into things without careful thought.

Lawyers were early adopters of computers (and dedicated word processors) in the workplace precisely because as soon as these tools were available, it made no business sense to pay a secretary to retype an entire document to include a few edits. Many law firms quickly excelled at using forms, copy and paste, templates and other word processing tools to streamline the creation of documents.

As a lawyer plans for her future career or her law firm's future, it is now as simple as this:

A document automation system allows a law firm to create documents more quickly at a lower cost to clients while reducing the opportunity for errors.

Isn't that really all you need to know to begin the process?

Your Document Czar and Other Big Ideas

The Annual Big Ideas issue of Law Practice Magazine is out. Topics include the inevitability of cloud computing, the Uberization of law, whether our ethical rules stifle innovation, crafting a proper partnership agreement and much more. You can read the articles from the July/August 2015 Law Practice Magazine for free online, but as I have noted in this space before, you probably increase your chances of actually being able to read all of the articles by downloading the Law Practice Mag app so you can read on your favorite mobile device. The app is free to download and the magazine costs $4.99 per issue or $19.99 for an annual subscription.

My "Big Idea" contribution is Your Document Czar I know there is someone in your law firm who is dying to be given the title of czar, but that person is probably not right for this position. Microsoft Word is a powerful tool that is often very frustrating to operate. Law firms deal with complex documents and should be experts in the creation of documents. Unfortunately, for most law firms, the staff is left mostly on their own to cope with both Word and the firm's document creation policies. Why shouldn't one person be designated as the document creation and automation expert? Some great improvements, like templates, can be created by the expert and then shared with others who can make use of the improvement without having to know the nuts and bolts behind its design.

All law firms should be examining how automated document assembly can improve their workflow and save the clients money. Your Document Czar can take charge of that project as well. I interviewed Barron K. Henley, with the Affinity Consulting Group for this column. “You can use Word for 25 years and your skill level will be the same as it was approximately two weeks into using it,” said Henley. “Many of the features are hidden, so you won’t stumble onto them.”

Maybe the appointment of a Document Czar makes sense for your law firm. If you don't believe me, just ask your staff how much they still struggle with Word formatting issues today and how many different templates they use.

Lawyers, Did You Know Your Kindle Can Do This?

(Jim's Note: I don't host guest posts here. So please, PR firms, don't flood my inbox with guest post requests. I delete them all unread anyway. But when Elaine Dowling shared this Kindle tip with me, I decided to make an exception to my rule and share the following. Thank for you for the contribution, Elaine.)

As much as the practice of law relies on PDF documents, there aren’t a lot of good ways to read them comfortably and efficiently.  Frequently, I need to read long, complicated PDF files: a Supreme Court opinion, articles, research, reports, even an appellate brief.  Earlier this week it was a seventy-page stock prospectus.  I needed to be able to mark passages that I would later quote in a brief, and make notes as I went along of important passages, research questions, etc. 

I had two options.  I could send seventy pages to the printer, clear off a spot on my desk and spend two hours hunched over a pile of paper – highlighter and sticky flags in hand; or, I could email the file to my Kindle’s email address via Amazon, have Amazon convert the file from PDF to Kindle’s native format for me (FREE) and read the file while reclining in the comfort of my favorite chair with all of Kindle’s built in reading and notation tools available.  I chose the latter.

Two hours later, I had read the file.  I had highlighted passages and made my notes – all using Kindle’s built in tools.  I plugged my Kindle into my laptop and copied the “My Clippings.txt” file over to the directory where I store that client’s word processing files.  Now, when I write my brief, I don’t have to re-type long passages from the PDF file and hope I catch all my typos.  I can just cut and paste, and I can search the notes file for particular passages or questions I had jotted down while reading. 

Here is how to make this work. 

Every e-ink Kindle has an email address.  To find it, go to “Your Account” at Amazon, then, under Digital Content/Digital Management select “Manage Your Content and Devices”.  Choose the “Your Devices” tab.  Click on the Kindle you wish to use, and the email address for that device should be visible. 

Once you know your Kindle’s email address, you send an email to your Kindle with the PDF file attached and the word CONVERT as the subject line.  Amazon will convert the PDF to kindle format (the conversion isn’t perfect, but it is pretty darn good) and deliver it to your Kindle free over a wifi connection in just a minute or two. If you want it delivered over a 3G connection that Amazon pays for, Amazon will charge you for that.  My seventy-page PDF file the other night cost me 15 cents on my 3G equipped Kindle Touch. 

I have also been able to email a file to the Kindle app on my phone.  I have not been able to do this with either the Kindle cloud reader or Kindle for PC.  I don’t have a Kindle Fire, but it is my understanding that the Fire runs the same app as my Android phone, so I would expect that this will work with a Kindle Fire. 

A lot of the tech tricks I read strike me as just another way to justify our toys.  This is a trick that I use fairly regularly, because I think it is a better, more comfortable, easier and more productive way of reading large PDF files than any other I have tried. 

Elaine M. Dowling

www.dowlinglawoffice.com

Microsoft Office 365 for Lawyers podcast

So what do you know about Microsoft Office 365? It is a way to convince you to get Office with an annual subscription payment instead of buying the software when you choose, right? It is in the cloud, right? Well, you may know some truths about Office 365, but you probably don't know "the whole truth."

This month, Ben M. Schorr, author of Microsoft Office 365 for Lawyers (and a ton of other ABA books about Microsoft tools as they are used by lawyers) joins Sharon Nelson and me for the Digital Edge Podcast, Microsoft Office 365 for Lawyers is Here! Trust me. You may not know all that you think you know about Office 365 and, since this appears to ne Microsoft's plan for the future, you do need to know about it.