Lawyer Productivity

Using the Heading Styles in a Word document instead of directly formatting all your headings gives you access to a lot of functionality, including the ability to include a fully automated Table of Contents in your document with just a few clicks.

Working long hours at home means the gap between your office chair and your La-Z-Boy is as thin as a sheet of legal-size paper. So, if you’re reading your last brief and it’s just "all work and no play make Jack a dull boy" over and over, you ...

According to the International Legal Technology Association, almost half of all legal purchases of imaging, scanning or optical character recognition is made by small law firms.* If you’re among them, congratulate yourself for making a smart ...

What writers need is a method they can use to create a first draft. Of course, lots of magic happens during revision of that draft, when writers refine their thoughts further. That’s when they apply Word styles. But they need a first draft to ...

Microsoft’s idea of attractive headings doesn’t suit most legal documents. But you can permanently change your default heading styles so you can start every new document with headings in the right typeface and font color. One of the first things ...

At first glance, communications may seem like a bygone problem for lawyers today. Haven’t smartphones made it easier to stay in constant contact with your clients? It’s true that smartphones offer you more mobility and instant, real-time ...

To save time and labor in writing emails, consider composing templates or boilerplates that can easily be inserted into new emails and email messages you respond to. That’s the premise and promise of Ant Text, an add-in for Outlook and Outlook ...

Lawyers are essentially professional writers. Last year, I saw my friend and New York Times best-selling author Scott Sigler speak at Phoenix Comicon about how he managed to be a prolific writer and handle the business side of being a ...

David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity method has been wildly popular since its debut in 2001. "Capture" is one of the most important steps in the GTD process, and nothing captures ideas faster than pocket notebooks. I know, Evernote ...

Learning how to first identify and then modify the existing Styles in your document is a good first step to learning how Styles work in Microsoft Word. Master a few basics and you can quickly make global changes to elements like headings, page ...