Legal Tech Mastery: Microsoft Word

A pre-recorded streaming VIDEO replay of one session from the January 2024 webcast, Legal Tech Mastery: Streamline Your Practice with Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Tools for Managing Remote Teams Efficiently.

Microsoft Word^® Power Tips for Legal Users

In the modern practice of law, most lawyers handle some or, sometimes, even all of their own word processing. Some attorneys have always typed their own documents, and others are increasingly looking to become self-reliant in that regard. Many small firms cannot cost-justify hiring word processing support staff, and medium and larger firms often have only one support staff person supporting anywhere from three to seven lawyers (which means that lawyers have to get in line and wait if they need help). However, due to the complex formatting often required with legal documents, legal users find Microsoft Word^® difficult to navigate even though it is often the primary tool used to produce work products. Using Word and “clicking around” provides little improvement and no insight. This session is designed by a lawyer for lawyers to specifically address these realities.

In this interactive session, Barron Henley starts by teaching you how to fix the common legal drafting problems plaguing many attorneys when using Microsoft Word^® and how to avoid these issues in the future.

Learn dozens of tips and techniques you can put into practice immediately. Even if you think you already know Word well, you learn new features and tools throughout this presentation.

• Prevent random format shifting while you edit a Word document
• Remove hidden information (metadata) from Word files before sending them to opposing counsel
• Modify Word’s programmatical default settings so they work better for legal drafting
• Easily capture clauses, phrases, and other segments of text into a clause library for efficient document building
• Copy and paste text from one document to another without making a formatting mess
• Use correct method to hold headings, acknowledgments, signature blocks (and the like) together to avoid awkward page breaks (spoiler alert—it does NOT involve page breaks or extra hard returns)
• Set up single or multi-level automatic paragraph numbering schemes that work.
• Set up complex page numbering—turning it on or off in the middle of a document, starting it in the middle of a document, and changing formats (for example from Romanettes to Arabic).
• Use track changes and comments to indicate proposed changes; and use the compare feature to identify the differences between two versions of a document

About the Speaker

Barron K. Henley, Affinity Consulting Group / Columbus, OH

Barron K. Henley, Esq., is one of the founding partners of Affinity Consulting Group, a legal technology consulting firm focused on automating and streamlining law firms and legal departments. He earned his B.S./B.A. (marketing and economics) and J.D. from The Ohio State University and is a member of the American, Ohio and Columbus Bar Associations, and the Worthington Estate Planning Council. He is a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a member of Ohio Supreme Court Commission on Technology and the Courts, and a member of both the ABA Law Practice Management and the Real Property Trust and Estate Law (“RPTE”) Sections, Co-Chair of the Joint Law Practice Management Group, a Board Member for the ABA TECHSHOW, and a Director on the Columbus Bar Services Board. Mr. Henley heads Affinity’s document assembly/automation and software training departments. He is also an expert in launching new law firms, overhauling existing firms, and documenting and re-engineering law firm processes. Finally, Mr. Henley teaches continuing legal education (CLE) classes throughout the U.S. and Canada, covering a wide variety of topics related to law practice management, technology, and ethics.