Legal Tech Mastery: Streamline Your Practice with Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Tools for Managing Remote Teams Efficiently

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

Do you find Microsoft Word® frustrating? Of course, you do! Get dozens of Word tips and techniques for controlling the complex formatting required in legal instruments.

Discover how to organize Microsoft Outlook, improve its interface, and use hidden tools to better manage the high volume of emails in your law practice.

Take advantage of your opportunity to get help and answers to your specific Microsoft queries from a nationally acclaimed legal technology expert.

Learn how to manage a distributed workforce efficiently and securely.

Join nationally acclaimed legal technology expert Barron K. Henley for this full-day CLE, with invaluable practice management training presented in three instructional sessions.

Microsoft Word® Power Tips for Legal Users

• 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

Using Outlook to Organize and Manage High-Volume Email in a Law Office

• Improve Outlook’s default settings for use in a law office
• Customize Outlook’s interface so you can see more email at once
• Track and flag important email for follow-up
• Store email (and attachments) outside of Outlook so others in your office can find them when appropriate
• Efficiently organize your email by case or matter
• Store and easily reuse email responses to common questions received from clients and prospective clients
• Configure Outlook to notify you about important email but ignore the rest

Using Technology to Manage a Distributed Workforce and Work Together Seamlessly

• The surprising benefits of remote workers
• What you need for practice portability
• The ethical and security issues related to protecting client data when that data is being accessed from outside a traditional office space
• Recommendations for improving communication, keeping everyone connected, collaboration, and remote employee management
• Extending your cybersecurity umbrella to home workers
• Configuring an efficient and secure home office
• Building a reliable electronic client filing system that is accessible from anywhere
• Technologies that enable lawyers to draft even the most complex documents without assistance, even if they don’t know anything about the word processor
• Digital signature platforms
• Case management and legal accounting systems that provide unlimited remote access
• How to eliminate the need for traditional, on-premises file servers that typically provide no or poor remote access

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.