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Turbo-Charge Your Table of Authorities

By Tracey Baetzel
November 26, 2007

Does anyone in your firm still use ledger sheets and a calculator for computations rather than set up a spreadsheet? Absolutely not! Does anyone in your firm create footnotes manually instead of using the 'Insert Footnote' feature in your word processing program or, worse, hand redline a document? Never! Using these old methods despite software that is taken for granted today seems, well, inconceivable. However, if your litigation attorneys and secretaries are not using productivity-enhancing software to prepare their tables of authorities ('TOAs'), they are missing out on a major opportunity to streamline their production of briefs.

In spite of features that WordPerfect and Microsoft Word offer for high-end document production, these programs still don't accommodate a few critical nuances required in complex legal documents. Developing such esoteric capabilities is generally past the point of diminishing returns for large vendors where the legal market is not the entire product focus. After all, the legal market is a blip on the radar in the universe of word processing users, especially for Microsoft. However, this doesn't let law firms and legal departments off the hook. We still have to figure out how to enable lawyers and secretaries to produce properly formatted legal documents at a reasonable cost.

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