Microsoft Word in the Law Office and Document Automation (2016)

 

Total Credits: 3.0 Skills

 

Conquer Word formatting and styles to save time and create better legal documents

• Document Assembly and Automation for Your Practice

• Better Methods for Drafting Legal Documents

Carefully crafted model documents and templates are critical for most practice areas. They help prevent malpractice, increase profitability and are a primary method for transferring knowledge to others in your firm. This program will show you how to find the best of what your firm has created in the past. You’ll learn the rules for consolidating your intellectual capital into usable templates. Learn about the spectrum of automation tools demonstrated from the amazing things your word processor is already capable of, from simple Word functionality to document assembly applications like HotDocs.

For document-intensive and transactional areas of practice, improving drafting speed and accuracy directly impacts the bottom line while improving client satisfaction.

A. Legal Drafting Methodologies

B. Drafting Legal Documents Using Templates

C. Reducing Drafting Errors & Controlling Staff Work Product

D. Commercial Drafting Systems

E. Forms Practice

F. Automating Your Document Drafting: Advantages & Pitfalls
 

One of the most potent ways to improve the bottom line of a document-intensive practice is to improve efficiency. You can achieve this via subscription drafting systems (which are typically practice-area specific) and/or building a drafting system from your own documents. We’ll discuss the pros, cons and options for both approaches.

 

Topics include:

• Problems associated with creating new documents by saving old ones as a new file name and making changes

• Subscription drafting systems – what you need to know and who the big players are

• The important differences between templates and documents

• How to build your best content into intelligent, annotated templates

• How to incorporate the high-end functionality of Microsoft Word into your templates so they are effortless to edit

• Automation options from the functionality built into Word to document assembly programs like HotDocs

 

Speaker:

 

Barron K. Henley, Esq.