It’s 4:40 and the filing is due at five. You glance down the Table of Authorities and there it is: ABC Corp. v. XYZ Ltd., page 9. You flip to page 9. It isn’t there.
(This happens to careful people. It happens to very careful people.)
Some cut-and-paste problems are easy to spot: another client’s name left behind, or formatting that doesn’t match the new document. This one isn’t. The cause is usually nothing you did today. It rode in on text recycled from an older brief, and it brought hidden baggage along.
Reusing good writing is sensible. (Nobody should draft the same argument from scratch twice.) The catch is that some of what travels with a paste is invisible, and it can quietly undermine a Table of Authorities.
This post is for whoever is holding the file when that happens, whether you pasted the text yourself or inherited it from someone who did. You’ll see what’s hiding in recycled text and learn a short routine that keeps it out of your filing.
The trouble with “hidden” text is … it’s hidden
Briefs that have a Table of Contents and a Table of Authorities carry a special kind of hidden text: field codes. Every citation you marked for the TOA has a code behind it, and the codes begin with the letters TA. The field codes that drive an automatic TOC work the same way.
Word hides them for a good reason. Nobody wants a brief that prints with curly-bracketed codes scattered through it. (Press Show/Hide, the paragraph symbol on the Home tab, or Alt+F9, and you can see what Word has been keeping out of sight.)
Here’s the catch. When you drag your mouse or keyboard cursor across a paragraph to copy it, you can’t account for something you can’t see. What you paste, or don’t paste, can throw off a TOC or TOA fast. A turned-on Show/Hide lets you catch it before the deadline does.
But if you can’t see your hidden text, you can’t account for it while you’re dragging the mouse or keyboard cursor over it, preparing to drop your oh-so-masterful prose into another document. And what you paste—or don’t paste—can screw up a Table of Contents or Table of Authorities faster than … well, anything I can think of.
Why fixing it afterward is a trap
Once the codes are in your new brief, getting them to behave can turn into a full-time job. Changing how a TOC looks is one thing (see how to modify a TOC), and so is tweaking the styles in a TOA. Fixing what’s in either one is a different job entirely.
Clear Formatting won’t help, either. These are field codes, not formatting codes, so the tricks for stripping misbehaving formatting don’t apply here.
That’s why prevention beats repair. Microsoft’s favorite remedy for most problems is a reboot, and the same idea works here. (Not your PC. It won’t come to that.) Remove the codes from the pasted text, ideally before it ever lands in your new document, and start from a clean slate. Sometimes starting over is both faster and easier.
Setting yourself up to succeed
These steps are for Word for Windows. (I’ll put alternate instructions in for Mac as appropriate.) Before you drop a large block of text from another document into your current one, do three things.
#1. Open a blank document as a staging area
Do your code-stripping in a blank document, not in the brief you’re building. That way there’s less chance of accidentally removing something essential from the rest of your work.
The routine is simple: copy from the old document, paste into the staging document, strip the codes, cut the clean text, and paste it into your new brief.
Never paste old text straight into the new brief. (That’s the legal-writing equivalent of feeding Gizmo after midnight.)
#2. Make hidden text visible
You can’t delete what you can’t see. Show/Hide usually reveals everything, but Word lets you switch individual items on or off, and I can’t see how your copy is set up. So check (in Word for Windows):
- Click the File tab, then Options.
- Click Display on the left.
- Under “Always show these formatting marks on the screen,” make sure Hidden text is checked.
On the Mac, go to Word > Preferences > View:
Now you’ll see the TOA and TOC codes whether Show/Hide is on or off. You can turn this back off when you’re done.
#3. Check your paste settings
Stay in Options (Word for Windows) and click Advanced on the left. Scroll down to Cut, copy and paste.
- Pasting between documents: I recommend the default, Keep Source Formatting.
- Pasting between documents when style definitions conflict: I recommend Merge Formatting.
Skip Keep Text Only on either setting. It can strip the underlines and italics out of your citations, and restoring those at deadline is nobody’s idea of a good afternoon.
You can also override these settings on any single paste. Use the dropdown under the Paste button on the Home tab instead of CTRL-V. (If you’ve never seen it, here’s the lowdown.)
On the Mac, unfortunately, there’s no directly analogous setting for pasting preferences. You can, however, use the Paste button dropdown to control how the text is pasted in.
Strip the TOA codes
You’ve found that persuasive passage from an old brief and copied it. (Go ahead and admire it for a moment. It’s good writing.) Now paste it into your blank staging document, not your new brief.
With hidden text showing, you’ll see codes in curly brackets that start with TA and run through the end of the citation markup. Those are what you’re about to remove.
Find the TOA codes and replace them with nothing
- Press Ctrl+H to open Find and Replace. If that does something else on your computer, the shortcut may have been reassigned. Click Replace on the far right of the Home tab instead.
- In the Find what box, type
^19 TA(yes, there’s a space between 9 and T). That searches for TOA fields specifically. - Leave Replace with empty. Word treats that as replacing with nothing.
- Click Replace All.
The citations stay. The hidden codes behind them go.
If you need to clear every kind of field
Click More at the bottom of the box to expand it, then Special, then Field. Word puts ^d in Find what (or, you can just type it in directly). That finds any field, not just TOA codes, so page numbers and cross-references go too.
In a short snippet in your staging document, you probably have no other fields worth keeping, so Replace All is fine. If you do, click Find Next and review them one at a time. Either way, this is the reason to do it in the staging document and with hidden text showing: you can see what you’re deleting. Don’t Replace All with ^d on your full brief.
Move the clean text over
Press CTRL-A to select everything in the staging document and CTRL-X to cut it. Switch to your brief and paste, either with CTRL-V for your default paste options or from the Paste button’s dropdown if you want to choose the type yourself.
Move the text first, mark citations last
One more thing: wait until you’ve finished moving big blocks of text around before you re-mark citations. Mark first and you’ll mark twice. (The marking itself is a different post.)
The order that saves you the most grief:
- Move your text into the new brief through the staging document.
- Finish the big cut-and-paste work.
- Re-mark your citations.
- Build the Table of Authorities.
- Turn on Show/Hide and check the table against the brief, page by page.
Briefs are hard enough without the surprises. People will keep recycling good writing, and they should. The routine above just means the old brief’s baggage stays behind. If the person who pastes isn’t the person who rebuilds the Table of Authorities, send this to them. Kindly. And if you’d rather avoid recycling altogether, start from a template.
