If you’ve ever typed a really long set of discovery answers/objections, you’ve seen language like this:
“[Party] objects to this request on the grounds that it is vague, ambiguous, immaterial, irrelevant, not reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence …”
In fact, every attorney I know has his/her own boilerplate discovery objections — full paragraphs containing every possible objection one can make to a discovery request.
You don’t want to type that over and over and over again for 37 different discovery requests, do you?
Good. I don’t want you to, either. So I’m going to show you how to get out of it. Without quitting your job.
There’s this nifty little feature in Word called AutoText that works sort of like an autofiller like you’d see on a web page — you know, you start typing your name, and somehow the form offers to fill in the rest?
What’s helpful about Word’s AutoText feature is that you can define your own entries. So if there’s a long phrase you don’t want to have to type repeatedly (like the one above), you can just type the first few letters and wait for Word to “suggest” the remainder of it. Hit Enter and — voila! — the entire phrase pops in.
Let’s check this out in action:
(Note: to view this full-screen, click the button in the lower-right-hand corner of the video player.)
So, what phrases or sentences do you see repeated in the documents you prepare?
Note: For those of you now working with the ribbon-based versions of Word (2007 or 2010), I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is, AutoText (while it still technically exists) doesn’t work like this anymore, so the whole “start typing and Word will fill in the rest” thing is gone. (Ed.: Okay, apparently, I’m wrong about that. Which I’m perfectly happy about!) The good news is, AutoText has been incorporated into a new feature called Quick Parts. Click here for a video tutorial on defining entries for and using Quick Parts.
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