Admit it: you repeat yourself.  A lot.

Oh, you don’t think you do.  But if you work in a law office, you’re probably constantly going back to old documents, picking up bits and pieces of text to drop into your latest magnum opus.

Stop doing that!

For one thing, it’s just so inefficient.  Even worse, you’re constantly in danger of forgetting to edit something client-specific when you do all that cutting-and-pasting.  (Do you really want to repeat that time you forgot to change “he” to “she” in the Notary Acknowledgement and your client had to correct you before she signed her name?)

Here’s a better solution: Quick Parts.

Quick Parts (in Word and Outlook) allows you to save text as an easily-accessible building block for future use.  Think about how handy it would be to have a whole personalized gallery of:

  • Certificates of Service (ECF, postal service, combination)
  • Signature blocks (pleadings, contracts, letters, etc.)
  • Notary acknowledgements (personal, corporate, etc.)
  • Attorney-client privilege/work product stamps
  • Custom headers/footers
  • Whatever else you can think of

Trust me, it’s worth the few minutes you spend collecting the texts you use repeatedly, “genericizing” them a bit, then saving them as Quick Parts.  Document assembly will become that much easier the next time … and every time.

Here, I’ll show you how:

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This content is part of a course

What you’ve learned here is just a small part of my Assemble Documents Faster course, where you can learn all sorts of skills for creating and editing documents faster, such as Quick Parts, Autotext, and automatic paragraph numbering with cross-referencing. Click here for more information.

Deborah Savadra

I spend an inordinate amount of my time playing with computers and attempting to explain technology to lawyers and law office staff. It's not always easy, but someone's got to do it.

But, seriously, I'm a law firm software trainer by trade with nearly 30 years of experience in and around law firms and their technology. This blog is my attempt to spread the word about better and more efficient ways to use Microsoft Office in a legal practice context.

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