Courses from Legal Office Guru
Legal Office Guru offers online courses in Microsoft Office especially for lawyers and other legal professionals. Get more in-depth learning from Legal Office Guru by signing up for a course today!
Basic Word Skills for Legal Professionals
Want to save time and frustration in Microsoft Word? Still struggling to make the transition from WordPerfect? This course is custom-designed for the legal professional, whether you've just begun working in Microsoft Word or are looking to skill-up to the intermediate level. Soon, you'll be proficient enough to produce a Word document from start to finish!
Here's what we'll cover:
- Understanding the Microsoft Word Ribbon interface
- Using Navigation and Views to customize your Word experience
- Creating, saving, opening and editing documents
- Character/font, paragraph, page and document formatting
- Finishing and printing your document (including getting rid of metadata)
- Formatting and printing envelopes & labels
- Dealing with sections, headers & footers, and page numbering
- Basic automatic paragraph numbering
- Checking spelling & grammar
- Using Document Inspector to strip out metadata
- Printing and PDFing your document
Pleading Paper Course
If you're required to use pleading paper (hello, California!), you've been especially let down by Microsoft. Whatever happened to that interactive wizard? It's GONE.
The bad news is, I can't bring that back. The good news is, I can teach you how to successfully work with Word's pleading paper templates (and even make your own custom template)! And for those of you not on the latest version of Word, I can even give you access to older templates Microsoft has already discontinued.
The course contains two information-packed lessons on:
- Where to find ready-made pleading paper templates for your area (Microsoft is not always the best source!)
- The two different kinds of pleading paper formats, and which to use when
- How to modify a standard template without creating a mess
- Those vertical lines: how to get them placed just so
- These things have WHAT kind of tabs? (Don't worry, I'll explain it!)
- Getting your text and numbers aligned perfectly (math alert!)
Assemble Documents Faster
If you've got text or formats you use over and over again, you can't afford NOT to learn three Microsoft Word features: Quick Parts, AutoText, and Templates. Leveraging these features in everyday work can help you get documents (and yourself!) out the door faster!
This course will give you an overview of each feature, such as:
- Quick Parts: Saving reusable text
- Quick Parts versus AutoText: When to use one versus the other
- Building reusable headers, footers and watermarks
- Creative uses for auto-updating dates in Quick Parts
- Autonumbering discovery, affirmative defenses, and other headings
- Using Bookmarks and Cross-References to make updating documents automatic
- Embedding ASK and FILL-IN fields into templates to speed document creation
- How to build your own time-saving templates
Brief Builder's Workshop
Legal briefs (whether at the appellate or trial court level) are a document type all their own. And there are as many formatting and content requirements as there are courts! Fortunately, most of these requirements follow some predictable patterns that, once you understand them, enable you to use Word features to meet those requirements with ease.
This course specializes in those legal-specific features like Table of Authorities that get short shrift in generic Word user manuals. Brief Builder's Workshop covers:
- The most common mistakes you may be making in your Table of Authorities, and how to fix them
- How to interpret and edit TOA hidden text to fix a broken TOA
- Adjusting the formatting of a Table of Authorities or Table of Contents so it sticks even after you refresh the table
- Formatting your page numbering for the distinct brief sections (1 vs. i vs. C-1 of 1)
Track Changes Plus
If your hands aren't the only ones in your documents, you've probably run into some collaboration problems. Sure, there will always be differences of opinion about what to say and how to say it, but you don't have to put up with technical issues on top of that. How do you track and correctly attribute various authors' changes and comments? How do you track the document's editing history? And how can you be sure your final document doesn't contain any potentially compromising metadata?
This course on effectively using Microsoft Word in document collaboration is centered around the Review tab, which contains not only Track Changes but other collaborative editing tools you might not know about:
- Marking edits and insert comments with Track Changes
- Showing, hiding, and printing tracked changes
- Reviewing and dealing with others' edits
- Restricting others' edits to just the text you want them to edit
- Comparing two versions to produce a redline/legal blackline
- Scrubbing out metadata before sending your document out
Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Word Styles
Frustrated with Word formatting? Chances are it's because you don't understand Word's underlying formatting engine: Styles. Having a working knowledge of Styles can slash your editing time and produce a document that just plain works better.
In The New Legal Normal, we're all being forced to do more in less time and with less staff support. Knowing how to use this high-leverage feature in Word could mean getting work product out the door faster and with less frustration!
Learn how using Styles intelligently can help you:
- Make global formatting changes with just a few clicks
- Modify one Style and affect multiple Styles down the "cascade"
- Permanently fix those ugly blue Cambria headings
- Diagnose and fix persistent formatting problems
- Structure your document so you can use features like the Navigation Pane and automated Tables of Contents