Building a Table of Authorities in Microsoft Word with Joe Dudek
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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2024
- Attorney Joe Dudek shows you how he automatically creates Tables of Authorities using features in Microsoft Word. Learn about:
- Revealing hidden text and codes in Word
- Creating repeatable short and long form citations
- Speeding up the cleaning of citation errors in legal briefs
This is the BEST instructional video on Table of Authorities and Citations of ANY on UA-cam, EVER! I think I've watched every UA-cam ever uploaded. I've made so many mistakes as a result of following those videos that I've had to abandon my paper and start anew. If I make a mistake while following the instructions of this video, I know how to correct them because Joe Dudek purposely set up scenarios to replicate mistakes, issues, and errors one may encounter. Again, great video! Thank you VERY much!
This is great. I've been wanting to learn this for years. Excellent explanations, and I'll be able to rewatch and pause and try it on my own practice document.
Absolutely the best instructional video on TOA that I've encountered, because you addressed some advanced issues that most videos simply don't cover. I'm a legal secretary with a very strong word processing background. One correction in the presentation: in the Q&A portion, when referring to the issue of TOA text running into the page number, both Joe and Joshua referred to a "hard return" (the Shift + Enter shortcut key combination). That's a misnomer, as it actually is referred to as a "soft return". In comparison, a hard return is the Ctrl + Enter combination, which yields a completely new paragraph and is represented by the pilcrow (paragraph symbol).
Absolute BEST training on the subject I've encountered. Thank you so much for sharing this!
I worked as a legal night word processor in a major international corporate law firm in Houston for many years. This is an excellent presentation, and I have seen quite a few people, either in a work setting, or tutorials like this on Word, where they do not have the show/hide, or the button that looks like a paragraph, turned on. I ALWAYS use that feature which reveals the hidden characters and functions, as it is too easy to delete a TOA marker, a character, a tab, etc. with it turned off. I honestly don't see how anyone can use Word efficiently, ESPECIALLY for a merge doc, a TOC or TOA, without it on! I am still dependent on it, and still use it, even for a simple letter. It just makes sense. Also the long and short forms of case cites in TOAs. Extremely informative. Thank you!
Elizabeth - You have me all kinds of curious, what is a "legal night word processor?" Do attorneys in big law use word processors to format everything so they don't have to? I can see this being INCREDIBLY time saving, and increase revenue.
@@LN-bg8hd Well let's see. I worked for very large, international corporate law firms. For instance, there were over 200 attorneys in our Houston office alone. They had offices in New York, Dallas, Houston, Austin, London, Shanghai, Paris, etc. The legal secretaries would handle the correspondence, doing service lists (distribution of copies to everyone involved in the lawsuit), printing all the labels, etc. They would handle the mail and court filings. Anything over 10 pages was sent to the word processing department. They had a day shift and a night shift for the word processors. We did all the typing, scanning, converting, editing, transcribing, and marking their briefs for table of contents and table of authorities (all the case cites that are referenced in a legal summary judgment motions or briefs. We had a litigation, appellate, labor law, corporate, public law, and energy department. So you can see the huge demand for people who can quickly and accurately edit and get those documents ready for court. We worked downtown from 5:30 to 1:00 am. Day shift was 8:30 - 5:00. Anything over 10 pages, was sent to the word processing department. What the day shift didn't finish, we did. If you know anything about corporate law, the attorneys are always working late into the night if they have a multi million filling due the next morning. It's very demanding and you can't get upset. Have to be able to work well under extreme pressure. I personally loved it, but when I had a baby, I started working remotely from home doing the same thing, only with medical stuff. The job I did now pays anywhere from about $80k to $100k in big cities. (I didn't make quite that much but close).
@@ElizabethF2222 - I went to your profile to see if you had any content. Sounds like you know a LOT about word processing legal documents. I am a fairly newly licensed att'y and have mainly been at public interest and nonprofits so trying to figure out how to become more efficient.
Tech keeps changing... I can't keep up. (I am officially old.)
"A long-suffering combatant against Word"? Wow!! A comrade. Perfect. But you fight on without me, brother. I almost lost a friend over this. Seriously. He thought my preference for Wordperfect was an "affectation." He didn't talk to me for weeks. And when I finally broke the silence in a meeting in the conference room, he said, "It isn't you; it's me." I said, "Thank God. I thought it was your health!" He replied, "No, it's that thing you have with Wordperfect. It's such an affectation. Why can't you be like the rest of us?" I said, "You're right, Bill. It IS you." Nowadays, we laugh our asses off. Years later, I've come around. What other choice is there?
I'll be a WordPerfect fan FOREVER! But, yeah, I've come around too (and I'm a paralegal).
I used the short forms Dudek shows us here in a TOA I had to do recently, just broke it down to the name e.g. Brown or the Statute e.g. § 1105. I noticed it would miss or skip some and couldn't tell if it did it on purpose. I never think of microsoft as that smart, so it misses some.
Every appeal brief I have I come back to this video because I forget how it works every time.
loved it!
Thank you