Advanced Word Skills Training for Lawyers

Learn these top 3 Advanced Word Skills which are guaranteed to save lawyers time and produce Word documents easily, quickly, and without errors.

You may be spending a disproportionate amount of time on your Microsoft Word documents that you simply cannot charge for (or perhaps you can, and you are!). Fixing errors and formatting can be frustrating, especially if you’re working in other people’s documents. If that’s the case, you have little control over how the document is constructed and often they may not work as you would expect.

Many law firms are losing experienced support staff, more lawyers are working from home on their own, and many more seem to be setting up their own firm.

In this digital world now forced upon us by the pandemic, it is important that your continuing competence (CPD) includes a most frequently-used application - Microsoft Word. We feel it’s about time relevant Advanced Word Skills training is offered to help you. Why Advanced Word Skills are important to have

Advanced skills mean less time is spent on formatting and your drafting is faster. We’re often told that lawyers type and write as they think, and it’s important to get the first draft prepared quickly.

As you know, your documents will go through a number of iterations and versions, with changes made not only by you but by your opponents. Using best practice for your document construction (ie how a document is built up from the template) will also make your opponents’ life easier too.

And all of that will make you look great! After all, nobody likes poorly formatted documents.

Course Content: top 3 errors people make in documents and why they are bad!

In any training course you need to have some context so you can quickly learn and apply your new skills. In this module, we will demonstrate to you what happens when:

• Show/Hide. Most people don’t use the Show/Hide button and some don’t even know it’s there. This button reveals formatting marks, such as tabs, spaces, paragraph marks, among others. It might sound unimportant, but these hidden marks are often why document formatting goes awry and large gaps are left on your page.
• Pasting Incorrectly. It’s not just CTRL V. In fact most people are not aware that you cannot use CTRL V shortcut or even ALT CTRL V to paste text into a document correctly. Pasting Text Only is very important but sometimes even doing that will not give you the result you are looking for. It’s not how you paste, but where you paste.
• Fixing Styles. When you get a wrong number, you don’t need to delete anything. You need to change the Style, and changing a Style is simply a matter of selecting the correct Style from the Style Gallery. In a good template, the gallery will be concise and clear what should be used to style your documents.

If this sounds too advanced, then fear not. The live demonstration and support will make everything clear.

Course Content: you will learn your top 3 fixes to make you look great

Now that you understand how frustrations and errors are caused, we’ll show you the right way to format your document. You won’t learn everything there is to know as Microsoft Word is a large and complex application. But you will have a great starting point on your journey of gaining Advanced Word Skills.

More importantly, the top 3 fixes we will give you are guaranteed to save you time in the future.

• Turn on your Show/Hide Button – Lots of people will probably have worked on your document before you, and their skills may be lacking. Turning on the Show/Hide button reveals the formatting marks that have been put into the document and will reveal why there are unwanted gaps on your page. It also allows you to paste text so that you never get the wrong number on your paragraph.
• Use a good template with Styles that work – The ground floor of a good Word document is a good template. If you are working on a document that is old, originated somewhere else or has not been created properly, the Style Gallery will be cluttered. This makes it impossible for you to know what Style to apply to get the number you want on your paragraph. If the template is a good template, you will be able to see what you should use and always produce accurate documents.
• Follow best practice principles in Word – Word is like any other software package; you must follow its rules or you will not get the result you want. While there may be a lot of workarounds in Word which can seem helpful, they will usually end up breaking the document. Following best practice principles in Word – doing it properly from the outset and following Word’s rules – will mean your document is stable and error-free right to the end of your deal.

Your Q&A

We have set aside 15 minutes at the end of the session to answer your questions, but we are not going to restrict this time if there are lots of questions. You can feel free to leave but it may beneficial for you to hear other people’s questions and problems they have.

We are often asked about Track Changes, automatic cross-referencing and cover pages. It's impossible to answer all questions in a short space but we can develop further courses once we have a good bank of questions from you.

Don’t miss out

Reserve your place now and will share the conference link with you in the joining instructions in good time.

Once registered you will have access to a recording of the training course.