#540: Microsoft Word Rules Every Lawyer Needs to Know, with Barron Henley

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett (00:12): 

Hi, I am Stephanie. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:13): 

And I’m Zack. And this is episode 540 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I talk with Barron Henley of Affinity Consulting about how you can become an actual power user of Microsoft Word. And the answer may surprise you. 

  

Stephanie Everett (00:28): 

Yeah, I think a lot of people think they know how to use Word because we’re lawyers and that’s what we use to do our drafting. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:37): 

And I know styles, I’ve changed styles. I know how to turn on the paragraph button so I can do a carriage return versus a page break, or I know that that’s not power user. 

  

Stephanie Everett (00:57): 

And some people may be saying, I don’t know that. What does that mean? 

  

Zack Glaser (01:01): 

And just because you can redline a document and share it or make sure that you’re making comments, that’s great. That is really, really good. We need to be using everything that Microsoft Word is, but not, we don’t need to be using it as Barron says. Like a typewriter. 

  

Stephanie Everett (01:19): 

Exactly. And I think the good test is if you go up and change the font or that use that B or I or U Little button, the you’re probably messing up your document. You don’t realize it. So he’s going to teach you the better way to do that. 

  

Zack Glaser (01:34): 

Yeah. Well, so this one is probably going to be a little bit more effective. If you watch the video, Barron shares his screen. We do our best to try to tell you what’s going on. I think a lot of people that use Word, we’ll be able to follow us in audio, but we have this up in video format on Spotify and we have it up in video format on our YouTube channel, which is Stephanie. We started pushing that a couple months ago, and it’s really starting to take off. 

  

Stephanie Everett (02:04): 

It’s a lot of fun. And so obviously this episode lends itself nicely to that because it is cool sometimes though to be able to show people what you’re talking about. And this is one of those tools, I mean, we said it before, if you’re a lawyer, you’re probably using Word Daily, hourly, so you really do need to know how to use it, and Barron’s going to show you these amazing tips to actually use it much more effectively. 

  

Zack Glaser (02:33): 

And I will say, I actually recorded this with Barron twice. I had a mess up with my audio the first time and the first time we did it, I wasn’t super familiar with what he was doing. When he told me what he was going to be able to do, literally I was like, bullshit, bullshit, Barron. No way. There’s no way on God’s green earth that you can make a bulletproof document that the formatting will not have any problems. And happily, I was proven wrong. 

  

Stephanie Everett (03:00): 

Yeah, I know. This is Barron and his finest in his element and he gets pretty fired up. I mean, there’s probably no one in the world more excited about crafting legal documents in Word than Barron. So I think our listeners are in for a treat, and even more so if you go and watch the videos, like Zack said, check it out, learn a few things. I think you will. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:27): 

Yeah. Well now here is my conversation with Barron. 

  

Barron Henley (03:31): 

Hi, I’m Barron Henley. I am a recovering lawyer and one of the founding partners of Affinity Consulting. Let’s see, my responsibilities include directing our educational efforts. I do a tremendous amount of core production tool. We call it training, which is word outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Acrobat, that kind of stuff. And I’m also an automation geek, so I still do quite a bit of document automation projects using a platform called Hot Docs. And that’s pretty much it. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:06): 

I mean, I guess that’s pretty much it for our introduction here. There’s a lot of stuff we could say about you. Barron, thanks for being with me. I always appreciate chatting with you. Obviously we’re here talking about your experience with automating documents in Microsoft Word and the pain in the blank that comes along with trying to get those things automated. But before we start, I’m going to have you share your screen with us to show us what’s going on as we go. And for those of you who are listening to us in just the audio version, you can catch the shared screen on our YouTube channel or on Spotify. They also have a video version of this and that should be helpful. But I think this type of thing, the pains that Microsoft Word has is pretty common. I think people will be able to follow along anyway. So yeah, Barron, we’ve talked about this a couple of times and you’ve told me that you can set up a document from the get-go that is not going to have those hiccups that happen with automation, and I think everybody’s felt them. Something goes to the next page, something your formatting doesn’t follow all this crap. And I’ve gotten used to just going through my documents and kind of knowing where they are, but I don’t have to do that. 

  

Barron Henley (05:44): 

You don’t, you don’t. So Microsoft Word unfortunately conceals what users need to know in order to set up documents so they work properly, which is generally why everyone is perpetually frustrated with it because you can use it for years and years and years and not stumble upon all of these little hidden Easter eggs and features that have always been present in Word but are well hidden or simply. There are no buttons for many of the features that you would need to use in order to control a document. So through many years of experimentation, mostly through the document automation stuff, because if you build a 400 page template that produces a 40 page document, when 360 pages of irrelevant language are discarded during the assembly process, if you haven’t set it up exactly right, you’re going to have so many formatting issues on the backend that you’ll want to just throw your computer out the window. So when we encountered that, we kind of had to figure out, well, there’s got to be some way to do this. And there was zero help generally on the internet, so it was kind of an experimentation as to how you get a document to do what you want and make it behave in perpetuity going forward so you don’t have to keep revisiting same issues over and over again. And a good example of one of those would be, I’ll just share my screen real quick. 

  

(07:16): 

Let’s see entire screen, and I’ll share the one that we’re looking at right now and we’ll just get a Word document over here and I’ll show you what I’m talking about. So for example, let’s say that just to give you an example of some of the features that are kind of hidden in Word, this is a very common kind of problem you would run into in Word where you’ve got a title that’s sitting by itself at the bottom of a page, and obviously you’d want it at the top of page three. Most people are going to solve that by adding a couple of hard returns and saying there’ll fix it. Or actually even worse is to put in a page break, which temporarily, and that’s the important thing, it temporarily solves the problem. By doing these things, I’ve created a gap and if for example, this paragraph were to become a little bit longer and trickle onto the next page, then I end up with an entire page in my document and I’m going to have to go find the page break that I previously added because I felt it was necessary and take it back out again so I don’t have this big blank spot in the middle of my document. 

  

Zack Glaser (08:28): 

Yeah. Well, okay, let me take a pause real quick. So we’re looking at a template for setting up a company LLC template it looks like real quick. And so obviously we’ve got 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, all of those things. And for those of you who aren’t seeing it, we’ve got a title on a separate page from the rest of the paragraph that’s going in there. Barron, I think that a lot of our listeners would probably consider themselves power users of Microsoft Word and looking at the example that you just did, I would think that because they can do that, that’s why they would consider themselves power users. For me, yeah, I’d put a page break in there and then I would know that it would break if it went weird. That is an extremely common issue that I’ve come across, and I mean as your templates are variable, are dynamic and that’s going to happen, I almost look at it like that’s going to happen, so let’s keep going. I’m curious to see how the hell we get past that. 

  

Barron Henley (09:36): 

Yeah, so there’s a feature in Word that allows you to effectively glue stuff together and there is no button for it on any ribbon. And what you pointed out is very true. People believe that there’s a correlation between how long I’ve been using Word and how good I am at Word, but the reality is most people are using Word like a typewriter more or less, and they haven’t found or learned to exploit the really powerful features built into it that would make all of their editing faster, easier, better. And this is a good example of one of those things. So if you wanted to take the title at the bottom of one page and attach it to the paragraph at the top of the next page, you actually simply right click the paragraph you want to attach to the next one. In other words, you don’t care about the subsequent paragraph, only the one above it, and if you right click it, you get this little list of options and you can go down and choose paragraph out of that dialogue that appears, okay, 

  

Zack Glaser (10:40): 

That’s familiar. 

  

Barron Henley (10:41): 

And once the paragraph dialogue appears, there’s two tabs at the top, one of which is called line in page breaks, and if you click on that, there’s a little series of check boxes, one of which says, keep with Next. And if I click on keep with Next, that will permanently adhere whatever paragraph I right clicked to the next paragraph without very importantly creating a gap between that title and the proceeding paragraph. So if add, if the proceeding paragraph gets longer and it trickles over onto the next page, there’s never going to be extra hard returns or page breaks to take out. They weren’t required in the first place and there’s none to take out now. It’s just simply going to do what I want and it’s kind of a set it and forget it. Once you do that, that particular paragraph is never going to be an issue again. And that’s what we encourage people to do when they’re going through documents. Think about most people are aware of this is likely to be an issue at some point, 

  

(11:43): 

And the point is, there’s many cases where you can simply apply these otherwise hidden features and cause your document to simply not ever generate the air that you’re expecting. As we say in automobiles, it’s better to avoid the crash than to have survived it, and Word is exactly the same way. I’m trying to avoid the crash and I don’t want to have to deal with it. People are so oriented toward this always happens and then I have to fix it and it happens and I have to fix it. And it never really occurs to people in my experience that that could have been avoided in the first place, so you wouldn’t have to figure out how to fix it because it never occurred. That’s what we try to get people to so they understand that you can build templates that they will not give you those kind of formatting glitches as long as you set it up correctly in the first place. And showing somebody how to use a template properly constructed is literally a five minute exercise. Even somebody who doesn’t know anything about work, they’ve never drafted their own documents, they’ve always relied on support staff, for example, but I can give them a complex template and in five minutes of instruction they’re going to produce perfect documents with the cross references are right, the paragraph numbers are right, the spacing is right. There’s no awkward page breaks anywhere. 

  

(13:08): 

Everything sticks together the way it’s supposed to, and even if they copy and paste into the document from somewhere else, and we’ve all experienced that, you paste in and it comes in, you’re like, oh my God, what just happened? But if you have styles set up properly in your Word documents, which is another very well hidden, mysterious feature of word, literally it’s two clicks to fix any particular paragraph. If I clicked in this paragraph and let’s say I pasted it in and it looked like that, it’s it’s way too small, wrong font, wrong point, size, wrong everything, no paragraph number, and you’re like, oh my God, here we go again, it’s as simple as you don’t even need to select the paragraph. You can just put your cursor in the paragraph and then click on a style that provides the formatting you want, and it fixes literally everything. There’s not even a, sometimes it doesn’t work like no, it works like that. Every single time you put your curse in the paragraph, you click on the name of the style that you set up and the formatting does exactly what you want and it will remain doing exactly what you want as you edit the document. 

  

Zack Glaser (14:22): 

So yeah, we’ve gotten a taste of some of how the hell was I supposed to find that keep with next thing, first thing. So that’s exactly, yeah, that’s kind of a taste of what we have here. But you’ve also said with these styles, you can set this stuff up from the beginning. You can set up this document from the beginning to where I do a new paragraph I this style with it, and it’s going to have this, the numbering. 

  

Barron Henley (14:56): 

Yeah, 

  

Zack Glaser (14:57): 

So numbering, table of contents, 

  

Barron Henley (14:59): 

Table of authorities, the paragraph numbering is also very mysterious in Word. They give you three buttons up at the top of the screen to set it up. There’s a bullet button, there’s a 1 2 3 button, there’s a one AI button, which is the multilevel list button. The first two buttons, I mean, I don’t even know why they’re here. They’re completely useless, and we encourage people to not ever click them for any reason whatsoever, literally in any document. 

  

Zack Glaser (15:23): 

Okay. 

  

Barron Henley (15:24): 

The only one should ever use is the multilevel list because the multilevel list gives you total control over the numbering. You can do bullets, numbers, letters. It’s up to nine levels deep if you only need one level. Okay? If you ever need a sublevel, okay, there’s a bunch to choose from. 

  

(15:40): 

And basically I can take the paragraph numbers I set up in a multi-level list and attach them to particular styles. So in the document that’s on my screen right now, that’s exactly what we did. That’s why if I go to the end of a paragraph and I hit enter, I will 100% of the time get another numbered or lettered paragraph in the appropriate order. I will get the appropriate spacing, font, point, size, paragraph, alignment and everything else because all of that is every single formatting attribute that one can apply in Word can be built into a style. So it doesn’t matter what you want it to look like. You can say, I want this to be a one inch first line indent with lowercase alphabetic lettering with parentheses surrounding it. I want an extra blank line after each one. I want it to be times in Roman 12 point justified paragraph alignment, whatever it is you want, put that all in this style and it will do all of that. Now, if you want to change levels, if I wanted these two paragraphs to be sublevel under a, I just click on these sublevel style that does that, and if I change my mind, I can switch it back. 

  

(16:45): 

Its literally that easy. In fact, when I explain this for somebody who’s not seeing my screen right now, they’re probably in a state of disbelief that that’s even possible because people, I explain that you can do this, and typically people say, I’ve never seen word behave like that. 

  

Zack Glaser (17:05): 

No. 

  

Barron Henley (17:06): 

And I have to show it to ’em to prove it to them. And they’re like, well, is this some trick? No, there’s no trick. 

  

Zack Glaser (17:14): 

What’s the magic you’re setting up? Okay, so start me off with how I set that up. Okay, we know what styles are. We know that we have kind of a heading, a heading two, a heading three, heading four, and then potentially a body or a paragraph, something like that. How do I set that up to where it can and hell, where do I 

  

Barron Henley (17:33): 

Go? Well, first of all, you got to know, you got to open up your Styles Pain. If your word for Mac, there’s actually a button that says Styles Paine. So it’s pretty easy to find it. 

  

(17:42): 

It’s on the home ribbon and word for windows for some reason, they don’t give you that button. Instead, you have to click this little arrow that I’m hovering over in the bottom right hand corner of the Styles Group on the home ribbon, which doesn’t even look like a button, but is, or you have to memorize one of the tons of speed keys that word provides, which is alt control, shift S, which the styles thing easy enough, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah, no problem. I mean most people in Word for Windows anyway, they don’t even know how to open up the Styles pane because there’s not a button for it. Again, no button for it. But anyway, once you get the styles paint open, every Word document comes with 247 styles before you do anything. 

  

Zack Glaser (18:26): 

That’s 246 more than most people use. 

  

Barron Henley (18:29): 

Yes. And word is watching over your shoulder in a creepy way, and it looks where you are in the document, and it applies a style without telling you that it’s doing that. And that’s the way word has always worked. So because every paragraph and every Word document and every version of Word has always had a style applied to it, you either learn to control them or they work against you. And unfortunately, there’s very little gray area in between. If you don’t learn to control styles, then you simply can’t control word because you can’t turn off styles, even if you say, I hate them and I never want to use them. Every paragraph and every document you create is going to have one. You can argue that that is really a silly construct, and I’m not going to defend it, but if you want to control it, you have to just say, okay, those are the cards I’m dealt. I got to learn how to get these things to do what I want, or else word’s going to fight me at every turn. And that’s exactly what it does. So all I do is I first customize the styles. All you have to do is right click one, and your first option is modify. It doesn’t matter if you’re word for windows or word for Mac. 

  

(19:34): 

And then there’s a little format button at the bottom, and you can see I can control everything, font, paragraph tabs, border language, frame numbering, all of that is controllable in one thing. Now to be, now notice when I click format, there is a numbering option, and unfortunately that numbering option is 100% useless. So you cannot set up paragraph numbering with that numbering option. And this is critical word, right? Right. Any logical person will look at my screen right now and go, that’s what I click on and I’m here to tell you No, no, it’s not 

  

Zack Glaser (20:06): 

Okay. 

  

Barron Henley (20:08): 

Instead, you have to do this. You go to the multilevel list button, and then you go down to you. And here’s another thing, another little rule of word. You will pick a sample from a dropdown list at your peril, and we actually encourage people to never pick any sample from any dropdown list anywhere on any button in word. You’re always better off creating your own, whatever it is. Table of contents numbering scheme, doesn’t matter. Headers, footers. So I go down to define new list style. I call it numbering. And then I go format numbering at the bottom. And now what I do is this is, you can see up here it says, I got nine levels of numbering. I click on the first level and here’s the special sauce link, level two style, and I simply click the down arrow and link that first level of numbering in this case to heading one. I click on level two and I link it to heading two or whatever styles you 

  

Zack Glaser (21:11): 

Want. Holy crap, 

  

Barron Henley (21:12): 

Connect them to, but this, and here’s the other thing, see this little less button. This is how the dialogue normally looks. You can’t even see the ability to link a level of numbering to a style. You have to click this button before you even know that’s an option. And that’s typical Microsoft design. They’re hiding things from you, even within a dialogue you manage to find, they’re still hidden stuff inside that dialogue. It’s really ridiculous. And that’s why I will never run out of work and training people on how to use this program because it does such an amazing job of hiding everything. 

  

(21:48): 

So basically you go through and you connect one-to-one, two to two, three to three, four to four, however many levels you got. And then when you’re done, and then at each one of those levels down here, you can decide, do I get a 1, 2, 3 Roman numerals, Romans, A, B, C, uppercase, lowercase, first, second 1, 2, 0 0 1, 0 0 1, bullets, diamonds, squares, circles, whatever you could possibly want, I can attach. And they’re automatically going to number letter, whatever it is that you chose. And once that’s set up, it is really bulletproof and some of the steps necessary to get there. I can’t even explain why. I just know that if you do it this way, it will work every single time. And if you skip any of those little weird steps that I don’t necessarily have a reason why it won’t work. 

  

(22:39): 

It’s like when you’re making a recipe, you’re like, that’s a weird ingredient. I wonder if I leave it out if it’ll be the same. No, it will not. So put it in there, even if it’s a disgusting ingredient like fish sauce, which if you’ve ever smelled fish sauce, you’re like, that is the most wretched smelling thing I could possibly imagine. Make a Thai recipe and leave it out and it won’t taste the same. It’s terrible. It won’t taste like it’s supposed to, even though that ingredient by itself is wretched. If you omit it, it ain’t going to work. The world is the same way. Weirdly, I’m using cooking analogies because I also am a cook. 

  

Zack Glaser (23:12): 

Yeah, okay, this feels like you’re telling me rules to a game that I didn’t know existed. 

  

Barron Henley (23:20): 

There are rules, weirdly, funny enough, that’s how I actually explain when I’m explaining styles, literally in the slide deck says rules of styles. And then I’ve actually, because they’re so hard to explain, I think it’s easier to understand in terms of a rule book. Here are the rules. I didn’t make up the rules. I’m just explaining the rules. If you abide by the rules, you can control it, 

  

Zack Glaser (23:42): 

And you can’t necessarily intuit your way through it. 

  

Barron Henley (23:45): 

No, 

  

Zack Glaser (23:46): 

You’ve got to know these rules. So the other thing, I think of these as big things that we run into. When you set up the styles this way and you connect them to the numbering. This way when I delete or add a paragraph, I don’t have to go and add numbers and things. 

  

Barron Henley (24:08): 

They’re part of the style. So as soon as you apply the style that has numbering, it will format the paragraph the way the style tells it to, and apply the numbering and the spacing and every other formatting attribute you might want. It’s all 

  

Zack Glaser (24:23): 

Well, so you’ve also got these things in there, and maybe going a little bit too deep here, you’ve got, if people are viewing the video here, they can see places where like 4.1 B is highlighted 

  

Barron Henley (24:36): 

Automatically updating cross references. 

  

Zack Glaser (24:38): 

Yeah, talk me through those. Those are cross-references where, so if I delete or put something else in 4.1 B or something like that, that’s going to update. 

  

Barron Henley (24:48): 

Let’s add a new 4.1 and a new 4.2. Now that will make all of these references change, and all you have to do is select the document right click and update fields. And as you can see, they now say 4.3 instead of 4.1 and 4.4 instead of whatever it was before. And it’s astonishingly easy to do that as long as the document said, let’s say this one right here was typed 2.3, and I wanted to make that an automatically updating cross-reference. Watch how it’s really easy if the document’s already set up most things in Word, I simply go insert and I click on the cross-reference button and it outlines literally the entire document is outlined here. And all I do is pick on 2.3, click insert close, and that’s it. And now that is obviously a field which will update if I add or delete stuff in between. Now, if I hadn’t used automatic paragraph numbering and I clicked on insert cross-reference, there’d be nothing to link it to, right? So it’s predicated on you used automatic paragraph numbering, and if so, cross-references that automatically update could not be easier. It is literally click on cross-reference, pick your paragraph, click, okay, that’s it. Three clicks. 

  

Zack Glaser (26:04): 

So what this leads to is the big daddy of all the crap that we run into, I think in formatting, table of contents, table of authorities, and setting that up. I in law school had a document that had a table of authorities in it, and I just would go grab that document every single time I needed the table of authorities. And I think I might’ve set one up new once, but I got that table of authorities from my professor, and it’s a pain in the butt, and you can’t get the periods to go correctly. And then when you change something, so this makes that almost a childs play. 

  

Barron Henley (26:45): 

Yeah, it is. And actually a table of contents is derived from the styles in the document. So if I open up a document that doesn’t have a table of contents, but I want to add one, all I have to do is identify which styles or I guess what the text, looking at this document, I got articles, right? Heading one is controlling those. So I want to pull into my table of contents, all the text to which heading one is applied because those are the articles. I also created a style to handle the titles for all the level twos called heading to title. And so I want to create a table of contents comprised of any text to which heading one and heading to title are applied. With that information, I can simply go to the location where I wanted to put the table of contents, click on references. And again, you get all these choices for tables of contents, these dropdowns, these should never be clicked on, literally never. You go down to custom table of contents and then you tell it which styles. This is just a list of all the styles in the document, and all I do is I tell it which ones I want to pull into the table of contents, 

  

(27:55): 

And I put little numbers adjacent to them corresponding to the hierarchy of the table of contents. I just click, okay. And I get a table of contents. 

  

Zack Glaser (28:03): 

Oh my god. 

  

Barron Henley (28:04): 

I mean, if I wasn’t talking while I doing that would’ve taken less than 10 seconds. And I’ve got a complete table of contents that also automatically updates if I make any changes to the document. All you have to do is right click and say, update field. So if I went down here and added a new paragraph, fake title, this is my paragraph, and as long as I apply this style to the title and I come back up to my table of contents and I right click and update the field. You can see a fake title just got pulled into my table of contents. That’s how easy page number. Again, phrase easy if the document’s set up right, a nightmare if it isn’t. 

  

Zack Glaser (28:44): 

Yeah, if you play by the rules, they let you through to the finish line. Okay, so before we go, first thing you teach people, as we said at the beginning of this, you teach people how to do this in much longer sessions than we have in just this podcast. I want to make sure everybody knows we have a lot more there, but pop your screen back up if you don’t mind. Again, that heading to title thing, that is a fascinating style to me because we’ve all, again, run across this. Obviously you’ve been doing this for law, you’re a lawyer, you know what you’re doing here. That is a separately formatted, underlined, bolded word or series of words right after the number of the, 

  

Barron Henley (29:41): 

These are what you would call run-on heading. So I got a title immediately followed by the rest of the paragraph, but I don’t want the rest of the paragraph on my table of contents. I only want the title. 

  

(29:51): 

In the old days, and by old days, I mean word 2003 and earlier, you basically had to fool word by using this horrible feature called a style separator, which was like a hidden hard return between two separate paragraphs that kind of pulled them together. So they printed together, but it was really two separate paragraphs and it was buggy and hard to explain to people. And so in Word 2007, they came out with this new type of style called a linked L-I-N-K-E-D-A linked style, which actually you can layer on top of another style. So that’s what heading to title is. Originally the paragraph just looked like this, for example, and I just simply selected the title, and then I click on heading to title. And because that is a separate style, that’s what I can pull that into 

  

(30:40): 

My table of contents. And the other ancillary benefit is styles. Once styles are created and apply to the text, you don’t have to touch the text anymore to change how they’re formatted. You can reformat the paragraphs by changing the style definition. So for example, if I wanted none of these to be underlined, I don’t need to go select 92 titles for on all these pages. I simply right click and modify heading to title, remove the underline attribute and click okay. Every single paragraph on every single page just lost its underline without me touching anything at all. 

  

Zack Glaser (31:13): 

Yeah. 

  

Barron Henley (31:14): 

Again, that would’ve been maybe 10 minutes of selecting and turning it off and selecting and turning it off. I didn’t have to do any of that. I just right click, modify, click, click, okay. And the whole document updates itself literally the second I click. Okay. 

  

Zack Glaser (31:28): 

Yeah. And that kind of highlights the idea that these styles are also kind of inherited from the basic style. So like that main paragraph style, if you’re set to courier new and you want to change everything to Ariel, you can go to that main paragraph style and 

  

Barron Henley (31:49): 

Change it. Yeah. There’s a foundational style called normal, and all of the other styles are based upon normal. So in this lease agreement, if I wanted to change, this is currently set up for the font century school book 12 point. Now, let’s say I wanted to change it all to times New Roman 11 point, if I right click and modify normal and switch it to times New Roman 11 point and click, okay, the entire document, every page number, paragraph number, every bit of text, every single thing in this, it all switch is switch fonts and shrank by one point without me touching a single thing. It’s perfect. And I mean, that took, what, 10 seconds maybe to do that, right? Right, 

  

Zack Glaser (32:40): 

Man. Yeah. Okay. So you’ve made a believer out of me here, Barron, and I’ve done, I got into legal tech through automating things in my office through doing these automations making 

  

Barron Henley (32:55): 

Same path for me, my friend, 

  

Zack Glaser (32:57): 

Yeah. Setting up templates. And I would’ve considered myself pretty savvy, especially with the styles and all that. This has really solved a lot of the main automation problems that we run into. Even in just that last one, my initial thought was, oh, you’re going to change this, and it’s going to be everything is times New Roman 11. But it wasn’t. It changed everything according to the change. It changed everything appropriately. So 

  

Barron Henley (33:32): 

I still have paragraph numbers, I still got bold titles. I still got the same point size that I had on those titles. A table of contents. It’s kind of like the normal style is the building block for everything else. The normal style is also the default formatting for every single document that’s ever existed. Again, if you look at Word, is there anything to tell you that your default formatting is controlled by some style? No. There’s nothing that tells you that. 

  

Zack Glaser (34:01): 

No, no. 

  

Barron Henley (34:02): 

You just have to, I don’t know, divine that through, I don’t know, prayer. I’m not sure how one other, I mean, we figured it out through experimentation, but there’s very little information out there about that stuff. And I get emails every day where people say, I Googled this and couldn’t find the answer, so I’m trying you. And the reason for that is the way law firms use Word is wildly different than the way all other industries use words specifically. We need a lot more of it. We use it on a higher level than most other industries. And because lawyers are a tiny little demographic of the overall installed base of Word, there isn’t a lot of help on the web. I mean, you think the web has the answer to everything, and in many cases it just doesn’t, because what you’re trying to do is so unique and weird to legal that other people don’t care about it, don’t even know what it is. Like a table of authorities, for example. 

  

Zack Glaser (34:57): 

Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly right. Well, I will say now, if people do want to go find the answers to some of these on the web, they can find you on the web, they can find you on LinkedIn, they can find you via email. They can go to the affinity consulting.com and find you where else. What’s the easiest way to get ahold of you, Barron? 

  

Barron Henley (35:21): 

[email protected], B-H-E-N-L-E-Y, at affinity consulting.com. If I’m awake, I’m connected to email seven days a week. So it doesn’t matter. And the reason I say that is because a lot of times people have a word and it’s a Sunday night. I got a brief due Monday morning, I can’t get my table of authorities to work. Okay, we’re here for you. 

  

Zack Glaser (35:46): 

Fair enough. Fair enough. That’s what we do, man. We’ve all been in that spot where we’re printing and binding, and we just added the paragraph and all the glue went weird. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Barron, thank you for talking to me about this. I hope this helps. Well, I know this will help a lot of people, so I’m going to be using a word a little bit less like a typewriter, and hopefully a lot more. 

  

Barron Henley (36:14): 

Let me know if I can assist. 

  

Zack Glaser (36:15): 

Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks. I always appreciate talking with you. 

  

Barron Henley (36:19): 

Yeah. 

 

 

 

Continue Reading