Polish and Perfect Your Legal Writing Skills

Episode Notes

Transcript

New Solo

Polish and Perfect Your Legal Writing Skills

10/20/2017

[Music]

Intro: So you are an attorney and you have decided to go out on your own, now what? You need a plan and you are not alone. Join expert host Adriana Linares and her distinguished guests on New Solo. Tune into the lively conversation as they share insights and information about how to successfully run your law firm, here on Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Adriana Linares: Hi and welcome to another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I am Adriana Linares. I am your host. I am a legal technology trainer and consultant. I am usually somewhere between New Orleans and Orlando, but today I am lucky enough to be recording from one of the Legal Talk Network offices in beautiful Los Angeles.

We are going to have a great episode today. I actually invited one of our sponsors to come on and talk to us about their product and also some other interesting things that they do outside of PerfectIt. So we will have an informative and educational podcast with some good conversation after that about the importance of technology competence for lawyers.

Before I get into that and introduce them, I want to make sure and thank our sponsors. So I am going to take just a couple of minutes to read through a couple of important messages from our sponsors. Hope you listen.

Answer 1 is a leading virtual receptionist and answering service provider for lawyers. You can find out more by giving them a call at 800-Answer 1 or online at  HYPERLINK “http://www.answer1.com/”www.answer1.com.

Thanks to our sponsor Clio. Clio’s cloud-based practice management software makes it easy to manage your law firm, from intake to invoice. Try it for free at  HYPERLINK “http://www.clio.com/”clio.com.

Thanks to our sponsor and guest today PerfectIt. It’s a legal specific proofreading software that locates mistakes that neither spellcheck, nor the most eagle-eyed attorney can find. Try PerfectIt free from  HYPERLINK “http://www.intelligentediting.com/”intelligentediting.com. Make sure you enter the discount code New Solo. That will give you a little discount on there, and we really want to thank them for that. And like I said, we are going to hear a little bit more about PerfectIt in just a couple of minutes.

Unbundled Attorney is a premium lead generation service that delivers exclusive leads directly into your Inbox in real-time. Looking to get more leads and grow your practice, visit  HYPERLINK “http://www.unbundledattorney.com/”unbundledattorney.com today.

All right. Hi Ivy.

Ivy Grey: Hi Adriana. How are you today?

Adriana Linares: I am great. Hello Daniel.

Daniel Heuman: Hey Adriana.

Adriana Linares: Thanks for coming on you two. Why don’t we take a minute and I will ask Ivy to introduce herself first. Tell us about yourself and your background, and Daniel, and then if you guys want to give us a little lowdown on how the two of you work together, that would be great.

Ivy Grey: Great. Thank you so much for having me Adriana. So as you said, my name is Ivy Grey. I am a practicing lawyer in New York. I am licensed in New York, Illinois and Oregon. Those are all three places that I have lived and worked. I am a corporate bankruptcy attorney and I am also half of the team that creates American Legal Style for PerfectIt. Those are the two ways that I spend my time and it’s a bit of a juggling act, but it is very fulfilling.

Daniel Heuman: And I am Daniel Heuman. I am the CEO and Founder of Intelligent Editing. We produce PerfectIt. And I have been doing this since 2009, spending my time developing software for editors, for marketers, and most recently for lawyers.

I guess the origin of the software came from my background. My background is not in law. My background is as an economist, and when I was working as an economist we produce reports and proposals and other very long documents. And at the end of every one you have to do the same kind of tasks, you check the hyphenation is consistent, the capitalization is consistent, that you have got the client’s name right, and that you spelled it right. All these little, little things would be the same at the end of every report and that was kind of my aha moment, like there must be a better way to do this and that led to the development of PerfectIt.

Adriana Linares: I love it and I love PerfectIt. So I want you all to tell — I am a user, that’s the good thing so I can talk about it, but not as intelligently obviously as you can. So tell us a little bit about what PerfectIt does for legal documents for lawyers.

Ivy Grey: So PerfectIt is — we modified it for the legal space by creating a style sheet called American Legal Style, and in that style sheet we have incorporated the rules that are incredibly difficult to remember, all of the nitpicky things that people who went to law school are happy to forget.

(00:04:51)

So for instance, Bluebook citation rule such as punctuation and what you should be using and how you should be either abbreviating the citation, all of those things, we have programmed those mistakes in to catch them and fix them for you automatically.

We have also —

Daniel Heuman: Ivy programmed those things in. Ivy sat down with all of those books and she filled in 13,000 entries line by line of all the things that she has ever seen go wrong in legal documents to make sure that she could effectively be this little voice in every lawyer’s ear saying, no, no, no, that dot doesn’t go there.

Adriana Linares: Wow. That is impressive. I can’t imagine what you must be like when you are like organizing and cleaning out a closet.

Ivy Grey: Oh, I am brutal. I am the person who every shoe is in its own clear plastic matching box.

Adriana Linares: Of course it is, yeah.

Ivy Grey: All of my clothes are organized perfectly according to sleeve length and color.

Adriana Linares: That is amazing. I will tell you when people ask me what it does and I always recommended it as one of my tips, tricks and tools, for me, if I am writing a contract or some training materials or something which is typically what I am doing, if I spell email, e-mail in one place and then email without the dash in six places and then in four places I capitalize the E, it runs the report and it finds those inconsistencies and says, hey, which way do you want this?

If I have got a bulleted list of items and some of them have a dot at the end but some of them don’t throughout the document, it says, hey, do you want dots or don’t you want dots? I mean it’s a little bit naggy, the thing.

Daniel Heuman: And maybe that reflects its founder, because those were all the little things that bugged me so much. And it’s crazy because they are nothing mistakes and they are so hard to find, but they jump out at readers.

Adriana Linares: They really do.

Daniel Heuman: They see, oh, oh, oh, you didn’t do this the other time, and it’s not everyone. Certain percentage of readers won’t see those things.

Ivy Grey: Oh, but you know who really sees these things, senior partners, and let me tell you, as a junior associate getting pinged for those things over and over and over again, it’s so frustrating, and that frustration mounts, and I honestly believe that a lot of people give up on the practice of law because they feel like they are getting attacked for these small things that at the end of the day don’t really matter. And I wish I had had this tool when I was a junior associate, because it turns out I was not nearly as perfect as I thought I was.

Adriana Linares: Yeah, it is. It’s like you all don’t have enough stress, you add on again these little nitpicky things. So anyway, I think it’s a great tool. I wish everyone had it. Particularly when I do presentations and I talk about it, I say this is something that if you are too seasoned and mature of an attorney to need this, please at least buy it for your junior associates and your staff, your paralegals who write a lot of documents, because it really does just clean up those little visual things that really can be, let’s see, what’s the word I am looking for, they break up the rhythm in a document that someone is reading.

Ivy Grey: They are distracting.

Adriana Linares: Yeah. Is there anything else that you want to make sure we know about it that would encourage people to check it out, what else?

Daniel Heuman: Yeah. I think one of the most important things, the reason why I want it to be a sponsor especially of this show is that we think it’s right for solo practitioners and we especially think it’s right when starting out, because it’s inexpensive, and that’s not true of lots of products for lawyers, and people have this image of lawyers as having big budgets and unlimited amounts to spend on things. And I don’t think it’s true from what I have learned since we started in this market, I don’t think that’s actually true of law generally, but it’s especially not true of people starting out.

I have started a business from scratch, you don’t have that much when you begin with and PerfectIt is ideally placed for that sort of market I hope.

Adriana Linares: Great.

Ivy Grey: And the other thing that I would add is that it’s not just the Bluebook, it’s the Redbook, it’s Black’s Law Dictionary, it’s the Elements of Style, all of those rules and writing techniques that you are expected to remember and expected to apply throughout your writing that you just don’t have time to look for or time to check through those books, it will help catch those things and help you enforce those rules.

Adriana Linares: Sounds like a total no-brainer to me. How much does it cost?

Daniel Heuman: It’s $99 right now.

Adriana Linares: Is that one time forever or annual?

Daniel Heuman: It’s a one time forever thing right now. By the time listeners —

Adriana Linares: I think you guys should charge more.

Daniel Heuman: Well, we are switching, so we are about to enter the Office Store, which is really exciting and it’s going to be available for Mac, for iPad, that kind of click of a button. You don’t even need to install anything. And when we do that it’s going to switch to being a $70 a year purchase. But it’s still going to be really low I think for what it does, for what it is.

Ivy Grey: Absolutely a no-brainer.

Adriana Linares: So right now it’s available as an install and let’s see, we are at about mid-September when we are recording this, so when do you expect the way that it is delivered and used to change?

(00:10:01)

Daniel Heuman: In early November.

Adriana Linares: Okay. So if you listen to this after early November, and it will be in the Apple Store and then in the store for Office, so you are going to be on both platforms and mobile as well?

Daniel Heuman: So it’s only going to be in the Office Store, but the way they have done Office 365 is that the Office Store is available for all those platforms now. So if you are in iPad with Office 365, if you are in Mac with Office 365, the Store button is now really convenient and obvious and you click the Store and then you will be able to just search for PerfectIt.

Adriana Linares: Excellent. That’s great. And then can learn more about it at  HYPERLINK “http://www.intelligentediting.com/”intelligentediting.com and all the different ways that they might be able to get it, depending on the platform that they are on, as well as get it earlier, if you can’t wait before that method of delivery changes.

And for those of you who are listening and you hear us talking about Office 365, if you are still not sure what Office 365 means and what it is, I had an episode a couple of episodes back with Ben Schorr from Microsoft itself explaining exactly what Office 365 is and we really talked about what another great service and addition and change that has been to important software that we use. So go back and listen to that one if you are not too sure about Office 365.

So before we move on to our next segment and start talking about one of my favorite topics, competence when it comes to technology and lawyers, I am going to take a quick break to hear a message from a couple of our sponsors.

[Music]

Adriana Linares: Imagine what you could do with an extra eight hours per week? That’s how much time legal professionals save with Clio, the world’s leading practice management software. With intuitive time tracking, billing and matter management, Clio streamlines everything you do to run your practice from intake to invoice. Try Clio for free and then get a 10% discount for your first six months when you sign up with the code New Solo 10, that’s New Solo 10 and do that at  HYPERLINK “http://www.clio.com/”clio.com.

[Music]

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Adriana Linares: All right, welcome back. I am Adriana Linares and with me today are Ivy Grey and Daniel Heuman from  HYPERLINK “http://www.intelligentediting.com/”intelligentediting.com. They make a product called PerfectIt that I am very happy to have as sponsors for this podcast so I invited them to come on and talk about that with us.

Now we are going to switch gears a little bit because Ivy has been writing a lot and talking a lot about the importance of technology competence and you guys have a great guide on Microsoft Word that we will talk about in just a second. But let me just let the two of you or either of you, however you all want to break this up, maybe Ivy, since you are the actual practicing attorney, talk to me about how that started becoming important to you.

I mean it’s obvious, number one, because of the fact that you all built PerfectIt, that making life easier when it comes to creating what I refer to as beautiful legal documents is important, but what about just overall technology competence, why has that become something so important to you?

Ivy Grey: So in 2012 the ABA released a revision to the Model Rules. Many rules were affected, but the one that we are talking about when we speak about competence is Model Rule 1.1. There weren’t really any changes to the text of the rule itself, but what you will see is changes to Comment 8, and in Comment 8 we said or the ABA said that in order to be competent, we also need to be aware of the availability risks and benefits of technology and we need to keep up with those changes.

So we had a shift from competency as focused on only the substantive knowledge of the law, to also the delivery of our legal services through technology. And it became clear that it was no longer okay to simply be a Luddite and to pretend that the world wasn’t progressing. The ABA makes really clear that the rule changes aren’t meant to reflect changes to practice as they have already occurred rather than to impose something new upon people.

So the people who were really shocked are the people who haven’t changed, they are still running Word 2003. But the people who have been keeping up with technology and moving forward, which is really the safer way to go, nobody was surprised by that.

(00:14:46)

I got really excited about the idea of technology competence, really in that I have been essentially the office trainer in every office that I have worked in. And it’s really sad when a random associate is the person who knows the most about how Word and Excel work. But people would come to me and they would say, oh, this formatting is moving all over the place, I just don’t understand this. And I would have to take time out of practicing law to fix things and I knew that there had to be a better way and with this rule change people are now encouraged to go find those better ways.

And in February the ABA also released an update to the CLE requirements suggesting that they should also provide technology CLEs. So the first state that’s allowed that is Florida, which is where you are from and that’s pretty exciting.

Adriana Linares: Yes, they are welcome. I had a lot to do with that, I am proud to say.

Ivy Grey: It’s so good. It’s so good.

Daniel Heuman: Excellent.

Ivy Grey: So I think that once people start getting CLE credit for learning their legal technology, it is going to be — it won’t be as much of an uphill battle to get attorneys to actually learn. So it’s the combination of the rule change and the CLE credit, which rewards you for actually doing the learning and training.

Adriana Linares: It’s not enough. So, right, Florida was the first to adopt that rule and thanks to one of my dearest friends and colleagues and someone I love working with more than almost anybody, John Stewart. He was the one that sort of pioneered that. And it’s a good start. I mean when the ABA made that change to the Model Rules and since then 28 states have then turned around and made that same change to their own state rule.

So I think what we are doing is just signaling to lawyers that these governing bodies see the necessity, but by just forcing lawyers to take three hours over a three-year period we are not really moving the needle that far. I think it’s basically, just to trumpeter, saying, hey, pay attention, and then if you are so inclined, please get more than three hours of training over three years.

And it’s certainly a batter for me all the time. I mean my whole career and life seriously and almost my life, because I love my job so much, has been trying to encourage lawyers to just learn some good basic skills, because I watch how much they suffer and they don’t even realize they are suffering.

I need to bring Eckhart Tolle in with me to remind them that, well, just you are suffering. But man, you are really suffering if you want to throw your computer through a window every time you go to create a legal document and there are so many simple things that lawyers could learn.

I mean just learning about that little pay special button that pops up every single time you pay something in Microsoft Word changes lives. And I change lives like everyday that I show somebody that and they go, wow, that must be new. I say, or it’s 20 years old. So I totally think it’s important of course.

Ivy Grey: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I have been writing and speaking about, which I think brings it home a little bit more is that, Model Rule 1.1, which is the duty of competence, it really doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is part of a collection of rules. And so I have been encouraging people to think about the broader ramifications of how they work, how they provide legal services, how they draft legal documents and what an effective use of programs like Microsoft Word really means.

And so from there I have connected the dots and I have drawn attention to Model Rule 1.6, which is the duty of confidentiality. So you are going to have issues with that if you aren’t using track changes properly and you will have issues with metadata.

Also, the duty to bill ethically and fairly, that’s Model Rule 1.5. So if you are incompetent in doing your work and you are deliberately refusing to learn technology, then it raises questions about your bills. Are you really billing fairly if you don’t know how to use your programs?

And then the other two issues or the rules that were really affected are Model Rule 5.1 and 5.3. 5.1 is regarding supervision of subordinate lawyers and 5.3 is supervision of staff and vendors. And under both of those you have to have policies and procedures and effective measures to ensure that other people are complying with their ethical duties.

And since the duty of technology competence is part of the ethical duty, then any senior attorney or supervising attorney is responsible for making sure that other people are in compliance, which means essentially law firms need to train. So I think when you put all of those things together, it’s a bigger push than simply saying over the course of three years you need to do three years of training. So I am hoping that people will start to really see how it all works together and how important it is.

(00:19:58)

Adriana Linares: No, I totally agree on all those things. I do a regular presentation on the importance of technology, I forget what the actual name of it is, but I hit on all those exact points you are talking about. And the last point I will make just sort of supporting what you have said before we go on to our next break is that one of the big issues I see with lawyers and not understanding, not only what is possible or what isn’t or what the risks are with their own computer, is not understanding what their staff doesn’t necessarily know. They just assume. I mean I get this — I tell this great story about I was in this law firm and I have probably told it on this podcast, so if you have heard it before, I am sorry. I will tell it really fast.

I was training at a law firm and this was just a year or two ago in New Orleans, that was moving from WordPerfect to Word. Fine, no big deal.

Daniel Heuman: Already a good start.

Adriana Linares: Already a good start. I actually do that training a lot. There is still a lot, and that’s fine, just, it’s fine. I don’t care that we are moving from WordPerfect to Word. So I am training the staff and this attorney comes in, he was obviously important and he walked in the room and he took off his glasses and I stopped, of course, and I said hi, will you be joining us. And he looked at me and he said does Microsoft Word create a table of authorities. And I said, well, of course it does. And he looked at me and he said tell them and walked out.

Okay. So what had ended up happening is the previous night he wanted to file a document and it was not required thankfully to have a table of authorities, but he is old school and he wanted it in there really bad. So the excuse by the assistant was Word doesn’t do that, and I hear that all the time and I want to become unglued. Because I think to myself, you are talking about a product that’s been being developed for professional document development, generation and creation for 20 years, at least, maybe 30, and you think Word can’t do that. You think you are going to be the one person that comes up with the one thing that Word can’t do.

So it was one of those moments where, now, the attorney didn’t know for sure, and will probably never know what Word is capable of, but the fact that a lot of attorneys aren’t really sure what their staff doesn’t know and what they should know is another thing that really bothers me too, because we go back to that supervising of staff, supervision of staff requirement.

So anyway, let’s take a quick break again. We will come back and I think what we might do, if you guys can, I will give you like a two minute chance to think of some stuff, what I think would be great is if we ended this segment with some really useful and practical tips that people can walk away with.

Ivy, I am sure you have got tons of those, like I do, and Daniel, you have probably learned several from working in legal, and I think that would be a great end to the show.

So we will be right back.

[Music]

Adriana Linares: Imagine how much faster you could work if you spent less time proofreading. Almost every lawyer wastes hours each week proofreading rather than producing legal work. With PerfectIt’s American Legal Style, you spend less time proofreading and have more time to focus on substantive matters. It’s easy to use and there is no training required. Try PerfectIt for free from  HYPERLINK “http://www.intelligentediting.com” intelligentediting.com and start saving time on proofreading today.

[Music]

Adriana Linares: Are you a family law, immigration, or estate planning attorney looking to attract new leads and retain more clients? Join hundreds of other solos and small firms, just like you, who use Unbundled Attorney to receive premium, exclusive leads, delivered directly into their Inbox in real-time. To learn more about how their lead generation services can grow your practice, subscribe to the Unbundled Attorney Mastermind podcast or visit  HYPERLINK “http://www.unbundledattorney.com” unbundledattorney.com today.

[Music]

Adriana Linares: Okay. Well, we are back. I am Adriana Linares and with me are Ivy Grey and Daniel Heuman. They are the creators of PerfectIt, one of our sponsors and one of my favorite tools and we talked about it for a few minutes. Then we talked about the importance of technology competence, which it’s almost starting to get old that we keep talking about it, but we have to because we are still a little bit behind.

So I hope that the conversation has just inspired you. I think that people that listen to this podcast are the types of lawyers who are inspired to learn more. So I thought maybe we could end off with a couple of good tips and tricks in any product, any tool. Ivy, tell us something that you wish every single lawyer on the planet knew how to do or their staff?

Ivy Grey: All right. Well, I am super-excited about this Chrome plug-in these days called Rapportive. And it shows the LinkedIn profile of the person that you are corresponding with right inside your Gmail account. And since a lot of lawyers are using Business Gmail for their email server, it works there too.

(00:24:52)

It’s so exciting because it helps to confirm that you are actually sending the email to who you think you are sending the email to. And it encourages you to be a little more personable and civil to the person that you are writing to. So that is the one thing that I love outside of Word.

Inside of Word, the use of styles and headings is the best thing ever. It encourages outlining and really thinking about the flow of your arguments. It saves so much time and then it automatically creates a table of contents. I mean you just cannot miss with using that.

Adriana Linares: I agree. And I am going to throw a tip in there that sort of loops back around to yours with Gmail. I am a G Suite Business user as well, so my email service provider is Gmail, but I love Outlook. So I just want to remind anyone that’s listening that even if you are using a web-based email service, I guess they are all web-based really, but a Gmail or I don’t know what else people are using these days, but you can synchronize your email, your calendar and your contacts with Outlook using their G Sync tool that is offered to you as part of your subscription to G Suite.

So if you have been an Outlook user and you have missed it, you can certainly go back, it’s yet another reason to have Office 365 subscription.

And I joke around that I am Bi-Tech, I am Bi-Tech, get it, so I work on PCs and Macs and it’s been, if you are a really good Outlook or Word user, it’s been frustrating to slowly watch the evolution of Office for the Mac, but it’s coming along and they just released an update a couple of days ago, maybe a couple of weeks ago in Outlook for the Mac that does one of my most important necessities, and that is, you can take an email and drag and drop it on to your calendar and it converts all the information that’s in an email onto a calendar appointment.

So when you get those emails that have call-in information or directions to someone’s office, you can now drag and drop directly onto your calendar and easily make an appointment out of it. So if you haven’t gotten to do all that stuff, research and do.

Daniel, do you have a good tip for us?

Daniel Heuman: Yeah. So I have this favorite program, I guess, it’s a free thing, it’s a clipboard manager and it’s called ClipX.

Adriana Linares: Wait, talk about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that tool.

Daniel Heuman: The concept behind it is amazing. It’s that in these days of gigahertz of computer speed and gigabytes of memory and terabytes of hard disc drive, we all have a clipboard and our clipboard stores exactly one item and that is so wrong. And I can’t work on any computer now without ClipX, which has everything you copy, it remembers the last 25 items.

Adriana Linares: So are you a Mac user then?

Daniel Heuman: No ClipX is only on the PC, but I bet there is an equivalent for the Mac.

Adriana Linares: Yes, I use ClipIt on the Mac. ClipIt is the name of the one that I use; there are probably plenty of them.

Daniel Heuman: Yeah, I am sure, but for a PC, this one happens to be free. And it pastes unformatted and it just changes the way you work. So that would be my one outside of Office.

Inside of Office, I would give a shout out to our friends at WordRake.

Adriana Linares: Oh yeah, good idea.

Daniel Heuman: I love their software.

Adriana Linares: Explain what WordRake does.

Ivy Grey: Oh, oh, oh, this is my favorite part. Sorry, I am also a WordRake user, avid.

Adriana Linares: Me too.

Ivy Grey: So for lawyers, it takes bloated text and makes it readable and translates it into plain English. All of those times where you are struggling to be under a court-imposed maximum page length, WordRake can help you get rid of all of that extra language and cut it down and fit within those limits. It is the best thing ever. I use it on every document that I write.

Adriana Linares: I even use it in my emails.

Daniel Heuman: And as a software guy, the thing that’s wonderful about it is it’s so easy. You click one button. That sounds obvious when you see it, but as an interface so few programs achieve that level of just fluidity and simple, easy to use element.

Adriana Linares: Absolutely. That’s one of my favorite products. I think it’s 199 for that one.

Daniel Heuman: That’s with that —

Ivy Grey: If you are using Outlook and Word.

Daniel Heuman: Yeah, that’s right.

Ivy Grey: If it’s just Word, it’s 129 a year.

Adriana Linares: Oh, okay. And why wouldn’t you get it? I use it more in Outlook than I do in Word and I am pretty sure it’s PC only, right?

Ivy Grey: For now.

Adriana Linares: For now, yeah.

Ivy Grey: But coming by the end of the year, they tell me, it will be available on the Mac.

Adriana Linares: Great.

Ivy Grey: I actually just wrote an article for ILTA, it will be coming out for their Office 365 White Paper, where I surveyed a number of the really amazing proofreading and editing tools that work in Microsoft Word, so I am up on all of the changes that are coming, it’s exciting.

Adriana Linares: It is exciting, all these great tools. Yeah, I am glad you mentioned that one Daniel. Daniel, do you have another one, another good tip?

Daniel Heuman: Yeah, one that I got from this show actually.

Adriana Linares: Oh, tell us more, we love when we —

Daniel Heuman: TextExpander. I know we have talked about it a few times and I love that. Before that I was using PhraseExpress, which is also very good, but TextExpander just makes it that much easier to sync across multiple computers. So I have got those all set up with all the little short keys and things that I have been using for years.

(00:30:10)

Yeah, that’s just wonderful and easy. You program it to respond to little phrases, so I type BW and it writes out best wishes and then my signature.

Adriana Linares: Yeah, I love that. We love that tool. Great.

Daniel Heuman: And then I do TFW and it’s thanks for writing. It’s all the things that I could — answering emails, doing the things that I have to do over and over again, it’s just great for that.

Adriana Linares: I wanted to circle back one quick thing, because I am a trainer and I always over-explain and it’s annoying, I know, but I just — I feel like, I just want to say this, we talked about the clipboard and it doesn’t make sense until you see what it does, but I just want to explain this really quickly.

So right now when you go to draft a new legal document, you might source for that one new document from the Internet, from a document you have on the desktop, a document you went and found in your old archives. So right now what you are doing without a clipboard tool is you have to do a one to one, you copy or cut, and then you have got to go immediately paste it. Then you go and you copy or cut the next thing you want and then you must go immediately paste it, because every next cut or copy writes over the last one, right? Okay, so I think that’s clear.

What happens when you have a clipboard tool, and by the way, the clipboard has been built into Microsoft Office for 20 years, so that’s a tip I know you have heard me say, and if you are not sure how to turn it on, just Google Microsoft Office Clipboard, it’s been there forever, but that’s only inside of Office. We are talking about tools that exist system-wide.

So what it will do is, let’s say you are in the middle of a Word document and you go out and find and pull up a case from Google Scholar or Lexis or wherever you do your research. You can sit and scroll through that document and copy something, continue working so that you are not having that mental disruption of having to go paste, not to mention how many times have you forgotten to paste something and then copy the next thing and overwrote it, so the frustration of drafting long documents.

So what happens is you can scroll through looking at an entire document, copy, copy, copy, copy, copy, then go over to your new document and click and pick, is what I always say, you click to pick the line and it puts it exactly into the space that you want or the snip it, it’s basically like a snip it. So the clipboard and clipboard managers I think are huge time savers and I hope everybody goes out and gets them.

Ivy, one more from you and then we will call it a day if you have got one?

Ivy Grey: Sure. Working in Microsoft Word you may find a document that has perfect formatting but you don’t know how to make that formatting yourself, that’s when you use the Format Painter. And if you do Shift+Ctrl+C, you will get the format copied, and if you do Shift+Ctrl+V, you will get the format painted.

The most exciting thing though is that you don’t have to keep going back to the original source, you can just use that hotkey combo over and over and over again, changing the things that you want to change so that they actually match your intended style. It can save you so much time and you don’t actually need to know anything at all.

Adriana Linares: So let me go a little further and explain something about that too. Let’s say you get a document from another lawyer and every single heading like Introduction, Conclusions, Statement of Facts, your headings are centered, bold, Arial, 14 and blue, and now you want —

Ivy Grey: And say they have like extra space underneath them, but you don’t know how much.

Adriana Linares: Right, exactly, it’s that little space after it and you just want to add another heading that looks exactly like that. You don’t have to sit there, imagine all the clicks it takes to go center, bold, 14, how do I get the spacing right, and that’s again super frustrating. So what you can do is use this tool that Ivy has mentioned, it’s called the Format Painter and if you look around on it, it’s in the same section of the ribbon as the clipboard is. So the Clipboard — I am sorry as Paste.

If you look at your ribbon in Word, whether you are looking at it on the Mac or the PC, the very first button on the ribbon is the Paste button. I call it having pole position, because we paste so much and then if you look to the right of that, you are going to see cut and copy and underneath that is a little painter, or if you are a keyboard shortcut person, which many of us are, then you are going to use the keyboard shortcuts that Ivy just gave us.

You are going to say, okay Word, copy that formatting, and then you are just going to go to where your word is, say it was statement of facts, and you are going to either sweep over it with your mouse, you have got to tinker with this to figure out how it works or just click on it and that whole paragraph will pick up the exact formatting from the one that you copied. So it’s basically a copy and paste for formatting.

And what do we mean by formatting, formatting is things like font, font size, line spacing, justification. So that’s a great, great, super useful tip.

(00:34:56)

Daniel Heuman: There is another little tweak on that one that when you double click on it, it stays going. So if you have lots of headers that you want to make the same, you double click the tool and then you just click on each one.

Adriana Linares: Yes, that’s true, you can stick it. So you can stick the Format Painter. That’s great.

Well, rats, looks like we have run out of time, like I always do.

Ivy Grey: Well, wait.

Adriana Linares: Yes, one more.

Ivy Grey: Just one more, if you like these tips, you should check out our Lawyer’s Guide to Microsoft Word Resources and Training.

Adriana Linares: Oh yes, we forgot to talk about that.

Ivy Grey: In that Resource Guide it’s all clickable links of all of the tools that we have either checked out and love or we just think that you should check out. So they will include blog post about how to create a table of authorities, for instance, from Deborah Savadra, who is the Legal Office Guru and she will show you how to do that click by click.

We go over the really awesome tools that are available for all of the Bluebook citations, training resources such as LawTech Partners from Adriana and Affinity Consulting Group with Barron Henley. All of those resources are collected together, but one of the best things about the document is that we went through or I went through and I thought about how lawyers approach things and what they call it, and I did a translation to bring it into the Microsoft Word world, so that if you want to actually learn more, you are googling under the right terms to get the results that you want and expect.

I think that’s one of the things that is most difficult about getting people to look for something that works for them on their own, is because they don’t know where to start or how to start.

Adriana Linares: Yeah, googling is an art form, right? So knowing better what terms to use is always going to be so helpful. And how do they get the guide?

Daniel Heuman: That’s at  HYPERLINK “http://www.intelligentediting.com/lawyersguide” intelligentediting.com/lawyersguide.

Adriana Linares:  HYPERLINK “http://www.intelligentediting.com/lawyersguide” intelligentediting.com/lawyersguide. Altogether, Lawyer’s Guide?

Daniel Heuman: Yeah.

Adriana Linares: Okay, great. And it’s probably on your homepage somewhere I would guess. You guys put on a newsletter as well so people can always subscribe to your newsletter, right?

Daniel Heuman: Absolutely.

Adriana Linares: Excellent. Well, before they go, tell everybody how they can find, friend or follow you on the Internet, Daniel?

Daniel Heuman: Twitter is @IntelligentEdit and everything else is at  HYPERLINK “http://www.intelligentediting.com/”intelligentediting.com.

Adriana Linares: Excellent. What about you Ivy?

Ivy Grey: I am very active on Twitter, I am @IvyBGrey, and I am also available on LinkedIn, pretty active there,  HYPERLINK “http://www.linkedin/in/ivybgrey” linkedin/in/ivybgrey.

Adriana Linares: Awesome. Well, thank you so much Daniel and Ivy, it was so fun having the two of you on.

Daniel Heuman: Thank you. It’s real pleasure to be on.

Ivy Grey: Thank you so much for having us.

Adriana Linares: Yeah, it was really fun. Oh, I was absolutely thrilled to have you both. So that’s it, that’s the end of another awesome episode of New Solo. I hope you enjoyed it and learned some more stuff.

Remember, if you enjoy what you hear here, wherever you are hearing it through, please make sure you take a moment to rate us in Apple Podcasts and if you want to learn more, make sure you visit the New Solo page on  HYPERLINK “http://www.legaltalknetwork.com” legaltalknetwork.com.

Thanks again everyone for listening, join us next time for another great episode. And remember, you are not alone, you are a New Solo.

Outro: Thanks for listening to New Solo with host Adriana Linares. Tune in again to learn more about how to successfully run your new practice, solo, here on Legal Talk Network.

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The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.

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Bob Ambrogi: Hi. This is Bob Ambrogi. I have been writing, podcasting and speaking about legal technology for over two decades. Monica Bay and I co-host a show called Law Technology Now, where we interview experts behind the newest legal tech. Tune in on iTunes, Stitcher or at  HYPERLINK “http://www.legaltalknetwork.com” legaltalknetwork.com to learn why technology is improving the legal industry for lawyers, their clients, and everyone, as it brings us closer to access to justice for all.

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