Word for the Law School

Overview

The law school has us teach this class to prepare their students for the LTA (Legal Technology Assessment). They can take this online test to certify their word skills. There are also tests for Excel and Acrobat. Taking the assessment is one of the best ways to prepare. Tina Wilder (the law school woman in charge of this whole thing) can get you a login set up.

The assessment has 13 tasks that require people to download a word document, fix something, and upload it again. We cover the first 8 tasks in Day 1, and the rest in day 2, with the idea that people can go online and do the first half between the weeks. The third week we cover a handful of other skills that law students need that aren’t covered by the LTA.

Students work on their laptops. The classroom has a PC, plus Shawn will connect his Mac, so you can use whichever one matches what most of the class has, and briefly switch the projector over when things are significantly different (mostly that happens on day 2)

Class Files

You can find the practice files on Box, or access them at files.learnsoftware.org/lta

For days 1 and 2, we have practice files based on the ones from the actual LTA (we’ve changed them enough that they won’t work if someone tries to just submit their files from class on the assessment). For day 3, we have a legal brief Shawn shared with us, which needs all the tools from that day’s curriculum.

Day 1 Outline

Files at: tiny.cc/ltaword1

Tasks 1-8

  1. Track changes
  2. Find & replace
  3. Insert a non-breaking space
  4. Apply styles
  5. Insert & fix cross-references
  6. Insert a hyperlink
  7. Edit style format
  8. Edit advanced style format

This day will cover the first 8 tasks of the LTA, but not in order. The order on the LTA is badly jumbled, and we’re putting similar tasks together so they can be done on the same file instead of needing 8 separate files. (You may want to write out this list of tasks on the board and check each one off as it’s covered)

File 1. Nonbreaking space – hyperlink

Covers tasks 3 and 6

Insert a nonbreaking space between the “ii” and “a” in section 2.01 (a). This will bring them onto the same line. Insert it from the insert > Symbol menu, or with Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Space.

Insert a hyperlink from the words “security act” in section 2.02 (a) to a website. (You can just google the security act and link to any site about it)

File 2. Styles

Covers tasks 4, 7, and 8

Talk about styles, then apply the Heading 1-3 styles to everything in “Article 1. General.” (this will auto-number them so you’ll need to erase the manually typed numbering)

Modify the Heading 4 style (the one with the roman numerals) to be left aligned, and calibri size 11

Modify the quote style using the advanced format > font and format > paragraph and format > font menus to have no italics, all-caps text, and 1-inch margins on both sides. Mention numbering settings here, too.

File 3. Crossreferences

Covers task 5

Replace the words “Section 2.02(b)” (in Article 2 section 2.01) with a cross-reference to section 3.02(b).

Since the section numbering throughout the document has changed, select all text (Ctrl/Cmd + A), then right-click on a cross-reference and update the field. This will update the numbering on all the cross-references in the document.

File 4. Track changes

Covers tasks 1 and 2

Talk about what track changes does, and how to turn it on and off

Use next and back buttons to review and accept/reject changes. Accept all changes.

Similarly navigate through comments, then delete all comments.

Use find & replace (Ctrl + H, or you can get to it from lots of different places in menus) to change every mention of “Form S-2” to “Form S-3”)

Day 2 Outline

Files at: tiny.cc/ltaword2

LTA Tasks 9-13

  1. Copy and Paste
  2. Page Break
  3. Editing Footers and Page #’s
  4. Remove Metadata
  5. Comparing Documents

Concepts

File 1. PageBreak – Metadata

Covers tasks 10 and 12

Put a page break in before the line reading [this space intentionally left blank]

Page breaks can be inserted with Ctrl/Cmd + Enter, Insert > Page Break, or Page Layout > Breaks > Page

Removing metadata:

This task is completely different on Mac vs. PC. Demonstrate both ways.

  • PC version
    • File > Check for issues > Inspect Document > Remove all:
      • Document properties
      • Hidden Text
      • Embedded XML (not super important because it can’t be done on a mac, but do it anyway)
  • Mac version
    • Document Properties (File > Properties > Summary > manually delete all fields)
    • Hidden Text Ctrl+H > Gear next to Find >Advanced Find & Replace > Click Replace tab > Click Format drop down at bottom > Click Font > Click Hidden Text. Leave “Replace With” box empty, then hit Replace All
    • Reiterate: There is no support for deleting embedded XML on Mac, but you should get through the assessment fine by deleting the document property fields.

File 2. CopyFrom and CopyTo

Select all the text in CopyFrom and copy it (with a right click, or with Ctrl/Cmd + C)

Paste it at the end of Section VI in CopyTo using the Merge List paste option (this will re-number it to be Sections 6.12, 6.13, and 6.14)

You can find Merge List in the right click menu on a PC, or in the paste options dropdown of the home tab on either PC or Mac.

If merging the list doesn’t work properly, you can also paste normally using Ctrl/Cmd + V, then apply the “Heading 2” style to each paragraph.

File 3. Footer – PageNumbers

In this scenario, the footer that is supposed to be in Exhibit A has been applied all over the document. We need to use a section break to put this footer only on exhibit A.

Turn on your hidden marks if you haven’t already, and add a section break at the end of the page before Exhibit A (you can either add a continuous section break before the page break, or remove the page break and put in a next page section break). Section breaks are under Layout > Breaks > Next Page or Continuous

Double-click in the footer, copy the footer contents, then delete them.

Go to the footer for section 2 (exhibit A), and turn off Link to Previous and any other weird options like different first page.

Paste in the complete footer you copied earlier.

Make the page numbering restart at 1

  • Open the page number format menu by either right-clicking on the page number and selecting page number format, or going Header and Footer Options > Page Number > Format Page Number
  • Set the numbering to start at 1 instead of continuing from the previous section

File 4. CompareOriginal and CompareRevised

Comparing documents lets you see changes between versions of a file as if they were tracked changes

Open any document in Word, and go to Review > Compare > Compare Documents.

Use the browse option to choose the the original and revised files, set the username you would like to appear on the revisions, make sure the advanced settings say the output will be a new file, then hit OK.

This creates a new document that shows differences between the two documents as if they were tracked changes.

Conclusion

  • You can now pass all 13 tasks of the LTA assignment. We recommend you do so soon while the knowledge is fresh.
  • Next Class:
    • We go over how to create a Table of Contents automatically
    • We also go over how to create a Table of Authorities

Day 3 Outline

Files at: tiny.cc/ltaword3

This day covers a few important Word skills which lawyers writing briefs need, but that aren’t included in the LTA: Tables of Contents and Tables of Authorities. It’s also a good time to review styles.

All the class practice is done on one file, a legal brief called “Wasatch Equality v. Alta.”

Table of Contents

The file already has styles applied throughout it for headings 1-4. Put in a Table of Contents using Word’s default settings (References > Table of Contents > Automatic Table 1). The default table won’t include heading 4s, and has some weird formatting. Discuss how the table of contents works and review styles if people aren’t super confident with them.

Why is this better than writing out the table of contents from scratch?

Delete that table of contents and replace it with a custom table of contents (References > Table of Contents > Custom Table of Contents). On the custom TOC menu you can set it to include level 4, and modify the appearance of each TOC entry style (adjust indentation, dot leaders, etc.)

Someone who was here on the previous days remind me how to modify styles? What settings could make this look more professional?

Reapply some styles or change something, then update the TOC.

Table of Authorities

This video is excellent and if you haven’t done this before you should start by watching it.

First, you have to mark all the authorities in the document.

  • References > Mark Citation opens the window
  • Set your categories: go to the Category menu to set up the categories you’ll use by replacing the plain numbers in that list with your own category names (these categories will become headings for groups in the finished list)
  • Find and mark each citation in the document
    • Hitting “Next Citation” will search for the next time the document uses “v.” or “§.” If any of your citations don’t use those characters you’ll have to find them on your own.
    • Highlight the whole citation, then click in the dialog box and the text should appear there.
    • If the citation includes a pincite (legal lingo for a poinpoint citation, a number [or numbers] that follows the page number on which the case begins, separated by a comma and space), erase it in that window
    • Assign a category using the dropdown
    • Hit Mark. (That will create some hidden text marking the citation. When you hide nonprinting characters with the ¶ button that text will disappear)
      • How can I re-hide this hidden text, along with all the paragraph markings?
    • Repeat for each citation in the document (for demonstration purposes, just do a few together then have people spend a couple more minutes doing some on their own)
    • When marking a case that you’ve already used, you can just select the text, then select the case it refers to in the list of short citations in the dialog box, then hit mark

Once everyone knows well how to mark authority citations, go to References > Insert Table of Authorities to put in the table.

In the dialog box that appears, set it to include all categories, and use the modify menu to set the appearance of the table entries and headings.

Update just like a table of contents.

What else would people like to learn about?