the (new) legal writer

10 keyboard shortcuts you should know

If you work with a keyboard, then you should know Dan Pinnington’s 10 skills to make your typing faster and easier. I’ve been working with computers since 1982—virtually my entire adult life—and I learned three new things by readings Dan’s article. (Hat tip to Slaw.ca.)

Eight tricks you can do with Word

PC Magazine carries this article, Eight Handy Tools in Microsoft Word You Probably Don’t Know About. If you find just one you can actually use, the article will be worth you while.

Black’s Law Dictionary Digital

Here’s an interesting product available on Amazon.com: a digital version of Black’s Law Dictionary. Besides providing easy desktop access to BLD, it integrates with both Corel WordPerfect and Microsoft Word, including incorporation of the correct spellings of legal terms into the WordPerfect and Word spell-checkers. So if you’re document contains a word like usufruct, the spell-checker won’t go, “Huh?”, but instead will (if necessary) prompt you with the correct spelling.

Formatting in Word

If you’re a Word user who doesn’t like the way Word automatically formats paragraphs, learn how to take control. Read Bryan Sims’s four-part series on how to make Word do your bidding:

1. Unchecking Default Settings.
2. Creating a Style.
3. Creating a Numbered-Paragraph Style.
4. Applying Styles.

(Hat tip to George’s Employment Blawg.)

Hyperlinks in legal writing

For a while, I’ve realized that I can put a hyperlink in a Word document. But it never occurred to me to use that feature in legal writing, until I read this post by Australian barrister Stephen Warne, in which he describes how he used this feature to link to legal authorities cited in his writing. If you’re sending your client a Word or PDF document with legal citations, there’s no reason not to use this feature to give your client instant access to a cited authority.

Making the link is easy — bloggers do it in their sleep. For instructions, read Stephen’s post or this item from StudentCentral.