While many firms may rely on IT professionals or support staff to configure these changes, the transition to a remote workplace may require you to configure these settings on your personal computer at home. Without that knowledge, any attempt to use the default settings in Microsoft Word would change the line spacing of point headings, change the fonts and colors of headings, and create a table of contents and authorities that was unusable.ĭue to these problems, we tweaked and modified the default settings of Microsoft Word over the years so that the program would automatically create the table of contents and table of authorities for us in the ideal format.
However, those same colleagues had no idea how to modify the settings in Microsoft Word to use those features.
To make things easier, other attorneys would recommend that I use Microsoft Word’s built-in table of contents and table of authorities feature. While these tasks were not difficult, they were time-consuming. As for the table of authorities, I would read the brief and write down each page where a citation appeared so that I could then input those pages into the table of authorities.
In the early years of our practice, I would finish my memorandum and then spend a lot of time formatting the table of contents. One of the most frustrating aspects of brief writing is the amount of time it takes to compile the table of contents and table of authorities.
