By Payne Consulting Group

Long before you enter the courtroom, you must spend a great deal of time preparing, formatting, and organizing the documents that you plan to use as part of your case. You are often required to use precise formatting in the documents that you file with the court. For example, pleadings, briefs, and other similar documents must adhere to court formatting rules and must often be submitted under court-imposed deadlines. Many of the tools that are available in Word 2003 can assist you in creating documents easily and reduce the amount of time you spend preparing documents for filing.

Preparing your documents

The number and types of documents that you need to prepare depends largely on your case. The following list contains some of the items that you might find in a typical trial notebook. You must create and submit most of these documents well in advance of the trial itself:

• Chronology
• Witness list and information
• Key documents (for example, complaint, answer, counterclaim/reply, cross-claim, responses to discovery requests, motions, orders, trial brief, exhibits, and deposition transcriptions)
• Opening and closing statements
• Research
• Court deadlines or action plan
• Notes

Tools to help you prepare

As you draft and prepare your documents, you can use several practical new features in Word 2003 to assist you. Some of these features are:

• Reading layout view   This feature is designed to help make reviewing electronic documents easier. You can switch to reading layout view by choosing Reading Layout from the View menu, by clicking Read on the Standard toolbar, or by pressing the keyboard shortcut ALT+R.
• Thumbnails   You can use thumbnails to view and navigate within long documents. From the View menu, choose Thumbnails. On the left side of the document window, click a thumbnail of a page to move to that page in the document.
• Research task pane   This feature contains a number of different research tools that you can use without exiting Word. From the Tools menu, choose Research to display the task pane on the right side of the document window.

Formatting your documents

Documents used in litigation are often extremely complex. Word 2003 contains many options and features that are designed to help you create everything from pleadings with multilevel numbering schemes, to discovery requests and responses with automatic sequential numbering.

Some of the features that you can use to format your documents include:

• Styles and Formatting task pane   You can use styles to create consistently formatted documents. Styles can be easily modified, so you can make wholesale changes to long documents quickly and can also ensure that you're in compliance with court mandated formatting guidelines.
• Reveal Formatting Task Pane   You can use this feature to quickly identify and make changes to different formats throughout the document.
• Outline Numbering linked to Heading Styles   You can use this powerful feature to add multilevel outline numbering in pleadings, briefs, and other documents that require scheme-based numbering.
• Table of Contents (TOC)   You can quickly generate automatic tables of contents in documents formatted with headings or generate manually marked TOC entries.
• Table of Authorities (TOA)   You can use keyboard shortcuts to mark long and short citations in a brief and then automatically generate a TOA.
• Sequence Field Codes   You can use automatically updating sequence field codes for numbering in discovery requests and answers.
• Tables   You can use tables to create pleading captions and organize witness lists.
• AutoText   You can use AutoText entries to store frequently used blocks of text such as signatures, addresses, or pleading captions.
• Hidden Text   You can use hidden text for jury instructions. You can print one copy showing the citations marked as hidden text on the jury instructions for the judge and another copy hiding that text for members of the jury.

Organizing your documents

After you finish preparing and formatting your documents, you will want to make sure that they are organized and easily accessible during the trial. One way that you can do this is by creating a trial notebook. If your documents are logically organized in a trial notebook, you can quickly reference a witness's statement made during deposition or in an affidavit, or look at responses made to a specific discovery request, or refer the jury to a particular exhibit, or even add notations regarding additional points to be covered during the closing argument.

Using Word to help you prepare for trial

Preparing your documents for submission to court requires forethought, planning, and preparation. Document preparation is a time-consuming but necessary part of the litigation process. Fortunately, Word 2003 contains the features and tools that you need to quickly create trial-ready documents. Take the time to learn more about these tools in Word 2003 so that you can get your documents ready for court on time and in great shape.

About the author   Payne Consulting Group is a software training and development company headquartered in Seattle, Washington.