Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers a Microsoft Word add-in that automates document creation and ensures their consistency with firm-wide rules (see article below). In addition, you'll find links to the previous 11 TL NewsWire features, including our coverage of a redesigned international arbitration research service with tools such as Visual Connectors for Boolean searches, a Windows application designed to handle your OCR, PDF, and document comparison needs in one product, and much more. Don't miss the next issue.
Lawyers spend a lot of time in Microsoft Word — too much of it unbillable. Tasks such as creating paragraph-numbering schemes, tables of contents, and formatting styles involve a seemingly endless number of tweaks. Even after all this formatting, documents often lack consistency across your firm.
Word LX Professional … in One Sentence
Launched recently, Infoware's Word LX Professional is a Microsoft Word add-in for law firms that enforces firm-wide standards for documents and provides timesaving automation tools.
The Killer Feature
Infoware has helped law firms with document automation for more than 30 years. Word LX Professional is its first product specifically created for small law firms. "Word LX Professional provides the editing tools and document customization that only large firms can afford, and makes these available to the solo and small law firm market," says Dan Sharp, CEO and President of Infoware. "It allows for document consistency and formatting efficiencies."
Document consistency begins with Word LX Professional's Template Designer. This administrator tool walks you through a series of steps — uploading your firm's logo, entering the names of every user at your firm, importing clients and others from Outlook or another source, and creating document templates.
Document templates include letter, memo, fax, envelope, and address label. You can also create your own custom templates for other types of documents. For each template, you can tweak settings for logo placement, margins, font, text alignment, and page numbers. Other settings give you granular control over the layout of a template such as placement of your firm's address, contact information, and author and assistant details. You can also omit specific items. For example, if you use preprinted letterhead, you can omit the logo from the letter template.
These Template Designer settings reside in a file that you install on everyone's PC. You can create multiple settings files such as for different practice groups with specific preferences. Users access the document templates from the Word LX Ribbon in Microsoft Word.
Other Notable Features
The Word LX Ribbon also contains a number of important Word functions frequently used in legal documents. Infoware configures these functions to make them foolproof versus using Word's native equivalents. According to Infoware, the ribbon saves users one hour per day on average.
Perhaps most importantly, the Word LX Ribbon enables you to create documents with multilevel numbered paragraphs without having to understand Word's numbering intricacies. Similarly, another tool automates table of contents creation. Other tools enable you to create tables, sign documents, add a document ID, apply watermarks, use firm-approved paragraph styles, and insert contact information from Outlook.
Advanced users or those who work with an administrator can create model templates (e.g., pleadings, leases, wills) that conform to your firm's formatting requirements and which contain placeholders for data. The toolbar's Prompt function walks users through each data field in the document. This eliminates the risk of reusing a document and forgetting to remove another client's data.
What Else Should You Know?
Word LX Professional costs $250 per user per year. "Word LX Professional provides us with the tools to significantly raise the consistency and quality of our documents as well as improve the efficiency of those responsible for creating them," says Elia Associates law clerk Franca Russouw. "Firm branded templates can be easily created and accessed, and documents are now being numbered and styled consistently by users across our firm. We love Word LX Professional." Learn more about Word LX Professional.
How to Receive TL NewsWire
So many products, so little time. In each issue of TL NewsWire, you'll learn about five new products for the legal profession. Pressed for time? The newsletter's innovative articles enable lawyers and law office administrators to quickly understand the function of a product, and zero in on its most important features. The TL NewsWire newsletter is free so don't miss the next issue. Please subscribe now.
