Paralegals using microsoft office

When a task is completed in Planner, it alerts that team in the communication channel. Microsoft Office has a seemingly endless number of external integrations. For the most part, there are very few companies out there that would shun an integration with them. However, more and more legal tech companies are leaning in to collaboration with Office.

At the very least, many Legal Tech companies will integrate with Microsoft Outlook, or Word depending on the type of program. However, increasingly, we are seeing deep integrations with products like Teams, OneDrive, and Sharepoint. Clio Manage , for example, will start a new Team for you when you create a new matter.

Although alternative products are introduced seemingly daily, MS Word is still the industry standard for creating, manipulating, editing, sharing, and most importantly red-lining documents. And Microsoft knows this. Through Office , they have created a way to charge slightly more than what Word would be on its own, and give you access to many of these tools.

There is little reason other than personal preference to use alternative products for your basic tech stack. Keep in mind, however, that Google is doing this, too. So, this may not be the case for too much longer. Lawyers, like many other professionals, should take the time to understand the common features of Microsoft Office. Below are descriptions of common uses of MS Office applications and how they connect with each other.

This is the work-horse of the Office suite—at least for lawyers. Word is a processing, editing, publishing, and reviewing platform that is by far the industry standard. Lawyers should be using this to red-line documents, create standard files from templates, and automate files that are reused frequently. They should understand what meta-data is being stored, how to use version control and document compare , and how to use Quick Styles to make their document formatting easier.

For more on utilizing Word, head to our MS Word resource page. Outlook can be confusing sometimes, especially since the desktop version can serve up any email account you load into it. And, depending on what features you need, it may not be time to shift to the cloud-based program just yet.

But if you want more seamless integration with other Office programs, you may want to start heading that way. Many of the Outlook features that lawyers need relate to calendaring and managing time.

Lawyers using Microsoft Office should be utilizing the robust calendaring features, the ability to incorporate email into tasks, and the templated response features available. Other than scheduling, however, attorneys should also be using Outlook to make their communications more secure. A modern law office must store its documents somewhere other than in a physical file cabinet. A remote office needs to do it somewhere in the cloud. Microsoft Office offers two options for lawyers looking to store their data, and, depending on your set-up, either one could be right for you.

OneDrive is like personal storage in the Cloud. Although it can be used as an office network drive, that is not its best and highest use. Lawyers and law firms would use this instead of on-premises office network storage. Here are some of the most common technologies that are an integral part of the operation of a law firm:. Microsoft Office, Open Office, and Google Docs are common software suites that are used in many law firms. Knowledge of one of these programs is a must for legal assistants and paralegals.

As a legal professional, you will be communicating and exchanging documents with other parties. Being proficient in programs other than those used in your office is a great advantage when you are sent files with different file types created with different software systems. These office machines are commonly used in most offices. Having experience with these machines will be necessary to function in the office.

Knowledge of these machines will also allow you to easily learn and adapt to new hardware and equipment that is purchased by your firm. The ability to quickly learn and efficiently use these office machines is an important part of your job as a legal professional. Law firms use document management systems to handle document storage, organization, categorization, annotation and retrieval.

Documents are such a large part of every legal matter, a good legal document management system is crucial to the success of any law firm. There are many companies that offer legal document management software. While no one can learn all of these software programs, it is helpful to be familiar with at least one system, what it does and how it works.

Once you have these concepts, learning new systems, when necessary, will be easier to grasp and master. A video conference is a live, visual connection between two or more people residing in separate locations for the purpose of communication. Leave this stuff to the experts! Sometimes, that means doing it yourself. It had to be quick and easy. It had to protect the integrity of the evidence. And it had to be cheap. They wanted what many lawyers will come to see they need: the tools and techniques to stay in touch with the evidence in smaller cases without working through vendors and experts.

Outlook Express stores messages in plain text, by folder name, in files with the extension. Outlook stores local message data, attachments, folder structure and other information in an encrypted, often-massive database file with the extension. Because the PST file structure is complex, proprietary and poorly documented, some programs have trouble interpreting PSTs.

Outlook changes PST files. Shortcut World. Word Shortcuts ,by Shortcut World. Also provides shortcuts for and — very handy stuff. Here they are — the posts ranked highest during , the first full year for this blog. Posted in order of popularity, it is an interesting mix. Many thanks for stopping by.

Plain English Tools include Gobbledygook Generator. Sayeth or Saith? But Microsoft is sending its Office clip art to the digital beyond , where it shall rest in glory with Clippy, Zune, and the rest of the Redmond saints.

In other words, those wonky, yet charming images that graced countless PowerPoint presentations are in their last days. Microsoft already nixed the website where you could download Clip Art, so it may not be long before it disappears from Office entirely.

The good news is that Office already has better options for spicing up your files than relying on the dated and questionable-looking Clip Art. The literate i. For everyone else, practically anyone in a management position, Excel is an essential work tool. Despite this, a lot of people, especially those just stepping into a job are often intimidated by it.

In reality, if you learn Excel well enough, you can use it to keep time based records that update automatically, use it to store inventory, and even conduct surveys. That said, here are five very basic Excel functions that every beginner needs to know. Six Years Of iPhone J. Congratulations and thanks to Jeff Richardson for six years of iPhone J.

As usual, Jeff shares a sweet collection of apps in honor of his yearly anniversary. Thank you, Jeff! Seems like it was just yesterday that I wrote the first post on iPhone J.

Site traffic has grown steadily every year, and in just a few days, one of you is going to load iPhone J. Popular posts this year. Perhaps it reveals something about the topics that iPhone and iPad owners have been thinking about lately. Here are the ten most viewed posts published in the last year. Almost two years ago, we announced that we ended support for Google Calendar Sync. Starting on August 1, , this app will no longer sync events between your Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar.

Follow these instructions to uninstall Google Calendar Sync from your computer. This is frustrating, because as some folks point out, Microsoft should provide this integration for Outlook users. But the truth is, instead of helping its loyal Android customers, Microsoft wants more people using Windows phones and Office This news makes many Android-Outlook users want to abandon their Android devices all together.

Purely out of coincidence, I have a local friend who emailed me a similar question about syncing his calendar with Outlook:. You know that I am fairly stupid when it comes to this stuff! I use [a big name telephone company] as my primary email, and too many people have it to change it after so many years. I guess I could keep that as my primary email address and just use Google Calendar exclusively.

I just hate to have to log in to use the calendar. Lazy I guess. I do, however, also have a Gmail address! There are a number of third party applications available for syncing Google Calendar with Outlook. However, a lot of questions remain about whether Google Calendar will still sync with third party programs. I also suggest you keep up to date with any advances by following this Google products forum thread.

First, no attorneys should be using free Google accounts for their business work. Sign up for a Google Apps account — ask me for a referral partner discount discount code — that offers more features including no scanning , security, and encryption of email. If you do not have special litigation software and need to create a timeline exhibit for your case, hang on to this post.

It will come in handy, as will the Legal Office Guru Blog. Expose Your Weakness — Now! Find the unedited draft that you first circulated. Find the last long email that you sent to someone who matters — to the partner, the client, the general counsel, or the CEO.