(Showing) How To Improve Your Office’s Efficiency Through The Better Use of Word and Excel

Previously Recorded (June 27, 2023). Please note, this recording will only be available to access for 30 days past the scheduled date.

This program consists of the following presentations:

1 hr- Smart Template Building for Complex Documents:  Drafting is a bottleneck and pressure point in almost every law office.  Most lawyers draft new documents by finding old documents and modifying them to work for the next case or client.  Frankly, this approach has a high margin of error, it’s slow, and there are superior, alternative methods.  In this seminar, you’ll learn how to find and consolidate the best of your firm’s intellectual capital in a way that increases drafting speed and accuracy.  I’ll lay out the roadmap for professional template-building; and show you the spectrum of automation tools from the amazing things your word processor is already capable of to document assembly applications.  For document-intensive and transactional areas of practice, improved drafting methods directly impact the bottom line and improve client satisfaction.  Prepare to be amazed at the possibilities.

2 hrs- Automate Your Templates With Microsoft Word’s Built-In Functionality:  The best bang for your technology dollar is to learn to maximize the technology you already own.  This seminar is on point with that idea.  You have probably noticed the “Mailings” ribbon in Microsoft Word.  That ribbon should more accurately be the Automation ribbon as it has nothing to do with Mailing.  We’ll show you how to use Word’s merge function to automate your own documents without having to subscribe to an expensive document automation platform.  You can enter your client data into a simple Excel spreadsheet and easily merge it into multiple documents in succession or all at once.  Answer a question once and have the response fill in everywhere it needs to go.  Calculate pronouns and verb conjugation automatically.  Conditionally include text, phrases and paragraph based upon one or more conditions.  You won’t believe what amazing automation tools have been lurking in Word all of this time!  Ideally, this is a hands-on exercise, so bring your laptop and follow along if you’re inclined to do that.

3 hrs- Microsoft Excel for Legal Users:  If you have Microsoft Office, then you have Excel.  However, if you are like most lawyers, you're either underutilizing Excel or not using it at all.  In this seminar, we start with the basics and work our way up from there.  You'll learn powerful ways that Excel can improve your work product and make your life easier. Produce flawless fiduciary accountings, amortization schedules, real estate closing statements, disbursement schedules, medical bill summaries, and graphical representations of data (pie charts, bar graphs, etc.).  You'll also learn how to use Excel as a list manager and data source for mail merge functions (quickly creating hundreds of letters or labels in Word from a list of names and addresses in Excel).  We'll also cover many useful formulas for use with dates, numbers, text and logic (IF THEN).