If you’re interested in automation and you don’t think that you have enough spare time to learn more, give me 5 minutes of your busy morning and I'll make them count.
Don't worry, this isn't yet another article on whether lawyers should learn how to code. There's no need to be an expert in everything. That's why I believe that, instead, legal professionals should be open to borrow useful traits from the developer community and to adopt a "legal hacking" mindset: a do-er, collaborative and tech-minded attitude.
Your true competitive advantage is an open mind and the ability to build strategic partnerships. Ready to give it a try?
Step 1: Open Microsoft Word
Your trusted Microsoft Word companion has been assisting you with daily legal work since the beginning of your career. This familiar tool can do much more than highlighting texts and tracking changes. Of course, you already know this.
But have you already turned on the developer tab?
I mean this quite literally. For some reason, the developer tab in Microsoft Word is turned off by default. By opening the options (for Windows) or the preferences (for Mac), you can modify the ribbon which appears above your page and add the developer tab.
Step 2: Turn on the developer tab
Once you've turned it on, this is how it looks on Mac:
Step 3: Explore the options
I'd recommend to start playing around with the boxes (in the middle): the Text Box, the Check Box and the Combo Box. It's impossible to break anything at this stage.
A. Text Box
Once you've added a Text Box, you can define specific parameters:
- The type of content that can be entered: any type, a number, a date but also the current time, the current date and even calculations. Instead of having to add the date to your documents, you can simply add a current date field to your templates.
- The default content: if the same option is very often used across the different versions of the same model document, it's possible to pre-fill the information beforehand. For instance, if the rental contracts that you draft are almost always for a period of one year instead of three years.
- The format of the content: for example, whether the date should be written in US format.
- The maximum length of the content: this can be useful for submissions where the length is restricted to a maximum amount of words. Here, you have to indicate the length in characters but you can find useful tips online on the average amount of characters in X words.
B. Check Box
The Check Box is pretty much self-explanatory but the real differentiator is the Combo Box.
C. Combo Box
For example: your firm has several offices and you need to adapt the name of the city in the signature of your document. With the Combo Box, you can pre-fill the options and you only need to select the right one when drafting your document. Another straightforward example would be the name of the lawyer drafting the document.
It gets interesting when you start using the drop-down for fragments of texts that should appear in a legal document that you're drafting. Think about options relevant to the contract (e.g. a work contract for limited or unlimited duration) but also entire paragraphs.
Step 4: Ask why and try again
It only takes a few minutes to try out those options and they are very basic. So weren't your 5 minutes put to better use reading about blockchain, machine learning and big data?
- Long-term: I doubt it because I'm pretty sure that you prefer seeing lasting behavioural changes making a real impact in your organisation rather than being invited to give another keynote speech. In fact, net new revenue driven by technology is much more likely to come from your entire team starting to adopt a hacking mindset (including secretaries, knowledge managers, assistants and office managers), rather than from a buzzword tech purchase. And this starts with the very basics.
- Short-term: The added-value of those simple ‘tricks’ lies not only in the automation for yourself but in the knowledge transfer. It makes it easy to share expertise between offices in different locations, between experts but most importantly it allows to delegate part of the work to junior profiles and interns, who might be very enthusiastic to work with automated fields.
The goal of my article is to make sure that the next time you draft a document you wonder whether there is another (non-manual) way to achieve the same goal and that, instead of preparing a reading list, you try it out the same way you just did.
That's it? What about help text, macros or visual basic? If you want to learn more about the specific functionalities available in the developer tab, let me know in the comments and I'll expand on this very limited overview in a series of short articles.
