Today's issue of TL NewsWire covers software that adds legal research and litigation drafting tools to Microsoft Office via the Ribbon (see article below), a scanner rental service, an iPhone time management app, and a cloud practice management system for litigation. Don't miss the next issue.
GIVE MICROSOFT WORD AND OUTLOOK A LAW DEGREE
Microsoft Word and Outlook don't realize you're a lawyer. That's too bad because you spend so much time using these iconic software products. Your usage generates a wealth of data about your cases in the documents you create and the email messages you send and receive. Realizing this, LexisNexis teamed up with Microsoft to help you leverage this data to automate many common tasks.
Lexis for Microsoft Office 4.2 … in One Sentence
Launched recently, Lexis for Microsoft Office 4.2 adds legal research tools to Microsoft Word and Outlook and litigation drafting tools to Microsoft Word.
The Killer Feature
An email message arrives with an attached brief from opposing counsel. You need copies of all the cases and other source materials cited in the brief. Time for a ton of manual labor, right?
Not with the new version of Lexis for Microsoft Office, which adds a button called "Get Cited Docs" to Word's Ribbon. Clicking the button taps into your Lexis Advance account and places all the cited documents into a virtual stack. In addition to reading these materials on your PC, you can print and/or email them (PDF format). You can also apply filters such as displaying negative treatment from Shepard's to start your own research.
Get Cited Docs works with Word and PDF documents. In the latter case, technology from Nuance converts the PDF document into Word format on-the-fly. A document need not arrive as an email attachment. Get Cited Docs can import and then work its magic on any Word or PDF document with citations.
Other Notable Features
Lexis for Microsoft Office also assists you when writing. For example, Check Cite Format checks your citations against the Bluebook, California, or New York rules. It shows your citations in context and suggests corrections, essentially acting like a spell checker. It also updates "Id" citations.
As its name suggests, Check Quotes compares quotes in your document to the source material in Lexis Advance. When it finds a difference, it shows you the original in context and offers you a suggested correction. It works with block quotes and understands brackets and ellipses.
After cleaning up your document with Check Cite Format and Check Quotes, Prepare TOA automates the creation of a table of authorities that it validates against Lexis Advance. Options include adding, editing, and moving headings, separating cases and statutes, separating federal and state sources, and placing party names on separate lines. You can update the table of authorities as often as necessary.
Lexis for Microsoft Office also adds functionality to Outlook by highlighting keywords such as citations, companies, judges, lawyers, etc. Clicking on a highlighted item displays the corresponding court opinion, etc. from Lexis Advance. You can also display search results from Bing and Google as well as run citations through Shepard's.
What Else Should You Know?
Lexis for Microsoft Office works with Microsoft Office 2007, 2010, and 2013. It requires a Lexis Advance subscription. Learn more about Lexis for Microsoft Office 4.2.
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