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Populate initials template

expediate makes it easy to manage your precedence and all your general correspondence documents let's have a look all of your standard templates or precedents are kept in one area called template editor in here every area of law you cover has a corresponding folder where the relevant template or standard documents are kept it's easy to either import them or create them right from scratch first we would choose on a category on the left and on the right hand side of the screen we're now seeing the contents of that folder doing a right click and new would create a new template for us in giving it a name you can see then it then gives it a location or address double clicking on it opens up that document in this case I've gone to starting from scratch so it's gonna be a blank or a document right first place you need to start is deciding what your margins are for your letterhead so if you know that your page layout should be or your Margy should be something specific go and change it to that right now let's look in here in this version of Word 2010 the following items hidden in add-ins if you've got an earlier version of word this should be visible for you on your standard word toolbar can you see here the power bar it says current 8 client title contacts ID that's what's going to give us easy access to data we've already captured and expediate and allow it be merged into the various files we're going to use it within the first one of these dropdowns relates to any data we have captured on the summary page of our file let's look and see what I mean by that in a file there's your summary page so any field on this page so whether it's who owns the file the file type the file code the file name etc they're available to you in the first drop-down there are two additional fields available to you there one is the current date now this is very handy I would always say to you never use words Auto dating in a Word document because you run the risk of it updating when you reopen the document again in many months time however if you use it from the expedient power part it will put in the date that you run the template and won't change it again on future so that's handy the second one is author who you signed into expediate as when you're running this template so if you log in as your initials it can pull those initials in and make them part of the file code for you the second drop down here is titled client title and it gives you access to all of the data in relation to your client let's look here if I double-click the client you'll see here as I open them up every piece of information you capture on your client it's in a separate field and the reason is so that you can access them all separately here in your power bar so if you want the title and the surname or just the first name you can reference them from this drop-down the third drop-down is relationship in relation to a contact so let's say on a file we had a contact so let's add in somebody here let's say find somebody else I have multiple contacts that two contacts whichever one I choose we'll be able to merge the data into the template when I run it the fourth one is the fourth field here is relation to her fields and that's we'll come back to that but that's the configurable area of expediate where you get to decide what else would you like to capture we did say this one's gonna be a letter to our client well let's look I'm going to say here then I want my clients title here followed by his face clients first name space surname the client could be a company so I am in fact going to pick up the clients company name as well don't worry if the client doesn't have any company name the whole thing will concertina up and we'll have no gaps is HR home address one client H address to one of the common mistakes at this point would be to go from picking up H addresses or home addresses to work addresses so just be conscious of that come down a little perhaps the next thing you might want in there is the date on the document I rap if I'm the summary page of the file you're using this as your RF but your bio code that's available to you on the first drop down of your power bar and it says their file code so if we put our cursor where we want it and we go drop down file code and in fact you might want a forward slash and you might also want to reference the file owner so that would be available to you too in that you've got your case owner there and then you might also want to reference it yourself who's typing the document so that would be author then you might put deer and you might want to reference your client to your you can either be formal title space surname comma returned or could be title first name returned leave the body text area that's what you're gonna put in whatever time whatever you want to type in on that individual letter and then always have your signature and in fact I would say to make that signature and the person's name that should be really one of your auto text so that you can use it over and over let's see how this template works in practice so I'm going to X out of it don't want to save changes yes now remember we created that in a criminal litigation file so I can go to any criminal litigation file to run that and see how it works so let's choose this file here to test our template out in now the first thing I want to make sure of is that there is some data there for it to merge so yes I do have a client on the file I only have one line of an address though so I can only expect one line of an address to be merged in into activity then I'm going to go add template now presuming you would have a multitude of templates there you can search for the one you're looking for put in any part of a name and you can see here there how it finds it for me select the template go next and finish and it will go off into the background it'll find the template document I'm looking for and within the database it'll find the data of that client to put into the document and you can see there what it's come up with as I've expected details are vast particular client now it's worthwhile at this point in time when you're creating an initial template spend a little bit of time make sure it's absolutely correct I would actually print it out onto your letterhead page to make sure it's perfectly aligned so that you don't have to farid modify it each time you run it you might also decide the parts of this it's perhaps the wrong font or some of it should be in bold or there's something else different that is the company standard in terms of documentation if that's the case there's no point in changing this copy of the letter we're going to close this copy cancel it I don't really want that it was only a test and back into template editor and that's the way you make the changes so let's say I decide I want the RF to be in bold and I might decide that it actually printed on my letterhead not quite correctly I want it down a little bit okay let's try that one out now close out of it and I want to save changes yes please back into our file and if we go again add template letter to client home and finish again I print it out make sure it's correct and it's ready then for you to put in whatever ever body text has been dictated the good thing though is once you've spent a little bit of time and made your template it's reusable over and over again in any file increment criminal litigation because that's where we created it so again in this case I can go add template this client this template next and finish and it will pull in the details to do with this file so it references the client on whichever file you used it in so different file all together also ready for whatever body text I need to put it now in this particular template you'll remember we referenced a client it could have been though a contact it could have been an opposing solicitor could have in a bank it could have been any contact and I can remember going into our add-ins that's where we have decided what to reference if you have ever used words mail merge that's basically what this is and the power bar is what's giving you access to the data that you can pull in and reference now generally there are two things that can go wrong with a template either you've asked it to merge the wrong data or there's no data there for it to merge one other thing though if you are using documents that have been around for many years within your company and you want to make those into templates and expediate bear in mind that those documents could over time have had their own preset macros or workflows built into them that they could conflict with the macros or their mail merge that we're doing here with an expediate so sometimes I would say to you if if when you're trying to use an older document and make it into a template in expediate sometimes you're better off instead of importing it starting from scratch go right click new give it a name and then paste in the body text you want if that document bear in mind it doesn't have to be a simple letter it could be a complex document it could be a summons it could be a family home decoration one last neat thing to tell you about this just to give you a sense of it I'm gonna come out a template editor for a moment and let's go into a file fields this is the customizable area of expediate and the point of this is to give you the ability to create spaces to capture data yourself that you know you use over and over again so a quick sense of this is going in to maintain I'll create a background area I'll give it a heading and against that heading I'm going to capture some key data so let's say court record now I could have multitude of different things in here but just to give you a sense of this one so I'm in a file now the files in criminal litigation there's my summary page there's my people page there's my activity page and now have a fields page which obviously could have a lot more data that I've put in majors now here's one of the handy things if I now go into a criminal litigation file do you remember of our power bar the fourth one had been blank before once you create fields they're available to you to reference within your template documents fields by the way should always be short sharp bits of information they're not clauses so things like court record the opposing solicitors and their reference number in a conveyancing file that could be the folio number of the county the purchase price data like that that would be handy to be able to type once in the file and merge over and over again into various documents