Create a Professional Fees Invoice Format in Word for Legal Needs

Professional fees invoice format in word for Legal

hello and welcome to microsoft word for legal assistance formatting text paragraphs and more my name is sean dillman and this is a presentation that i gave recently to about 100 lawyers across the country and it went really well and i received many wonderful testimonials and a lot of great comments following the presentation so i thought that i would turn this into a youtube video so that even more people could benefit from seeing it so before i begin i'd like to make a few quick comments just to help you get the most out of this presentation i'm going to be showing you a lot of different screens that are in microsoft word so that this is a really practical demonstration and a walkthrough for you so please ensure that you've clicked uh wherever you need to click on your screen to make sure that the presentation appears full screen on your monitor on my side i've tried to increase the size of my software as much as possible you'll see that i have a large word screen i've got a large cursor and a large mouse arrow but i can only make it so big so please make sure that you're in full screen mode on your side so that you can see all of the little details and with respect to the materials that you'll be seeing in this video all of these presentation materials are available to you just visit my website at seandelman.com and you can request them through there so that includes all the presentation slides that you'll be seeing as well as all of the word documents that i'll be showing you there's also a hotkey reference guide and just to give a little bit more information about the materials you've got more than 100 slides so it's it's pretty in-depth i wanted to give you a really fantastic slide so that you can see all of the stuff that i'll be covering um just in case you find this presentation to be too fast-paced or if you forget anything or if somebody comes in and interrupts you or something like that you'll have all of the slides uh for reference so that you can you can look back at them and of course i'm not going to be looking at every slide in this presentation that wouldn't be effective it would take far too much time so i am going to be jumping through the slides throughout this presentation so if you're ever not sure where we are please just look in the bottom left-hand corner and keep in mind that i'm going to be going between uh sharing my screen of microsoft word and then i'll be going back to the slide so i'll be kind of jumping back and forth so if you ever feel like you're lost if i'm in a screen share just wait until i go back into the slides with respect to the word documents as i mentioned you have access to these documents that i'll be using you don't have to do anything with them this is not an interactive presentation i don't expect you to be formatting your documents and doing work on the documents alongside me um if you want to work on them after if you want to use them or if you want to see them they're there for you that's why why they're there they're a resource but you don't need to do anything with them certainly not during the presentation finally there's a hot key reference guide i love hotkeys i use them all the time they've kind of become second nature to me i'll be mentioning them throughout so i've given you just kind of a partial list there's there's more hotkeys uh than them would fit on a single page that's for sure but i've given you some of the most common ones that i use and ones that i'll be using in this presentation because i won't be showing you my actual mouse like my hand on my mouse i won't be showing you my keyboard but i will be showing you where i'm clicking and then i can tell you the hotkeys that i'm using as i'm using them okay so with that here's uh some information about me but in a nutshell i was called to the bar of british columbia in 2016. before entering the world of law i studied computer engineering technology i worked as a web developer and i was a technician at ibm throughout my legal career i've practiced as a barrister and a solicitor and in 2018 i opened a law firm with a colleague where i continued my practice and was a co-managing partner i now consult on it and i teach lawyers and legal assistants best practices for using technology in legal practice i regularly speak on technology related topics to law firms law schools bar associations and cla providers okay and this is the final administrative slide so the target audience for this presentation is the average legal assistant with basic computer skills i am assuming that you know how to you know turn on your computer and uh open microsoft word uh send emails use a web browser do all kinds of stuff like that but i'm not assuming anything beyond that i'm not assuming that you're you're an expert or that you've been using the software for a certain amount of time or anything like that so i really do try to walk you through the basics and make this applicable for everybody and as for the sections i won't go into the details because that's what we're going to be discussing but essentially we're going to look at the versions of word first then we're going to look at things around distance meaning distance between lines uh distance between characters distance between the edges of the page things like that we're going to look at look and navigation which in includes altering how fonts look altering styles which is kind of something that controls fonts uh and altering headings so those those are all kind of connected concepts and we're going to look at all of that we're also going to look at lists which includes bulleted lists numbered list and multi-level lists and we're also going to be looking at page settings so headers footers adding page numbers adding section breaks and adding links and within that i'm actually going to show you a demonstration that shows you how you can use these tools together to produce documents that are much more powerful and will allow you to draft documents much more quickly and with greater accuracy okay so with that let's let's get started so a very quick note uh this is our first uh slide slide four in the bottom left hand corner here um we're i just wanted to talk to you about the different versions of word that uh should be covered by this and when i say should be covered um you know word 2010 2013 2016 and office 365 is the current version of word i've been using microsoft word i guess since you know 1995 or you know when i was 10 years old started using computers you know quite quite a while and word has generally been pretty consistent with making sure that something that functions in a previous version will still function in the next version however that being said if you ever find that i tell you something and it doesn't work quite that way in your version of word please just let me know and we'll find the correct way but i i am confident that uh it works that everything that i'll be discussing works for these versions so if if you're on word 2013 that's fine if you're still in 2010 that's fine it should work i produced this image for you to see that essentially even though word has been changing through the years it is staying you know roughly the same this first section i want to talk to you about distance so by distance i'm i what i've included in there is margins tabs and indentation and line and paragraph spacing so we're going to start with margins and i'm going to jump to this slide slide number eight and in my jurisdiction in in victoria bc uh the court here when you file a an originating document in the court system uh you know like when you're starting a lawsuit um of course the the you do not already have a file number because that's something that the court gives it and the court will generally put one of these stamps on it they'll either use kind of this huge rectangular stamp or they'll use the small round stamp and they'll stamp that on the document so in my jurisdiction a lot of lawyers and legal assistants like to do this they actually like to set up custom margins on the first page of their notice of civil claim document um so that there's plenty of room for that that stamp and just to show you this is what we're trying to avoid we're trying to avoid a page where the court doesn't have room to put their stamp this this is a picture with one inch margin so this is what we want to avoid so i'm just going to open up my notice of civil claim document so this is the document that you have in your materials and as you can see there's a big white space here on the top left corner i'm going to turn on this ribbon because we are going to need to see these little lines at the bottom so i'm going to turn on ruler um i've turned a lot of this stuff off to make it easier for you to see what i'm doing but some of it we're going to need so if you look on a document if you look at the top you've seen this before there's this white area with these numbers this essentially kind of gives you the information about the page this is a standard eight and a half by eleven uh page um so this is you know uh this is at eight and a half uh width by 11 inch height and you can change margins um by by taking your mouse dragging this around up here um there's these little indentation tab stops and things like this that can be altered and and we're going to be looking at all of this but what i'm going to suggest that you do if you want to change your margins is that you don't drag and drop things because in my experience dragging and dropping is generally a little less precise so what we're going to do instead is we're going to click on this button that says layout then we're going to click over here on margins and it's going to bring up a sub window that's going to start showing us some some kind of quick quick shortcut keys or not shortcut keys but shortcuts you know this is our last custom setting this is a normal setting this is a narrow setting moderate wide mirrored etc what i'm going to do is i'm going to come down here to the bottom and this is going to be a theme throughout this presentation i'm going to click on this little this text that says custom margins by clicking custom margins it's going to bring us into a separate like a new window is going to come up and throughout this presentation i'm going to be showing you lots of these little new windows like these small windows that i bring up as opposed to just working out here as opposed to just working using the ribbon i often come into these smaller windows because these windows give you more control so in this case in this document as you can see here two inch two inch so that's top left and then bottom and right is one inch one inch uh ignore gutter gutter relates to adding space if we're going to be binding this document we we are not going to be doing that so that's kind of more of a maybe a publishing thing or something so you can ignore that if you've ever wondered what that is but on this document we can change the margin so if we want to set this back to standard margin top and left i just changed it to one and one and there you go now we're back to a custom margin or sorry a standard margin of one inch margins but i'm going to go here click margins custom margins top two left two i'm going to click ok and that is back to that back to there you'll see that the second page is standard one inch margins you know we don't want this this two inch left and two inch top margin to be on the whole document i'm going to show you later on in this presentation how you can use section breaks to make a change that will affect one page but not other pages so just hold on for that the next thing i want to talk to you about is indentation so this text over here has been indented over to the right and i'm going to show you why we've done that again in my jurisdiction as i mentioned when you when you file a document with the court they're going to actually stamp a real life stamp assuming that you do it in person or if you do it electronically they're going to put a stamp in the top right corner here where it says numbers so that they can give your your your newly your newly born lawsuit a file number or your probate application a file number or whatever you're filing with the court they're gonna they're going to give it a file number i like this style which is to have this text in the top right corner but i also want it to be justified to the left meaning i want it to be in a line like i don't want it to be you know look like this just one second i don't want it to look you know like this or or something ugly right i want this i want the number and the city you know the this the name of the city you know victoria registry or whatever i want this to line up perfectly and the way that i'm causing it to line up is i set a new indentation uh or a new yeah a new new indent and that is up here so again as i mentioned i'm just going to go just ctrl z to undo that as i mentioned you can come up here and you can click and you can hold these things to drag this around like i could drag it to three and i'm confident that that's a three or two or whatever and you can do that and that's fine but again what i like to do is hold shift i'm going to highlight this text and then i'm going to right click on it i'm going to go to paragraph and again in this window you see here where it says indentation it tells us that we have a 4.5 inch indentation and that indentation is off of this margin which is our two inch margin so if you do the math uh if we're at a two inch margin and if this is indented over uh 4.5 inches it's 6.5 inches across the page obviously the numbers are not terribly important but just to give you an idea of of the specifics of what we're looking at so um the reason i'm showing you that it's important to use indentation is if you didn't do this like let's say you just we're gonna you wanted to put text over here you know um number uh city registry uh let's do it like this and you wanted it to be over here well you can't very well i'm just holding the space bar just you can't just like space it over like like you could right of course you could do this and it would work right but this this is not you know it it it roughly worked right it roughly worked but it's not very nice and and actually i want to go to to this slide uh this thing um so if if you look at this little button i'm not sure if you've seen it before this is slide 17 there's a little button in word that will show and hide formatting a lot of people i have met don't like this button because they find it to be annoying when it turns on i've also included the shortcut key shift ctrl 8 turns it on and turns it off people find it to be annoying because it kind of makes your document look ugly but i'm going to bring the the document back over and show you that uh ctrl shift 8 ctrl shift 8 i'm turning it on and off on and off your screen your screen is not malfunctioning i'm doing this on purpose on off on off on off so the reason i'm doing that is because it shows us all of these little hidden characters that you wouldn't normally see and the reason that i want to turn this on i can also click it is we want to see these little hidden characters so that we understand what's going on in the page so these little dots that you're seeing here these are spaces and that's why when i turn this off you can't see them because they're spaces right they're invisible so when we're formatting it's very important to have this on so that we can see what's going on with the page this little unit here is actually a really interesting uh a little i guess paragraph in and of itself because what you have here is you have this little icon i'm going to try to zoom up on it quite large you have this little icon which is kind of this arrow down into the left and then you also have this icon which is that reverse p thing so this this symbol i guess means it's a soft return which means that you can add a new line like let's say i wanted to add it so let's say that this is pair one and then we want to add a new line and then this is line two and then we add a new line i'm holding shift and i'm pressing enter that's the hotkey by the way line three and then i come down here and then i want to make a new paragraph i press enter instead of shift enter and then i say paragraph two uh oops line line one whoop line one line two the reason i'm doing that is because if i highlight this text all of this i right click on it i go back to paragraph this is where we can start controlling things like the spacing before the paragraph the spacing after the paragraph the spacing between the lines so if i want this to be double spaced between these lines i can turn it on here and if you look here in this little preview window and i apologize i understand this preview window is very small it's small on my screen so on your screen it's probably looking you know even smaller this little preview window shows us what it's going to look like before we click ok and before we make that change live but let's say i wanted to you know do something you know i wanted 12 point fonts you know before and after and i wanted these double spaced i click ok and then it does it to that but it does it just to that paragraph you see it doesn't do it to this paragraph um so if if i come down here to some body text that actually makes a little bit more sense as well which is to say so so this whole section this this first section about the parties right um i will come from here to here i i held shift and i highlighted the text and i pressed enter because these are all independent paragraphs i can highlight them all right click go to paragraph and i can make changes that will affect each of these paragraphs independently for example the spacing that i have here i have 12 point spacing after each paragraph which gives it this nice look that that spaces it out a bit but let's say we also want to add a little bit of line spacing between the lines themselves just to make it easier to read we could add a custom line spacing like 1.25 i'm going to press enter and now it has increased the space between all of these lines by 1.25 maybe that's not so visually appealing i'm going to hold ctrl and press set and go back to the standard formatting but i'm showing you this as an example so that you understand what you can do by highlighting text and making sure that it's it's its own paragraph and then using the this window this paragraph window so that you have more control over these really fine these fine features i actually have a slide on this i'll jump to um i am at slide number part of me uh slide number 55. i'm jumping ahead i'll be coming back but slide 55 shows us really how these specific fields are affecting specific parts of the document so okay so i'm going to bring the document back in and i'm going to hold ctrl and i'm going to press z or z to undo all of the changes that i just made so that i can put this document back to its original form so the reason i want to do that is i want to talk for a moment about these four little icons left justify center right or sorry left align center right align and justify and i want to take this text which is in the supreme court of jurisdiction i'm going to put it over here and i tabbed this over twice so again because we have because we have this button turned on we can see the the hidden marks in the document this little arrow to the right is a tabs which is which is that tab key on your keyboard above cap locks uh caps lock so if you press tab tab tab tab it tabs it it jumps uh basically a set distance those set distances are standard it's uh they're basically half inch one inch two inch you can see at the top here that uh it's it's lining this text text up with a half inch one inch one and a half inch two inch etc and that tab happens off of your margin in this case it's a two inch margin but what i'm trying to what i want to show you here really quickly is that the these this tab this tabbed over text kind of looks like this text as far as where it appears on the screen but it's very different meaning this we got this text here by tabbing it over which is not really what we want to do so i'm gonna i'm gonna just push this text down for a moment what we do instead is we take this text we highlight it and we use this features which is center control e which i think it means equal because what control e does i'm going to press this button uh control l uh so control e control l control e control l control l is standard left left justificat or left align which is normal when you open any document and um with a left align you know it's it's sitting right on the margin but because we're drafting this notice a civil claim to start this lawsuit and it has a specific style we want to center this text so instead we're going to go ctrl e um this text is also left aligned it's left aligned to this margin or this indent i should say um we can write justify i held control i pressed r we can justify the text i'm going to hold ctrl press j now justifying a single line doesn't look very good because there's there's nothing there's not no comparison uh there's no you need you need multiple lines of text so i'm going to come down here to this body text i'm going to turn off the paragraph uh i'm going to turn off our our view and i'm going to i'm going to toggle between control l which is left justified and you can see that change happening here as well i'm gonna go between this one and this one this one and this one so justified left justified left so i've got a diagram to show you this as well part of me uh slide number 36 so i'm showing you on this slide that left and right sorry left and align and justify look very similar if you look at this part of the text but once you start looking at this part of the text you see that it's very different because justify basically evens out the spacing between all of the the words and the units there to produce a nice effect where it's nice and flush on the left margin and the right margin so for legal drafting to really have a polish document at the end of the day um you know whether it's a you know a letter to opposing counsel or articles of incorporation or you know court documents whatever justifying the text is definitely the best way to go so okay so i'm going to jump back into the documents uh i just want to um come up back to the top and go and show you where i was tabbing this text so i want to show you that you can use custom tab stops so if i right click on this again and i go to paragraph where is that and then you can come down here to tabs you can actually set custom tab positions up here so as i said the default tab stops are at .5 inches and you can actually change that but we're not we're not going to do that so the standard default uh tab stops are at you know 0.5 inch 1 inch 1.5 inch 2 inch etc but let's say we wanted text to be you know 1.75 inches so if we come here i've got my my cursor right here this is at 1.75 and again as i mentioned the reason that i don't and that's actually this tab stop here the reason that i don't do this manually is if i'm dragging this around up here you know you can't really tell is that you know 1.75 or is that 1.8 or what is that right so i don't like to do that i like to to go into the menu and do that and if i come down here and look at something like this which is a a list you'll see where setting a custom tab stock can actually come in handy so i'm going to right click on this i'm going to i'm going to click on adjust list and indents it's a little different setting because this is for a list you know i didn't go into paragraph and then tabs uh i just went into adjust list indent so it says text index 0.75 i'm going to change this to a one inch indent and click enter and there you go so what you see happen is this pushed that this text off of these a and b further over on the page and in my view you know be by by giving this text a little bit more room to breathe as opposed to if you look down here if you look over here um this is not sorry this is much better looking uh in my view than than this because you know it's got room to breathe and then we're we're tabbed over so that is the explanation of of kind of how you can set custom tab stops why you would want to set custom tab stops so um i want to show you this this document so this is something that i kind of talk about how you can space paragraphs apart and i i talk about the difference in using line spacing and return spacing so if you look on the left hand corner of the left hand document you see all of these little p icons which means paragraph returns and if you look over here you don't see any at all so i'm going to show you that back in this notice of civil claim so if we come down here and i'm going to turn the formatting on again so we can see it you'll see here that we've got these different um paragraphs under this section party so what if i wanted these sections to be spaced out more well as i showed you we can highlight all of the text in this section we can right click we can go to paragraph and then we can increase the the distance so if we wanted more spacing after each paragraph we could say 18 points 24 points 30 points whatever you know i'll make it 30 points just to show you something kind of kind of you know easy to see so with 30 points we've got a huge space after the paragraph but you see that we still just have this little paragraph icon here and then we have that big space so alternatively what if instead of spacing our documents like like that what if we had done um something like this paragraph returns um or or return spacing part of me is kind of is kind of the the term that i was giving it so return spacing so if i do this if i do return spacing like if i use returns to produce my space between these paragraphs we've achieved a similar result which means we wanted to increase white space between these paragraphs and we've done it however there's a couple problems the first problem is as you can tell it took longer because i had to individually add them and then the other problem is that if we ever want to change this spacing we would have to go back and individually remove all of these uh you know paragraphs and these spaces so i guess my point is that what you really want to do to have nice clean tight documents that are easy to work with is you want to use the the spacing options that are available when you click right you go to paragraph and it says space in here and you can use you can change your line space and you can change your paragraph spacing you want to do it in here you don't want to just rely on adding spacing using your keyboard or something like that so look at navigation we're going to be talking about the things that kind of make up the style of the document and to do that i'm going to use the articles of incorporation document that i have prepared so we're going to be essentially looking at a lot of these um these these these things that are here um you know the stuff that stuff that you see all the time when you open the document i'm just gonna jump ahead to this area stuff that you use all the time but a lot of it we don't use in legal practice you know like if i highlight this text and if i come over here you know i you know with legal documents i'm not going to like make it purple and give it shade in and stuff like that like that just doesn't happen right we're not going to use that um you know strikethrough sometimes we use bold we use all the time italics we use all the time underline we use all the time you can change the style of the underline by clicking here i don't find that to be too useful but if you wanted to do that you can do that i want to make a quick note about this highlighting we do that sometimes you know a section of a document that is not yet completed or something you will often highlight that yellow as a warning i want to point out that uh highlighting text and then and then making it black highlighting that does not redact text um i there was a story in the news a couple years ago of an i think he's an immigration lawyer he got in trouble because he thought that he redacted a document in word by highlighting the text with black but i'm going to turn the color of the text to uh white and you will see that the uh the text is actually under there it's it hasn't gone anywhere you just highlighted it black right so anyway i just want to put that out there as a warning going back to what i had mentioned before i try to avoid using these settings out here and i generally try to right click on the document go to font and it brings up the sub window and this sub window again it gives you all all kinds of access to other things that are not in just out here right these are kind of special things you see some of the same stuff font style size through double strike through and a cool thing about this window is you know when you're making your changes you know bold italics will make it really big we'll change the change the font oh it didn't like that okay we won't change the font but anyway you see in this window down here that it shows you a preview of what the text is going to look like after you make it and actually on the subject of size i want to point out a hotkey that i use all the time if you hold ctrl and shift above your alt key there is an open bracket and a closed bracket kind of um key i use this all the time to make text you know if i need to make it really small or if i need to make it you know really big or whatever i need to do i'm just doing this using my my keyboard of course you can do that here you can go like this using your mouse but as i mentioned you know i generally prefer to use hotkeys and i generally prefer to use um like sub windows so i'm just going to hold ctrl z and put it back to its size another really useful feature is this one which will change your case so sentence case lowercase uppercase capitalize each word and toggle case um so the hotkey for that is uh oh it's yeah shift f3 i use it so much so much i don't look at it though so if you hold shift and press f3 you'll see that that's lower case i press it again uh that is i guess it made this uppercase and it made that uppercase i it did not make that uppercase because it doesn't it doesn't know that that is um this this is just capitalizing the first letter of each sentence not each word um i hold shift i press f3 again it makes it all caps so it doesn't cycle through capitalize each word or toggle case but if you want to capitalize each word just click on that and it'll do that so the thing that's great about that is if you've ever received text from somewhere where you know like let's let's say somebody gave you this text down here or you found it somewhere but it was all in lower case and then you go oh well i don't want it to all be in lower case you don't want to have to go through and make that a capital b capital o capital d you know whatever you click here capitalize each word done you know and that's not so nice because you know this these are kind of more sentences so click here um sentence case right and and then it capitalizes you know the first letter um obviously it's missing british columbia and stuff like that but anyway you get my point it can be a very useful tool to um it can be a very useful tool to be able to change your case all at the same time so now i want to show you something that is very um very helpful i'm going to come down here about controlling space between characters this is something that has presumably happened to all of us which is you've got a document like this you're humming along everything's fine you like it and then you've got this problem something very annoying which is this paragraph here as you can see you probably want it to be all on one page right it's it's just kind of dangling over if i take out this word you if i delete it now it fits on one page great but we want the word view to be there you know let's say we've already done our very best to to edit this paragraph down just to the point where it's saying exactly what we want it to say and we do not want to remove any words okay so what do you do and this is a trick that high school students have been doing for a long time to get around page counts and english classes and stuff so this sentence here it says if you have ever had trouble getting a single sentence to fit on a single line i have a way to help you so we're going to right click this text we're going to go to font and then we're going to go to advanced and again this is only available by going in through this sub window so you're going to see here where it says character spacing spacing normal if you click on normal expanded and condensed you can expand or condense the space between the characters not the size of the characters just the space between the characters so i'm going to leave it on normal but i'm just going to put my uh my cursor here in the the control window and i'm going to press my up and down keys so if you look down here at this preview window you will see that it is changing the size so what i'm going to do so so here i'll show you kind of a an extreme example so if we condense the space by two points this is what it does to the sentence you know you can't even read that right because all of the letters are on top of each other that's that's a terrible thing and what if we were to expand the size you know we add two points between every every letter well again it looks very ugly and spaced out that's that's not what we want but what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring it down to uh i'm going to condense it by point four points and there you go it all fit on one side uh on one line so i'm gonna i'm gonna use the control z and the control y keys i'm gonna undo and redo just so you see it undo redo oops sorry undo redo undo redo and it's a really good trick like essentially if you look at all of this text this is normal uh text uh 12 point font i'm guessing yes 12 point font with normal spacing between the characters this one sentence is the same it's 12 point font same font but the space between the characters has been reduced and i actually produced a a uh this diagram i got a nice picture of a uh well what do you call this uh a vice to show you that you know yes we have squeezed the um we have squeezed the text but you can barely tell so if we come back to this slide number number 68 by the way slide 68. um here's the first sentence if you ever have trouble getting a single sentence on a single line here's the condensed spacing um it looks very similar and then this final eye shows you how much space we saved we saved this much was just enough space that we needed and and actually this this slide number 70 you know in my jurisdiction there are court mandated um page limits for you know things like applications and different kind of court documents the court of appeal has pretty stringent um uh limits so you know i i wouldn't want to get in trouble with the judge who who pulls out a ruler and says hey wait a minute i found that you changed your spacing in this sentence but you know i really i really would uh i don't think that that would happen i think it would take a heck of a judge to do something like that um so okay so uh hotkeys i've talked about that please see the reference guide if you haven't already um i do include most of i believe every reference hotkey that i mentioned in here i believe is in there i'm a big fan of hotkeys i've got a youtube channel i made a whole video about hotkeys that i use in legal practice so if you're interested please it's there so now we're going to look at styles and and headings a bit of a shift in gears but still it's within this this realm of of the look of the document but headings actually also have a dual role so headings affect how the document looks but it also affects how the document functions so i'm going to hold ctrl and press f to bring up this navigation window on the left i'm going to click here where it says headings and this is probably something you've seen in documents before i'm going to right click and click collapse all just so you can see them all so this is a a version of articles of incorporation that i've used um the original document has about 40 parts or something this i cut it down to 14 just to you know just so i wasn't giving you a document that was too long it is just a demonstration so um this document is made up of of sections and headings uh and we're gonna talk about sections and we're talking about headings right now so if we come down here to part one information you'll see over here actually that uh when i got when i put my cursor on part one interpretation it caused this to highlight so this is a heading i'm going to click up here on styles because i have my microsoft word so squished to make it big for you it's not at the top bar but in your version of word you'll probably just see headings up there um in the top bar you probably won't even need to click this button but anyway so heading 1 is here um i can right click on that i can go to modify i'm not going to walk you through all of this stuff because we've kind of covered it in what we've done already but my point is as i as i kind of promised earlier uh we're looking at the submenus that really give you the finer controls so within heading one you can control the font the size whether it's bold italic underline all of this stuff the spacing you know the this gives you the information about the spacing right here and then if you click down here on format well holy smokes you've got even more right you can you can do the fine-tuning of the fonts the paragraphs the tabs the borders et cetera et cetera et cetera it would take far too long for me to get into all of that so i'm not going to but the point is to show you that you can style the heading to look however you want it to look in this case uh this is an articles of incorporation we merely want part one part two part three to look different and be centered so that it sets off what comes after it so what comes after it something like this definitions so if i click over here to make this bigger definitions construction of words singular and plural words etc so these sub headings i'm going to click here again to styles heading two so heading to right-click modify this is the specific settings for heading two heading two because of its number it is subordinate to heading one so it looks different than heading one um not too different but instead of it being all caps it is a sentence case it is bold just like heading one but it is left justified it is not centered and because it's subordinate the software knows that when it starts to produce this function on the left this navigation you know it knows that uh heading two goes under heading one and and if you had a heading number three likewise it would go under here and so on and so forth so as i said aesthetically this is pleasing you know as pleasing as a you know an article of incorporation goes it's not some you know beautiful document but we want it to be just clean and easy to use and easy to read but in addition to it being aesthetically pleasing it's very useful because if i want to go over here and right click and say expand all and let's say this was the full version of my articles and let's say that it was um you know 40 sections long and it was i don't know 60 pages or whatever you know three times longer than it is right now um navigating the navigating the document starts to become a problem so if i want to go and find out about appointment of attorneys you know obviously i can search for it too you know uh appointment of attorney i can do that and okay there you go that was easy it's section 12.5 but instead of doing that you know you can also just click over here i'm just gonna click again collapse all you know if i know i want to go into part four which is about share transfers and then i know that i want to go 4.5 transfer feed you know i click on it and it brings it up right here on the right hand corner right it's kind of hard for me to show it show you right when it happens because it's very fast right you know part six alteration of capital i click that it takes me to that part you know directors it takes me to that part so in addition to it being aesthetically useful it's useful to navigate the document it's also useful to alter the document and and build on the document so for example let's say there was some change in the law and we need to add a new section to our articles of incorporation i could go up here to styles and i could click styles heading 1 i could say part 15 new section and i can do it that way and if you look over here on the left hand side you see that it added part 15 new section and then i can say you know new sub section i can highlight that and i can go to styles and i can go you know new subsection it doesn't have the number in but typically what i do if i need to add something to a document and i already have it i i just take it from the previous section so for example uh part 14 i'm going to highlight this i'm going to highlight this i'm going to highlight this i'm going to go to the end of this section uh enter control v to paste and then i'm going to and then i'm just going to change this the stuff that i took right why reinvent the wheel you know new section uh new section i suppose with this numbering i'll have to start a new list so that it's not section 14 so that it's 15.1 and stuff like that uh and then you know text goes here so section sorry headings and subheadings you know very important but they're important for multiple reasons they're important because they help us control the document but they also control how the document looks um slide 79 is is just kind of an example of trying me me trying to show you that there's a lot going on kind of all at once and uh and that's that's the power of headings um this stuff too you know you can collapse the sections you can highlight everything in this section you can print entire sections you know theoretically if you wanted you can just drag and drop sections so if i wanted directors to be set part 12 and vote of shareholders to be sorry i want this to be 12 and this to be 11. i can just grab this drag it let go of it part 12 change that to say part 11. obviously all my numbering is is messed up now click on this one instead of it saying part 12 or sorry part 11 it can be part 12 and there you go again these this this sub numbering is is messed up because i did that but it was very easy to drag that section around but if you drag sections around that um are independent of numbering then you know let's say you're you're drafting some document with three sections uh and then later you want the third section to be in the center or move to the first again you can just drag them around if you've done it using headings so i'm just going to hold ctrl and press z just to put the document back to how it was look at all these changes we've made okay so now that document is back to the way it was um so yeah it does take time to set up uh we're on slide 90. it definitely takes time to set up but you know if you're going to be using these documents you know day after day and and over and over it definitely is worth your time and effort to set them up um okay so uh we're at uh slide number 91 i'm going to go back to my notice of civil claim i'm going to go to the end in my jurisdiction the court has mandated if you're using legislation or if you're relying on legislation in your claim that you mention what it is however the court hasn't really mandated very strongly how exactly they want to see it so most people here just put it as a list at the end so this is a bulleted list we're going to be looking at this this and this so if we click on this down arrow um you can access these different types of bullets most of these like this one's kind of funky i couldn't see using that you know in legal practice this check mark one is useful you know if i've sent letters to clients and i've said to them you know i've done a b and c you know i like to use the check mark because a check mark is a very positive kind of like thumbs up like yes i did this kind of thing same thing with numbering we click here on this box it opens it up uh this this this sub box we can click you know standard numbering one two three we can do lowercase roman numerals we can do you know capital abc we can do stuff like that um so that's easy to set up and then under sub lists uh or like list library this is where we would go if we wanted to set up something that was complicated like a multi-level list like this like let's say we were doing you know an asset sale and then we said like you know assets and then like you know building one you know building two and then you know first floor you know office one computer equipment you know mouse keyboard monitor etc you know if you're going to be doing a very um kind of complex um list where you're going to need you know one sub a sub i uh or you know sub one sub one a sub you know then you're gonna you're gonna get into something like this we're gonna you're gonna use this uh list library and if you click down here on on um define new multi-level list it'll bring up this window which lets you change everything about the list like like you can change what heading is at each section uh you know like is it going to be a or b or sorry is it going to be a or roman numeral or a one you can change the alignment you can change the indentation you can change all of that stuff so really quick this is something i've been doing throughout this is a tip about using a hotkey essentially if if you're in a document like i don't know any document really i just want to point out to you if i use the left and right keys this is this is about navigating uh your cursor basically if i use the left and right keys i'm going to push the right key right right right right right right right right right right right it's moving one at a time right but if i hold the ctrl key look what it's doing now it's jumping whole words so this is something i do all the time i hold ctrl and use the arrow keys because it makes it so you can you can navigate the document much faster if i hold ctrl and press down or up it does the same thing it jumps whole paragraphs instead of you know one line at a time line line line line and then if you use shift then that's how you can you can select entire paragraphs or entire lines or you can do something yeah something like this you know push to the right and i'm highlighting the text so that's just something i wanted to to point out to you if you haven't done it hold ctrl when you're using your left and right keys hold shift when you're using your left and right keys give that a try just as something to speed you up i'm not sure if you know about that if you've seen that before but please do um it's here on slide 95 and it's included in your reference materials okay so jumping to pages we are going to look at headers footers page numbers and section breaks uh headers and footers so this is just a standard picture of header and footer that you've seen before on uh on a document it's it's nothing surprising and then here is a document itself so the way to get into the the header section is you just double click on the section at the top it's as easy as that and then it brings up um this information the way to edit a header and footer basically works the same as uh everything that we've been talking about so far i do want to point out that in this precedent i've clicked here on layout and i'm going to click on view gridlines there's actually a table in this header part of me i'm going to click always show ribbon there's a table in this header so that we can left align this and then right align stuff over here or or there's a table down here that we're using to format the text we're not going to be talking about tables in this presentation but we are in a future session so so please keep that in mind um but using this header and footer section um and then you know clicking into it clicking out of it that's how we do that and then there's this button here different first page so if you see uh this is what the document looks like page one page two you see that the first page has like our firm logo and our firm information in the top left corner whereas on this page we we do not so that's the way we achieve that we use this button which is different first page and now i'm going to show you just a simple thing about numbering pages so there's a basic technique which is you when you're in header and footer you click here where it says page number top of page and then let's say we said plain number three and we want it to be over on the right hand side of the screen uh page pardon me i click on that and there you go uh so what it did is it well actually sorry i should do that on page page two i don't want that on page one so i'm gonna go to page numbers top of page to the right so what it did is it put the number two there this is this is indeed the second page but it turned the formatting to calibri uh size is 11. it's just a vanilla page number you know it doesn't look very good we'd want to do some formatting on that to make it consistent with our document and stuff like that um but i i don't like to do page numbering like that i like to do page numbering that says page blank of blank so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back into the header and part of me the reason i like to do page blank of blank is so that if you give a document to a colleague or you send it by fax and it's a four-page document if they get the document and they say page you know i have page three of four but that's where the facts stopped they know there's a fourth page you know and they can say to you hey can i can you send me page four or four i only got page three of four so the way that we do this i'm gonna delete these numbers so that i can show you how to do it from scratch so we write in the word page and then we're going to go up here to insert and then we're going to click on this funny little icon that has like a blue rectangle and a gray rectangle click on that and then we're going to click on field now we're going to scroll down to where it says uh num pages and page so we're going to start with page because this is page page 2 space of space and now i'm going to click on this again click on field i'm going to come back down here and i'm going to go to num pages keep in mind this is in your materials if this is if i'm moving too quickly this is in the materials so now i went num pages 2 of 2. so if this letter is to opposing counsel and it is i don't know on a very complex matter and there's a lot to say i'm going to just paste this paragraph paste paste paste space just to make a really long document so if you look here on the sixth page page six of six page five of six page four of six so that is a best practice you know that is what you want to be doing you wanna have page blank of blank it looks so much better than just saying you know page one page two page three but anyway i'll leave that to you okay so section breaks section breaks are a really important thing i'm going to go back to our articles of incorporation as i as i mentioned at the the beginning of this presentation i told you that i would be telling you how to do something to one section that's different than another such as in the notice of civil clam i showed you how to well i showed you that the first page had two inch left and top margins but then the rest of the document did not so how did we do that well we achieved that by using section breaks so i'm going to close this i'm going to make this bigger for you we're going to turn our formatting on and we're going to come here to the end of this section this this document is is logically made of two sections the table of contents and then the articles of incorporation themselves the actual articles so between these sections right here very important line it says section break next page so the way to to think of this and actually i've got a slide everything that comes after the green is section two everything that comes before the green is section one and why are we using that in in this document in particular we're actually using it to control the page numbering so if you look up here uh on page one there's nothing in the top right corner we've done this with the footer different first page but then we come down here and says page two roman numeral two what about page one of the articles themselves oops we come here page one of the articles themselves again there's no page number that's what we want just to give that clean look on the for the front page of a document and then we come here to page two it says page two ah but it's a two it's not a roman numeral two the reason it's a no it's a two not a roman numeral to is because it is a different section it's it has its own um settings as with respect to how it's going to page number also it's not continuing the page numbering from before like if you look here in the bottom left corner we're actually on page 6 of 21. this document that you're seeing here is the sixth page but it says it's page two why does it say it's page two it says it's page two because this is page two of the second section so how do we or insert a section break i'm going to delete this one so that you can see uh see me adding it in so delete that i'll put this on the next page uh oh whatever i'll do it this way uh it's under is it references or layout layout you know i i always click references and then it's under layout it's under layout you click on break and then i do usually the next page break so that's gonna what that's going to do is it's going to push everything on to the next page like that and then this is where the next section starts and voila so that's how you do a section break they can be a bit finicky because when you add them it causes ripples like it'll affect the previous section and it will affect other sections um so you have to watch out for that but it's it's an extremely powerful thing to do as i say here on page uh sorry slide 120 you know you can have different pagination for different parts and you can draft multiple documents in one file and i offer a service for law firms called omniform which essentially helps make these kind of power precedents but conceptually as the the example that i like to use the most is if you're if you're using uh documents to incorporate a company and you've got 14 different documents um you don't want to have 14 individual word files that you have to go into and make changes and then close it and then go into the next one and then make changes and close it if you can make all of your changes in one document it's much much much faster it's more reliable it's cleaner drafting um and it's all you have to do is set it up if you if you look if you think back of that that slide i showed you with the the runner with the very nicely defined calves it takes time to set the stuff up but investing in that early on is going to pay dividends throughout your pri your you know your time practicing because you're going to be using it all the time right so it works extremely well for litigation documents state planning documents so anyways it's a bit hard to describe in words but if you're interested in knowing more about that just just let me know okay so we're getting we're getting near the end jumping back to our letter to uh opposing counsel say so at the end of this section uh first paragraph i put a uh uh what do you call it a footnote and the footnote is down here to weed door which i think has nothing to do with what's being said here it's just an example that i remembered from law school and it just jumped to mind and if you hold your mouse over the text that actually shows you it says https colon forward slash forward slash kanley dot ca forward slash t forward slash gb fcg so if we hold ctrl and we click it's going to open just right to the link and and by the way this is a little trick this link to this case works this little short link works as well um basically they they give each case kind of two links so that this is the full link within the website you know the english canada federal court of appeal you know blah blah blah blah but then this short link just makes it easier um and shortens it down so i i like to use these short links but anyway so if i right click this copy link address i'm going to minimize this window i'm going to right click on this remove hyperlink so the reason i did that is so that i can show you how to make a hyperlink so so basically you know let's say we've had this footnote here and we're just saying you know well i could leave the text but you know link to case i'm just writing this you so you know that you can do you can do this to any text you just highlight the text uh uh where are we we're on this insert screen click on links uh link and insert link or you can just right click on it um can you and then you go down to link yeah and then you can insert link so because i have this um url to a to a website i'm just going to paste it here where it says address alternately you know there's a lot of stuff you can do you can you can link it to another document on your network so if you're doing this you know within your firm and there's you've got co-workers that can access the same files you can do that you can link uh to a section in the document you already have to have that set up kind of like in our articles of incorporation you know you need to be able to link to a certain section or certain heading uh you can make it create a new document you can link it to an email address and actually in some jurisdictions my understanding is that it is becoming mandated that links be included in cases in my jurisdiction i was actually recently speaking with a legal assistant who works for the government and she was working on a joint book of authorities for the court of appeal and she told me that the court is requiring that hyperlinks be included to cases that take them into the case but not necessarily to the paragraph within the case on the other hand i was actually speaking with a lawyer who is about three time zones away from me across the country and she told me that in her supreme court uh in her jurisdiction they are requiring that links be included and that those links be pinpoint links that take you right to the paragraph within the document so i understand that this is a live issue i should note that there are kind of cyber security issues that come with including links and documents because the people who are clicking the links need to trust that the link is taking them to a safe place and to the right place obviously that's on on you to make sure that if you include a link in the document that it's not a dangerous link it's not a spam link it's not anything like that and it is taking the person to the the right location you know presumably to some sort of case law or other legitimate document so yes i'm actually concluding this session with this discussion because i know how this is a live issue and it actually seems to be going back and forth depending on jurisdictions and some jurisdictions are actually changing their mind as far as whether they require the hyperlinks and whether the hyperlinks need to take you right into the case law like right into the paragraph or if it's sufficient that it just takes you to the case itself okay and with that we have reached the conclusion of this video thank you very much for joining me if you learned something new please leave a comment right now you know for example if it was helpful to you to learn about how you can condense text that you can keep it all on one page and stay within page limits let me know about that if it was news to you about how you can use section breaks and headings to really supercharge your documents let me know about that and if you'd like to learn even more please be sure to check out my legal assistant tech course here on youtube it's about two hours of materials on using different types of computer hardware and computer software and legal practice and it's specifically designed for legal assistance so i think that you'll learn some more great information there so with that i will leave off by saying thank you very much yet again my name is sean dillman you