The aim of this site is to provide legal professionals: paralegals, legal secretaries, and do-it-yourself attorneys with time saving tips and advice. Using technology, primarily the Microsoft Office Suite, I strive to shorten the time of tasks common to all law offices.
Using a format of short lessons, it may appear that some "tips" make little sense, have no benefit, or are just too simple to be of any value. However, they build upon one another as steps to a larger process that only becomes clear in the final product - hopefully a quicker,simpler way of doing something.
I hope this site helps make your work easier, and if you have the time, please send me your own advice so that I may benefit as well and pass it on to other readers.
What we now have is a template with the following data inserted automatically: the date, the addressee’s address, the greeting, and the salutation. It should look like this:
The body of the letter will be located in another file and imported. We do this by using bookmarks. The first step is to create a new document (body.doc is a good name) which contains all of the variable texts that we use in frequent letters. Cut and paste only the body of your letters and string them together in one long document separating them with a paragraph break. Use the same font style and size that you want in your final document. Do not use any formatting, such as indents:
As with the salutation, the judge demands his own closing. Whereas we can close the majority of letters with a simple: "Sincerely", letters to the judge should concede more authority, such as: "Respectfully yours". Assuming you have followed the advice in "Addressing the Judge" and "Inserting the Blocks", we can programatically format the closing using the "Title" field.
There are a number of ways to create a mail merge starting with a blank document. I begin by selecting Tools -> Letters and Mailings -> Mail Merge. This way two thing happen: the Mail Merge Task pane comes up and the Mail Merge Task Bar becomes available. Starting with the Mail Merge Pane, and going through the steps, we define the Type of document (Letters), the Starting document (Current), the recipient list (Outlook contacts), the Contacts Folder, and lastly the recipients (select only one for sample data). At this point the merge is made even though the document is blank. Save it as a Template with the .dot extension; we can now add some fields.
The body of the letter will be located in another file and imported. We do this by using bookmarks. The first step is to create a new document (body.doc is a good name) which contains all of the variable texts that we use in frequent letters. Cut and paste only the body of your letters and string them together in one long document separating them with a paragraph break. Use the same font style and size that you want in your final document. Do not use any formatting, such as indents:
