Hello and welcome back to Gimbal’s Tip of the Week: practical suggestions for building a more profitable and productive law practice. Today, we are sharing a tip to help you get more out of the technology you already have.

Every month, Members of our Practice Accelerator Membership get specialist coaching sessions. Over the past few weeks, we have shared business development and pricing tips from our coaches. This week, we are continuing with a tip from Colin Levy on ways to save yourself time with the technology you use every day.

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Colin’s tip: use more of the built-in functions in the system you are probably using every single day, Word, to save yourself time and effort and aggravation.

Getting the most out of MS Word

Two of the most useful yet underused functions in Word he recommends are Styles and Macros.

Styles allow you to set your formatting the way you like it, and then consistently apply that formatting across your documents.

Macros allow you to create and then reuse text snippets with a few clicks. You can create macros to insert standard clauses in agreements, routine paragraphs in your communications, or anywhere that you regularly type the same text over and over again.

Once you have got a standard paragraph (or many paragraphs) the way you like it, you create the macro and then apply it in other documents. You can edit it as needed, but we all know it is more efficient to start with a good template and edit it than to start from scratch every time.

To ensure you know how to get the most from your basic technology systems, Colin recommends you and your team take the Procertas Legal Technology Assessment (LTA). The LTA assesses your ability to use basic tools of our legal trade: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF. It also provides tutorials to build your skills in areas where you are lacking.

So, before you invest in new document assembly software, or some other new piece of technology designed to make you more efficient, make sure you are using what you have already got. And if you are not, start building your skills there.

That’s it for this week’s tip. Since we are on the subject of tech, here is our short list of the productivity apps we use…but make sure you’re getting the most of what you have already got before adding something new to your technology stack!

Also, check out the information about Practice Accelerator Membership. Members get masterclasses plus coaching with us and with our experts twice a month. It is a very cost-effective way to access expert advice. 

Thanks a lot everybody!