Technology Tuesdays

Microsoft Word has a tool specifically to help create tables of authority for legal documents, and it can be a big time-saver when working with long briefs.

Here's how to do it in Word 365:

Choose your Organization

1. On the References tab, look for the Mark Citation button
2. Click on the “Set Category…” or “Category” button 
3. Select the default text for each list item, write your replacement in below
4. Click “Replace” and continue to next category
5. Replace unused categories with numbers (you may need to scroll to see all of the default categories)
6. When finished, click “OK” - the list under the “Category:” Your drop-down list of categories should now be ready to use accurately

Mark citations

1. Select the first citation in your document.
2. Press ALT+SHIFT+I.
   Note: You can also click the References tab and then click Mark Citation in the Table of Authorities group.
3. In the Selected text box, edit the long citation as you want it to appear in the table of authorities.
4. In the Category box, click the category that applies to the citation.
5. In the Short citation box, edit the text so that it matches the short citation that you want Word to search for in the document.
6. To mark a single citation, click Mark. To mark all long and short citations that match those displayed in the Mark Citation dialog box, click Mark All.
7. To find the next citation in the document, click Next Citation.

Create the table of authorities

1. Click where you want to insert the table of authorities.
2. To make sure that the document is paginated correctly, you need to hide field codes and hidden text. If the TA (Table of Authorities Entry) fields are visible, click Show/Hide  [Paragraph mark]   [Button image]  in the Paragraph group on the Home tab.
3. On the References tab, in the Table of Authorities group, click Insert Table of Authorities.​
4. In the Category box, click the category that you want to include in your table of authorities. To include all categories, click All.
5. Do one of the following:
   • To use one of the available designs, click a design in the Formats box.
   • To use a custom table of authorities layout, choose the options that you want.
6. Select any other table of authorities options that you want.

Notes: 

If you add, delete, move, or edit a citation or other text in a document, you should update the table of authorities. For example, if you edit a citation and move it to a different page, you need to make sure that the table of authorities reflects the revised citation and page number. To update the table of authorities, click to the left of it and press F9.

Don’t modify the entries in the finished table of authorities; if you do, your changes will be lost when you update the table of authorities.

Edit or format a table of authorities entry

To change a table of authorities entry, you need to modify the text in the table of authorities entry field.

1. If you don't see the TA fields, click Show/Hide  [Paragraph mark]   [Button image]  in the Paragraph group on the Home tab.

2. Find the TA field for the entry that you want to modify.
3. To edit or format a table of authorities entry, change the text inside the quotation marks.
   { TA \l "Baldwin v. Alberti, 58 Wn. 2d 243 (1961)" \s "Baldwin v. Alberti" \c 1 \b }
4. To update the table of authorities, click to the left of the table of authorities and press F9.