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Jan Berinstein
What IT Professionals Wish Law Firm Staff Understood About Their Jobs
| 27 September 2011
Bridging the Gap Between the IT Department and End Users
Last year, I started a discussion in the Legal IT Professionals group on LinkedIn, asking what IT people wish law firm staff understood better about their jobs. My interest in the topic was more than theoretical: For nearly 25 years, I’ve worked as a legal word processor, and I’ve been a software trainer specializing in the legal field for almost as long. In those capacities, I’ve witnessed first-hand numerous interactions between users and IT departments—good, bad, and ugly.
I’ve heard complaints from both sides, but mostly from the users’ perspective. One of my goals in starting the discussion on LinkedIn was to give IT people a chance to express their views—and their needs—as a step toward bridging the gap between two groups that face rather different demands and issues at work.
In this article, I’ve provided highlights of the discussion, with quotes from many of the IT people who responded.
Word processing for law firms: Exploring inner (document) space: understanding line and paragraph spacing
| 15 November 2010
One of the issues that arises repeatedly among my training clients has to do with an aspect of word processing that many people commonly think of as relatively simple: line spacing. At first glance, it seems like a straightforward feature. After all, everyone intuitively understands the concepts of single spacing and double spacing.
But for members of the legal profession, even this basic, everyday feature can be complicated. For one thing, people who work with pleading paper derived from MS Word’s Pleading Wizard frequently find that the text in the body of their document doesn’t align with the pleading line numbers at the left margin of the paper.
New Temporary Backup Files in Office 2010 Can Save Your Bacon—or Cook Your Goose
| 04 August 2010
One of the most intriguing new features in Word 2010 is its automatic retention of temporary copies of files that users close without saving, either accidentally or deliberately.
Word 2010 creates these temporary backups, as do the new versions of Excel and PowerPoint, if you have had a document (whether saved or unsaved) open on your screen long enough for the AutoRecover utility to kick in, typically ten minutes. When you close an autosaved document, you’ll be prompted to save the document, to cancel the “close” operation and resume editing, or to close without saving. If you choose the “Don’t Save” option, Word will save a temporary copy of the document anyway—just in case you change your mind later on.
