The Glitchy World of the Table of Authorities in Microsoft Word

Creating a table of authorities in Microsoft Word is painful.  Depending on the size of your brief, it can take over an hour and frustrate you.  Let’s face it — appellate defenders generally cannot afford paralegals.  So you get the full brunt of Microsoft Word’s poor design.

Here are our top four frustrations with the Microsoft Word table of authorities followed by how we fixed them:

1. In Word, you need to open a separate function using “Insert” on the top navigation menu to even navigate to mark citations, which slows you down and heightens carpal tunnel;
2. You need to pay attention to whether you are marking case law, statute or a constitutional provision every time you mark, making sure you click the right box to avoid mistakes;
3. Once you run the table of authorities in the document, duplicates can appear that require manual deletion and throw off pagination; and
4. Often you have to go back and manually insert information into the table (i.e., citation will show up as section 654, and you have go in and type Penal Code before section 654).    

That’s Word for you.  We cannot comment on WordPerfect because we have not used it this century.  We would be surprised if it is appreciably better. (Perhaps someone in the comments section here can educate us.)

The Brief Pilot Exponential Improvement

Our goal with Brief Pilot was to make frictionless the creation of the table of authorities as we work toward fully automating it.  What you see now is our 2.0 version, and it is mostly automated (explained below).  

The 2.0 version is far from perfect, but is already exponentially better than Microsoft Word.  We have fixed each of the four frustrations described above.

Table of Authorities When Using Templates

If you are using template arguments in Brief Pilot, you likely do not need to mark citations at all.  In templates, the citations are pre-marked for you.  When you are done drafting your brief, you simply press the green “Create PDF” button.  In your .pdf, you will magically find a completed table of authorities.  Cool, right? 

For your work outside of templates, like the Statement of the Case, you need to mark citations to have them appear on the table of authorities. For example, if you reference Penal Code section 187 in your Statement of the Case, you would need to mark the citation there.  

We have made the mark citation feature easily accessible — it is always right where you are typing without the need to enable a new window or function.

Table of Authorities When Not Using Templates

If you are creating arguments from scratch and cut/paste anything into your brief, the software should automatically detect and mark your citations for you.

If, by contrast, you manually type, you will need to mark those citations.  Two notes:

• The software understands that all section references, unless otherwise indicated, belong to the Penal Code.
• You do not need to decide whether a citation is a statute, case law, a constitutional provision or other authorities, as the software knows. 

A Word of Caution

Brief Pilot has not existed for 42 years, as Microsoft Word has. So no doubt as you experience Brief Pilot, you will spot an issue with the table of authorities that we need to correct.  As an early adopter, you will experience issues.  You are like a person moving into a new house.  The house is great because it is new, and in almost all respects it is vastly superior to a 42 year old house.  But as the first owner, you will find items that require you creating a punch list for the contractor to fix.   

We are your contractor.  When you experience an issue, just ping us. We will quickly address it for you. Note, too, that each time a user experiences an issue and we fix it, it is fixed for all future users. So you are doing your part to make the world of appellate defending a better place.