What is everyone using to generate their tables of authorities? When I was in Dallas County, we used to use Word's built-in table of authorities generator. Here in Collin County, we have Word, but our legal assistants use West's CiteLink to generate the tables. West is now telling us that CiteLink will be phased out and that we should buy Cite Advisor for $2100 per year.

Any thoughts appreciated.

MS Word, as you suggest, has an excellent table of authorities generator. That's what we use.

MS Word too. But we subsribe to LEXIS and it also has a software program you can use.

JAS

Our secretaries use a product called "Full Authority" that they seem to like better than Word. I just make my Table of Authorities manually.

We use Word's table...however, it always comes up with odd fonts and spacing. I then have to go through and fix that.

We use Word, which as noted above can have a few formatting glitches. It helps with federal appellate preparation, since you have to include a word count.

I was dragged into using Word kicking and screaming, as we used to use Word Perfect, and I found its table generators (at least at the time) to be more user friendly.

Back when I was writing lots of appellate briefs in my ALR days, I used Word Perfect which on the whole I liked MUCH better than Word. The TOA generator was better and easier to use, and the "reveal formats" function was incredibly helpful to get rid of odd formating glitches. Fortunately, I dont' do briefs anymore because my agency uses Word as its standard word processor. I do have an old 2003 Word Perfect program installed on my computer, but they won't update so I principally use it to read opinions coming out of the Fifth Circuit.

Janette A

Janette you are right. I have always found the Wordperfect TOA generator better and generally Wordperfect to be better formatting appeal briefs, motions, other pleadings, etc. In the past few years though I have found it even quicker to do the TOA manually. When writing the Argument I paste the cite into the TOA alphebetically and then print a draft of the brief and just insert the proper page numbers on the TOA as I go through. Quicker and less hassle.

In your wake in Dallas, JRo, we played with the Lexis and Westlaw ones -- honestly, neither was near as good as Word. Sadly, there seems to be no good way but the old-fashioned one to consistently create correct tables [say that 4 times fast on Friday afternoon]. Word or WP, depending on which software you 'grew up' using, reign supreme here if you ask me.

Now Cory, you better stop creating new nicknames for me or I'll have to fire you retroactively.

Let me chime in on behalf of the WordPerfect generator. Heck, on WordPerfect in general. I've used it for years so, yes, I'm biased, but it is a better formatting and editing tool, by eons, than Word. The generator sets up both the table of contents and the table of authorities with no muss no fuss. Why IT people feel MSWord is worthy of support but not WP, I'll never know. Of course, they never write briefs!!

Our office IMS person just update my Microsoft Office to the 2007 version. It's quite a bit different than the 2003 version, so I am going to play with TOA generator and see if Microsoft has improved it. Something to do when things slow down.

Janette A

I agree about WP - much eaiser to use. More user friendly. When I worked at the AG's office that is what we used - maybe because our briefs went to federal courts and word had multiple problems with word count then. Have heard that MS fixed the word count problem - but am not sure about that. I still use 2003 MS And still have not figured out how to do everything yet - apparently we do not have any books to explain how it works, so my ToC is not always perfrectly lined up.

$2100 per year? I guess that is how West (i.e. Thomson, i.e. Reuters) can afford the flashy ad on the back of the bar journal.