Word Wonders: Multilevel Numbering for Lawyers

Document management can often be a challenging aspect of the legal profession. However, harnessing the power of readily available technology can significantly simplify this task. For example, utilizing Microsoft Word’s automation capabilities for routine micro-actions can expedite your workflow. Today’s Word Wonders article focuses on using multilevel numbering in Word, a feature particularly beneficial for legal professionals who use legal-style numbering.

As an active player within the legal sector, you understand how essential lists are when drafting any contract. Legal numbering imparts a structured framework to your text, enhancing the readability and coherence of your legal content. However, developing contracts, as Bill of Sale for Business, with multiple sub-paragraphs can be daunting, especially during the editing and finalization stages. This is where multilevel lists, known as legal outline numbering, come to the rescue.

This handy tool allows you to produce lists tailored to suit the documents you regularly handle. It also offers the ability to save numbering templates for future use.

Click the multilevel list icon to activate this and navigate to the ‘Define New Multilevel List…’ tab. Select ‘More,’ upon which you’ll encounter a screen displaying the settings of your new numbering system.

In this setting, you can delve into nine levels within your list (though we hope you won’t need to!). You can establish a distinct style for each level. The style pertains to the formatting of your numbering and associated text at each level, spanning features such as spacing and font type.

While creating your numbering layout, adhere to the traditional sections and assign a distinctive style to each:

After completing your list, press ‘OK.’ The next time you draft a business contract, this list can simply be selected from the multilevel lists. Furthermore, you can efficiently navigate across levels (and thus Styles) using the tab key (for the next level) and shift+tab (for the previous level) to expedite your typing.

Creating several multilevel list templates to fit the specific types of documents you frequently draft is undoubtedly beneficial. Not only will you have a straightforward shortcut for subsequent tasks, but it will also enable you to deliver drafts promptly.

To streamline your work further, we recommend installing our Loio add-in. With Loio’s capabilities, you’ll be able to thoroughly check and revise your lists and seamlessly edit the styling of your document once your draft is complete. Loio was devised with the understanding of the massive document workload typical in law and the limited automation capacity of Microsoft Word, so it’s worth exploring.

We hope this insight into the multilevel lists feature of Microsoft Word proves beneficial for your future endeavors.