Microsoft Office, especially Excel and Word, continue to be ubiquitous in most law firms. Many courts require filings to be made in Word format. Lawyers, and especially paralegals, use Excel for a range of operational and project specific processes. Yet sometimes this program does not get the respect it deserves. Many paralegals use Excel all the time. Here is a partial list of uses:
- Organizing invoices & financial statements
- Generating timeline exhibits as trial evidence
- Managing and merging contact files
- Creating charts and tables for various type of reports
- Tracking amortization payments in real estate cases
- Analyzing large data sets with pivot tables, slicers and pivot charts
As you can see, Excel is not just for adding up numbers in columns. Its uses range from organizing data to analyzing relationships between the datasets. And while Excel is not going to replace more expensive specialty litigation software, it does increase a paralegal’s productivity and efficiency. Here are some other related use cases:
- Calendaring future court dates
- Creating billable time databases
- Analyzing expansive privilege logs
- Organizing a searchable Bates Number database
- Maintaining a database of relevant case documents
At the end of the day, increasing one’s knowledge, strengthening current skills and adding new ones makes any paralegal more valuable to attorneys and the law firm itself. It also breeds confidence, provides a competitive edge and increases marketability which can increase opportunities for raises and promotions.