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Review Best Authority January/February 2008 Table of Contents Many tasks in a law office can be
frustrating, but creating a Table of Authorities usually ranks
toward the top of the list. Levit & James’ Best Authority helps
paralegals overcome many of the common struggles encountered with
creating a TOA. While automation and software are not complete
substitutes for manual proofreading, Best Authority provides an
excellent balance between the two. In 2006, Levit & James released
Best Authority and the company released its first upgrade in August
2007. Although Best Authority is easy to
use, the company strongly recommends that new users take a basic
training course to become familiar with the application. Levit &
James provides free training, two or three separate classes, to law
firms that purchase Best Authority Premium (as opposed to the new
“Light” version, which offers an e-learning module). The classes for
the Premium edition are conducted over the Web, and training
documents are included with the installation of the software. Going
through the training truly made me appreciate the subtle options
available in the software. Best Authority offers two different
interfaces that feature basic and advanced menus. Everyone should
start with the basic menu system before moving on to the advanced
menu system. The basic menu offers all that most folks will ever
need, with simple buttons for editing and formatting citations that
are found and highlighted in the document. In the Light version,
edits to the TOA are done with Word. In Word with the Premium
edition, users get a menu with many options to edit the TOA using
Best Authority. Edits made through Best Authority Premium to correct
an improperly formatted citation are saved in the document and are
permanent. Edits made to something in the TOA generated by Best
Authority also are stored in the document and are permanent. Since Best Authority only works in
Word, anyone who is familiar with Word can use the program. In Word,
Best Authority installs itself There are three main steps for
creating a TOA in Best Authority. First, you scan the document for
citations by clicking the “Scan Now” button. Before scanning the
document, Best Authority lets you dictate where in the document to
start and end the scan so that it will not include information at
the top and bottom of the document, such as front matter, tables of
contents and signature blocks. You also will be asked to place your
cursor where you want the TOA to be placed. Scanning a document
takes about one second per page. A dialog box pops up at the end to
inform you of how many citations were found. Next, you review all of
the citations tagged in the scan. The last step is building and
inserting the completed TOA. The TOA draft is a basic table that
will look nicer and cleaner in the final version, and the “Draft
Review” is where you will spend most of your time. In this mode,
Word is split into upper and lower screens. The upper screen shows
the draft table of the TOA with all the marked citations. Clicking
on a citation in the upper screen takes you to the citation’s
location in the document in the lower screen. All of the long
citations are highlighted in yellow and all of the short citations
are highlighted in blue. When Best Authority finds a “suspect”
citation (i.e., fragments of a citation, error in formatting), it
highlights the citation in red. Since Best Authority is built into
Word and uses native Word tools to highlight and link to citations,
all of the corrections are made directly in Word. Since most people
already know how to edit text in Word, fixing problem citations is
easy. Most of the time, suspect citations simply need to be properly
underlined, or the citation form just needs to be put in proper
format. In addition to the double-pane view in Word, a box titled
“Draft Review,” appears to the side with more options for marking
and editing citations. Once all of the corrections are
made, you rescan the document so Best Authority can properly
recognize the citations you corrected. If you still find problems,
just edit the mistakes and rescan again until everything is perfect. If you are not the primary author
of the document and someone else needs to review the draft, Best
Authority allows you to print the draft with all citations
appropriately highlighted. Once you get the hard copy back with
corrections made in pen or pencil, you can jump back into Word, make
the corrections and rescan the document until everything is fixed. I regularly am skeptical of
utilities claiming to be the ultimate fix for a specific problem.
However, I am very impressed with the finesse of Best Authority,
especially since it’s such a new product. The years of experience
that Levit & James invested in software development certainly shines
through in this application.
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