This page collects online resources for assisting students with technical aspects of drafting an appellate brief like assembling a table of contents and a table of authorities.
Procertas (http://www.procertas.com) offers a Legal Technology Assessment (LTA) which is a series of training modules and assessments designed to help legal professionals become more proficient at using Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat. Procertas' LTA provides 'competency-based' training and assessment. For each task there is a demonstration video, a practice task, and then a separate assessment.
Procertas has a training and assessment module for creating and editing legal briefs using Microsoft Word. The module includes the following tasks:
As part of the training modules each task has a short "teach me" video that demonstrates how to accomplish the task using Word. Students can utilize these videos without having to take the related assessment or complete the training.
The Law Library provides access to the LTA for all Loyola Law students, faculty and staff. Individual login credentials are required to access Procertas. Contact Joe Mitzenmacher, Reference and Electronic Services Librarian (jmitze1@luc.edu or ext. 5-6844) to set up your own account.
There are a myriad of free online sites aimed at assisting lawyers with Microsoft Word. Here are two of the best:
Lexis and Westlaw both offer tools for integrating research and drafting. These include research-related features like automatically generating a table of authorities or cite-checking an entire brief.
Books:
Hoonuit: