How to do a Table of Authorities, Part 1: Marking citations

by Deborah Savadra

Its the one legal profession-specific feature in Microsoft Word. And, judging from some of the requests I receive from my newsletter readers, its also one of the most intimidating. Its the dreaded Table of Authorities. (Cue: Scary music) In my experience, few things strike more fear into the hearts of legal support staff than having to put out a brief with a Table of Authorities. (Close second: Table of Contents) I suspect the bad rap TOAs get has more to do with how seldom most people have to deal with them (and thus, how unfamiliar they are) than with any real complexity of the feature itself. In other words, you can do this. And Im going to help you break this down, step-by-step, starting with marking your citations.

Whats a citation?
No, Im not trying to insult anyones intelligence here. If youre the least bit interested in using the Table of Authorities feature, you probably already know a citation when you see one. But just for the sake of completeness, heres a list of the authorities you can cite in Words TOA: 1. Cases 2. Statutes 3. Other Authorities 4. Rules 5. Treatises 6. Regulations

7. Constitutional provisions This, not coincidentally, is the order in which authorities will be organized in your TOA cases in section 1, statutes in section 2, etc. If youve got authorities that dont fit in any of those neat categories, there are nine other slots you can define for those (more on that later).

Marking a citation
Starting the marking process is easy. Once you select the citation using either your mouse or keyboard, there are two ways you can mark it as a TOA entry, depending on your preference: Keyboard: Press ALT-SHIFT-I (works in all versions 2002-2010) Mouse: Go to the References tab and click Mark Citation:

Either way, youll get a dialog box that looks like this:

Heres where youve got to make some decisions: What category do I place this in? This will probably be pretty obvious in most cases (see list above). In this case (no pun intended), it belongs in the first category, Cases. To ensure it ends up in the right category, click the Category button to go to the Edit Category dialog:

Select the correct category (here, Word guessed right the first time) and click OK. (If the citation youre marking doesnt fit the first seven categories, you can re-define 8 through 16 here. Just select the next number and type the category name in Replace with to rename it, then click OK. If for some reason you dont like the order these are in or the name of a particular predefined one, you can rename the first seven, too.) What short citation form do I use? This is an important decision, one to be made by someone sufficiently familiar with proper legal citation format (i.e., not me). Although Im no Bluebook expert, either, heres an example using this case:

Do I want Word to find all citations to this authority in this document, or do I want to find them myself? If youre pretty confident the case or other authority is cited the same way throughout the brief, you can click Mark All and let Word find and mark every instance of it matching the long and short

forms as youve defined them. Me, Im a bit more paranoid and like to double-check behind it. But its your call. You can always manually mark anything that Words missed later. Once you click Mark or Mark All, the dialog box records your short cite like so:

Click Close to complete marking the citation, or click Next Citation if you want Word to find the next citation for you to mark.

So, how does Word mark a citation?

All this clicking and decision-making results in a very long, complicated code thats embedded next to each authority. If you turn on Show/Hide (by clicking the button that looks like a paragraph symbol in the Paragraph section of the Home tab), you can see this hidden text:

Between the two curly brackets {} are codes that tell Word what table this is marked for (TA = Table of Authorities), what the long citation is (\l), what the short citation is (\s), and what category to place the authority in (\c 1 = cases). There are other codes (technically, switches) available, but thats an advanced topic.

Checking your citations

Using the Show/Hide button and a basic knowledge of the switches in the markup, you can check your marked citations and even troubleshoot and fix later problems with your Table of Authorities. (For example, is your authority citation showing up in the wrong section? Check the number after \c in the markup against the list above.) This is also a good way to spot check to ensure all citations have been marked. Who knows, Mark All might have missed something.

The right time to mark citations

As a matter of practice, its usually better to wait until fairly late in the brief writing process to start marking citations. As anyone whos tried to get a jump on these will tell you, the editing process can be rough on hidden text like TOA markup. One false move with the mouse, and a citation can go kablooey. Just a friendly word of warning: wait until the the brief writer has stopped moving large chunks of text around before marking citations, since minor edits are less likely to cause problems. So thats the basic spiel on marking citations. Next time: defining and inserting your Table of Authorities. In the meantime any questions, problems, frustrations? Let me know in the comments below.