Automating Legal Documents

Legal documents are supposed to conform to some set formatting. Most lawyers use a pre-formatted earlier document and edit the new drafting over it. This is apparently a convenient way of drafting pleadings, motions or other documents. But a document often contains some texts that need to inserted in various places within the document over and over again. For example, in an Affidavit-in-Opposition to a Writ Petition, the Writ Petition number, year and the party they are representing have to be typed in many places. Finding out the those places and manually changing all those parts is a tiresome and boring task. What if those texts could be inserted once for each document and then those texts would automatically be inserted in others places as well?

Well, this can be done in several ways. What I find most convenient is using custom document Properties and inserting them by a Field called DocProperty. Once a source document template is configured, the following documents based on it can be formatted easily. The steps are as follows:

1. Define custom properties. In Word 2013, go to File>Info. Click on Properties on the right side. Click Advanced Properties and select the Custom tab. Here add the custom properties such as case no., year of case etc.
2. Insert Fields in appropriate place. To do this, place the marker where the text will be inserted, go to Insert>Quick Parts (in Text group)>Field>DocProperty. Now select the desired custom property you created earlier. Do this step for all the places where custom texts will be inserted.
3. Provide text data. Go to File>Info. Click on Properties and provide the data that should be repeated throughout the document. Done!

This can also be done by defining Bookmarks and then inserting the Bookmark Text as Cross-reference.
Annexures need to be sequentially marked or numbered. Here the seq filed will come handy.

1. Insert>Quick Parts (in Text group)>Field> Seq. In the box, type after "SEQ" the following: "annexure \* ALPHABETIC \*MERGEFORMAT" without the quotation marks. You can use any other word instead of "annexure", because this will just identify the list if you need to use the method in multiple place within the document. If you want to use numbers like 1 2 3, type Arabic instead of ALPHABETIC.
2. If you need to use the method with different sequence of the numbers, this this going to be a little more work. Insert>Quick Parts (in Text group)>Field> Seq. In the box, type after SEQ the following: "annexure \r 50 \* ALPHABETIC \*MERGEFORMAT" without the quotation marks. Here 50 is where the number will start. The next fields however need to be slightly different. Here type "\c" instead of "\r 50". 
3. You may save these fields along with associated texts in the Quick Part Gallery for ease of use. Select the text including the fields> Quick Parts (in Text group)>Save to Quick Part Gallery.