Why do paralegals use excel

Lawyers involved in complex litigation must have a clear understanding of the chronology of the case. However, these timelines are also vital to a firm when the case goes to trial—jury members must understand case chronology, as well. Excel has the ability to sort timelines by event and date in a meaningful and demonstrative way.

Today, an increasing number of lawyers are using Mac computers and Apple software at the office. Even those lawyers, however, are keen on Microsoft products. For our firm, this represents the ideal solution at present.

I have taken a liking to a few different Mac billing apps out there like Billings, Involer, Invoice, GrandTotal, and iRatchet but each of them falls short in one way or another for our purposes. No need to purchase expensive billing software when Microsoft Office is already uploaded to your office computers. In addition, though some firms may have staff or consultants dedicated to case management analysis, for smaller firms, organizing timesheets in Excel can help trend your most significant cases over time.

For example, a legal administrator can organize attorney time by case matter, month, billable hours, or the billing attorney to discover which cases are the most active and which may need more attention, which attorney billed the most this month and which the least.

Access to this type of information will make a firm more attentive to any clients who might be falling through the cracks, and also increase its overall profitability, after it knows where to devote more billable hours. Excel makes this easy by providing a manipulatable database sorted by client name, county, type of case, date filed, place filed, date settled, opposing attorney, case settlement amount, and attorney fees to date.

At the end of the year, the compilation of all case status spreadsheets will give managing partners the perfect overview of upcoming casework and trials, in addition to closed and settled matters not to mention, incoming income! In a similar vein, Excel can expedite the process of assigning cases to attorneys.

Excel can be used as a method to effectively organize case assignments and avoid duplication of work effort. Debra Montano Liz. You are very welcome! Did you see the virtual paralegal summit we held a while back? Your email address will not be published. By Ann Pearson August 14, Give your firm and your clients, peace of mind, knowing their information is secure.

Does your law firm need an investigator for a background check, civil investigation or other type of investigation? Find a pre-screened private investigator today. Having said that if I had a situation where I had a lot of spreadsheets with pure data in them and I needed to redact out certain parts of that data, I think some of those tools could be very useful. Simek: Well, I know we talked in the first segment about how attorneys just — they try to avoid spreadsheets as much as possible and Sharon being one of them but are there are there any ways that attorneys can use spreadsheets to their advantages?

This is many years ago when I was doing a mixture of commercial litigation and criminal defense and we had a criminal defendant client. Our client was involved in a boiler room fraud scheme in Israel. She was extradited to the United States along with a lot of other members of this fraud and the US attorney wanted to charge her with all of the economic loss for the entire multi-year span of the fraud, even though she only got involved at the very end and if you know anything about federal criminal practice you know that a large part of the sentencing recommendation arises from sentencing enhancements like economic loss.

So the more the economic loss the higher your sentencing recommendation. And what I did is I was able to piece together some spreadsheets that were recovered from other members of this fraud which laid out who had done what in the multiple years of this fraud and I was able to put together a master spreadsheet that showed exactly which activity our client was involved in, and demonstrated that it was really a very small percentage of the overall fraud.

So it does make sense in the case of a spreadsheet to print out only what you need to make your point, and that might involve using filters or selecting a certain print area or using other tricks in Excel to print out just what you need to make your point.

So the consequences of not understanding can be pretty dire. Adriana Linares: Starting your own solo practice is tough. Ben, did the recent Wells Fargo inadvertent disclosure have anything to do with Excel? Are there lessons that we should take away from that case? I was very interested in the situation just as an eDiscovery practitioner and I took a deep dive, I read all the affirmations that were filed around that disclosure.

I went to a hearing about it. That sounds like Relativity to me, Relativity loads the first documents and then you have to click a couple of buttons to load the additional documents. Nelson: Well, that clearly would implicate the duty of competence, I would think.

Ben Kusmin: Yeah, failing to understand how your document review software works is certainly a problem. And I said there was a communications aspect, and what I meant by that is, if you have a good process and you have an open line of communication with your client and an open line of communication with your eDiscovery vendor, this kind of thing usually gets caught before it goes out the door. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics lists the following as duties that are performed by legal assistants and paralegals :.

Having knowledge of a wide array of technological skills will increase your career opportunities. Here are some of the most common technologies that are an integral part of the operation of a law firm:. Microsoft Office, Open Office, and Google Docs are common software suites that are used in many law firms. Knowledge of one of these programs is a must for legal assistants and paralegals. As a legal professional, you will be communicating and exchanging documents with other parties.

Being proficient in programs other than those used in your office is a great advantage when you are sent files with different file types created with different software systems. These office machines are commonly used in most offices. Having experience with these machines will be necessary to function in the office. Knowledge of these machines will also allow you to easily learn and adapt to new hardware and equipment that is purchased by your firm.

The ability to quickly learn and efficiently use these office machines is an important part of your job as a legal professional.