Virtual Legal Assistants - best practices?

[lsmapp]

I'm having a telephone conference with a couple of my attorneys next week to discuss best practices, especially re: drafting of estate type documents that tend to be pretty repetitive.

We usually use template word documents and do a mail merge (with excel spreadsheet) to complete the first draft of our documents. Anyone have any better or other ideas for us to consider? Definitely appreciate some advice from my legal VA peeps!

[Action Jackson VA]

Hi Laurie,

I like to use Access. It allows you to have your ready made documents in the program, then you can upload your excel spread sheet into the database, then apply your database of names to specific documents.

Kind of like the same thing you do with each word document, but, you do not have to open the word document then do the merge. In Access you only apply the names to the document already in the database, then run the report wiz to print out each document.

Have a great day,
Andrea

[lsmapp]

Thanks for the suggestion Andrea!! I'm not too used to using databases, does that save you a lot of time over word? I would need to open the documents anyway, as there are changes I need to make outside of the insertion of names and addresses (ie. do they want organ donation or not, etc?)

[Office Goddess]

I use word templates with form fields for the 'basics', then 'turn off' the form fields to make the other changes.

[reneeshupe]

If you still need to make edits to the documents over and above the merge, probably doing what you're doing will work best. Mind you I've never really used Access all that much and I'm guessing it probably allows you to do the edits as well....(that's just me guessing though).