Law Technology

Using Word 2007 and Google Docs to Collaborate on Documents

By Dennis Kennedy

Tom Mighell and I thought that the subject of collaborating on documents was so important that we devoted an entire section, with several chapters, to it in our new book, The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together.

I noted two good articles recently that give a good introduction to topics we cover in detail in our book.

The first Is Brian Zeve's article "Smarter, Faster Ways for Law Firms to Create and Share Documents" in the latest issue of Law Practice Today (many other good articles in this issue, too). Zeve highlights some of the collaboration features in Word 2007. You will want to familiarize yourself with these features if you will be moving to Word 2007 this year or are noticing that Word 2003 is now 5 years old and you want to put together good reasons to push your organization to Word 2007. The article also links to a Microsoft white paper on Word 2007 for the legal community.

The second is "Google Docs Lives to Share the Words." We not only used Google Docs as a prime example of a document collaboration tool in our book, but we also used it to collaborate on writing the book. The article summarizes the way Google Docs is built for a connected environment.

There is nothing more fundamental to the work of lawyers today than working together on documents and no more necessary skill-set than document collaboration skills. Understanding the available tools is essential. These two articles do a nice job of introducing some of the key tools and taking some first steps. When you are ready to go further, our book will be waiting for you.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

Now Available! The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Join the book's Facebook Group here.

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Full post as published by DennisKennedy.blog on April 27, 2008 (boomark / email).