The Microsoft Word skills every lawyer should know

Lawyers have relied on Microsoft Word for decades, but familiarity doesn’t always mean mastery. In a recent webinar, former DLA Piper lawyer and legal tech expert Maarten Truyens reveals how many of Word’s most powerful capabilities remain underused by legal professionals and sheds light on the Microsoft Word skills every lawyer needs to know to elevate their legal practice.  

Microsoft Word is a tool that is synonymous with day-to-day legal work. Despite this, Word is something most lawyers learn to use through osmosis; nobody sits down with a new associate and walks them through paragraph styles or section breaks. Instead, Word is learned the same way as languages when travelling; you may pick up enough to get by but be completely unaware of the grammar rules underpinning the language.  

Considering that lawyers spend between 30 and 50 percent of their working day in Word, it is glaringly obvious that having a rudimentary understanding of the tool they spend the most time using is not good. Most lawyers have a productivity issue hiding in plain sight; Word was designed with sophisticated document logic in mind, making it perfect for contracts, pleadings, and policies. But when lawyers rely on formatting shortcuts, documents can morph into messy, convoluted files that feel like they are fighting the user with each revision.  

“The fight with the layout is one of the biggest hidden productivity drains in legal work,” explains Truyens.  

How to use styles and templates properly 

In the video above, Truyens explains how a common habit wastes the most time in Word: manually formatting each section of a document rather than using Word Styles.  

We’re all guilty. When something looks off, it’s easy to grab the Format Painter, click around, adjust a font size here, nudge some spacing there, and voilà, everything looks normal.  

The problem is it’s only a temporary fix. Once someone else opens the document and starts editing a different section, things inevitably crash. Why? Because Format Painter only copies how something looks, not what it is. That distinction matters more than it seems.  

Word Styles work completely differently. A Style is a formatting blueprint, not a one-off formatting choice. Applying ‘Heading 2’ to a section title doesn’t just make the text bold and larger. It tells Word: this text plays the role of a second-level heading.  

Change the definition of that Style once, and every heading that uses it updates instantly throughout the entire document, no matter how long it is or how many people have edited it.   

Templates vs documents explained  

This is where the difference between a template (.dotx) and a regular document (.docx) becomes genuinely useful.  

• A template is a reusable file that stores your firm’s Styles, formatting, and structure.  

• A document built from that template inherits all of it automatically.  

Once styles are built into a template, every new contract, memo, or pleading starts from a consistent, correctly structured foundation. 

For teams, this matters even more. Consistent formatting across a legal team isn’t a cosmetic nicety; it’s what makes documents predictable to review, easy to hand off, and safe to edit without something breaking downstream.  

As Truyens puts it, “styles are the foundation of properly structured legal documents.”  

What are the biggest Microsoft Word formatting mistakes lawyers make?  

There are a few formatting faux pas that are easy to make when using Word.  

Empty paragraphs  

While hitting Enter a few extra times to push content down the page may feel harmless, it isn’t, as this creates empty paragraphs.  

Empty paragraphs are invisible landmines; delete one line of text earlier in the document, and suddenly your spacing is off everywhere, and nobody can figure out why. Spacing should be controlled through paragraph settings, not by extra line breaks. 

Heed Truyens’ advice: “Don’t create empty paragraphs. That’s not how Word was designed to work.” 

Confusing page breaks with section breaks  

A page break just pushes content to the next page. A section break lets you change the actual formatting rules partway through a document, such as page orientation, margins, and headers.  

Using a section break is the correct way to get a single landscape page for a wide table in the middle of an otherwise portrait document, without exporting the table separately or fighting your layout for 20 minutes. 

Stranded headings  

Nothing looks more unpolished than a section heading sitting alone at the bottom of a page, with all its content pushed onto the next one. The usual fix for this is pushing Enter a few times, which messes up the document formatting.  

“Keep With Next” is a formatting setting that exists for this issue. When applied through paragraph formatting, it tells Word to never separate a heading from what follows it.  

Widow and orphan control  

Similarly, the widow and orphan control setting stops single lines of a paragraph from being stranded awkwardly at the top or bottom of a page, which quietly cleans up a lot of visual sloppiness.  

One diagnostic habit is worth adopting immediately: turn on paragraph marks (the ¶ symbol, under Home or via Ctrl+Shift+8). It’s the single fastest way to see exactly what’s going on in a document: every extra paragraph, every manual line break, every hidden formatting mark that’s been quietly causing problems.  

What are the benefits of Microsoft Word skills?  

“Lawyers shouldn’t be manually fixing numbering and references in long documents,” says Truyens. That’s exactly the kind of work Word is built to handle on its own if the underlying structure is set up correctly in the first place.  

Automating numbering in Word 

Once your document is built on Styles rather than manual formatting, automation becomes possible, and you don’t have to worry about numbering.  

Manual numbering is genuinely risky in long legal documents. Renumber a section by hand, and it’s easy to miss a clause reference buried three pages later that still points to the old numbering, which can have serious implications down the line. The fix is to link your numbering to your Styles, so that numbered clauses update automatically as you add, remove, or reorder sections.  

Cross-references in Word 

Combine automated numbering with cross-references, which link one part of a document to another (say, a defined term back to its definition, or a clause reference to the clause itself).  

This way Word will ensure both numbering and references are correct as the document evolves, instead of you having to track it manually. 

Tables of contents in Word  

The same logic applies to a table of contents. When you apply Styles to your document, Word will generate and keep your table of contents up to date, rather than leaving you with a stale list someone retyped after the last round of edits.  

It’s important to remember that certain fields (numbering, cross-references, tables of contents) don’t always update automatically as you type. To ensure your table of contents is accurate, select all (Ctrl+A) and press F9 before finalizing a document, and Word will refresh every field in one pass. It’s a small step that catches a surprising number of last-minute errors before a document goes out the door.  

What are the takeaways?  

Lawyers don’t necessarily need new drafting tools to become dramatically more efficient; they need to understand the principles behind the tool they already use every single day.  

Most lawyers were not taught how to use Word to its full potential, and mastering it only requires understanding a handful of principles:  

• Styles are blueprints, not one-off formatting  

• Structure prevents the problems manual fixes create  

• Automation is only possible once that structure is in place 

Whether you’re drafting contracts, pleadings, or internal guidance documents, understanding Word’s underlying logic can save hundreds of hours each year and resolve countless headaches.  

Teams looking to go even further can pair strong Word fundamentals with legal document automation platforms, such as LawVu Draft, to extend these same structural principles across an entire document workflow.