Microsoft Word for Lawyers- Marking Citations in Word 2013

Marking Citations in Word 2013: Video

This video shows marking citations in Word 2013. Click here to view the syllabus for the full course.

Marking Citations in Word 2013: Overview

In this post, you will learn how to create a table of authorities for your legal documents within Microsoft Word. A table of authorities lists the specific references cited within a legal document along with the accompanying page numbers. It is like a legal bibliography. As when creating a table of contents or a bibliography within Word, you must first mark the citations within your legal document before you compile your table of authorities. When you mark a legal citation, Word will insert a hidden TA (Table of Authorities Entry) field within your document next to the cited text. You can then search for the next long or short citation within the document to mark or you can automatically mark each of the following occurrences of the citation within the document.

Once you have marked all of your citations within your legal document, you can then compile your table of authorities within Word. When you do this, Word will automatically create a table of authorities that lists all of the citations organized by category (such as “Cases”) and displays their associated page number.

Next, you will need to learn how to mark citations within your legal document. To do this, first select the text that you wish to mark as a citation within your table of authorities. Then click the “Mark Citation” button in the “Table of Authorities” button group on the “References” tab within the Ribbon. The keyboard shortcut for this dialog box is “Alt”+“Shift”+“I” on your keyboard. That will cause the “Mark Citation” dialog box to appear.

In the “Mark Citation” dialog box you can edit the long citation as you would like it to appear within the table of authorities by editing the text shown within the “Selected text” text box. Note that you can format the text, if desired, by right-clicking the text within this text box and then selecting the “Font…” command from the pop-up menu in order to open the “Font” dialog box where you can change the formatting.

Next, select the desired category for the citation from the “Category” drop-down. Note that if the citation category that you want to use is unavailable, you can click the “Category…” button to open the “Edit Category” dialog box. In this dialog box you can select a category to replace from the listing shown and then enter the desired replacement category into the “Replace with:” text box. Then click the “OK” button when you are finished.

After that, edit the text shown within the “Short citation” text box to match the short citation that you want Word to search for within the remainder of the legal document.

To mark only the selected citation, you can then click the “Mark” button. You can then search for the next citation by clicking the “Next Citation” button and repeating the process. To mark the selected citation as well as all of the long and short citations within the remainder of the document that match the entries shown within the “Selected text” and “Short citation” text boxes, click the “Mark All” button, instead. Also note that if you later add additional citations to the document, you can select the original citation, open the “Mark Citation” dialog box again, and then click the “Mark All” button to mark all of the additional entries.