Cut and Paste Stops Working in Word Update, Lawyers Mourn

This morning, lawyers across the globe woke up to a twilight zone of sorts.

Microsoft Word has stopped allowing the copy/cut and paste function in their latest automatic update of Microsoft Word which pushed last night.

Legal secretaries, paralegals, IT professionals and those lawyers that have to draft their own pleadings are scrambling to find a solution as Microsoft has announced that a patch cannot be released until next week, and cannot be rolled back to the previous update. Lucky for you, below you can read about how to temporarily fix the cut and paste nightmare.

Happy April Fool's Day!

If we had you going, we do apologize. After all, we're lawyers ourselves over here, and we know just how amazing, awesome, and downright life-saving cut and paste can be. And as legal bloggers and writers, believe you me, we would be in tears without it.

Thanks to the wondrous ability to copy and paste from one pleading to another, we lawyers can move paper mountains in a matter of few short billable hours. For those younger lawyers out there, you may not realize that there once was a time when cut and paste didn't exist, but thankfully, you'll never have to live in such a world.

Copy and Paste Tip

While it may not be Halloween, given that we played a trick, here's a little treat in the form of a copy and paste tip (though it might not be nothing new to the savvier computer users):

When you want to copy multiple words or phrases at the same time, you can hold down the control (CTRL) key while highlighting and skip around. Then, when you click CTRL+C to copy, it'll copy just the highlighted bits. This also will allow you to do batch formatting. For example, hold down control while highlight all your section headings (or other particular words), then you can apply underling or bolding with a single click.

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• Marie Kondo for Lawyers: Tidying Up Your Clients (FindLaw's Strategist)