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Summer Clerks Research Guide

Strategies and research tips for working law students

Be Organized

Practice Tip: Use technology to keep your research organized.

Make your life easier by automating some common research-related tasks like organizing email, documents, and citations.

Organizing Your Research

Gmail filter menu with From = bnalawalerts@bna.com and Subject = DocketKeep your email under control:

Use filters and folders to help you keep on top of email. Outlook and Gmail both provide tools to automatically mark emails as read, put them in folders, forward them, and flag them in different ways.

Collaborate remotely:

Instead of emailing drafts, share documents with remote collaborators and use comments, Hangouts, and IM to edit collaboratively. Google even supports a basic version of track changes in its "Revision history."

Organizing Your Documents

Draft smarter:

Are you drafting a long document in Microsoft Word? Use headings and references to keep your document organized and up-to-date. While The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Word was written for the 2010 release, it still provides important tips on using Word well.

Manage your citations:

Try using bibliographic management software to track your citations. Systems work with many of the most popular academic databases like Ebsco, ProQuest, HeinOnline and others. They don't generally work with Westlaw or Lexis, though.