Old Lawyer; New Trick (9/1/21)

The old saw is that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.  Extending that saying to lawyers (distinguishable from dogs in the lovability category), you can’t teach old lawyers new tricks. 

I am an old lawyer and am happy to say that I learned a new trick that I will implement in my publications in the future (most importantly, the 2022 Editions of the Federal Tax Procedure Book to be published in August 2022).  The new trick is to automatically generate in my word processing documents (WordPerfect) links to the Table of Contents items (permitting the reader to jump from the Table of Contents to the item) and cross-reference items (also permitting the reader to jump to the cross-referenced page and footnote).  Those links not only show up in the WordPerfect document but, when WP’s print to pdf function is used, are available in the pdf document as well.

I don’t know how long that capability has been in WP, but I just found it. So, old dog, new trick.  I will put that functionality in the 2021 Federal Tax Procedure Book (Student Edition) and put a revised version on SSRN.  When I do that, I will also provide links to Cornell’s Legal Information Institute Code Sections and to some of the key cases (on Google Scholar).   That will take some time to check to make the links where necessary and check them.  When I get that done, I will post a blog entry.  I hope I can get that done by the end of next week.

 I will not do that for the 2021 Practitioner Edition but will have the links in the 2022 Editions.