You polish the final edits on your appellate brief, proud of the strong reasoning you marshaled on behalf of your client. You smile as you think of the dinner plans you made weeks ago and won’t have to cancel because you finished the brief early. And then you realize that you’re missing the Table of Authorities. And just like that, you’re canceling dinner plans and hunched over your desk right up until the filing deadline.
The Table of Authorities lists all cases, statutes, and other material cited in a brief, including the page number on which each appears. The majority of U.S. courts require lawyers to submit filings that include a formal Table of Authorities, especially for longer briefs and motions. Creating the Table of Authorities is time-intensive, and many attorneys struggle with formatting, erroneously including or omitting certain legal authorities, and getting the page numbers to reflect new edits to the document. Everyone knows (or is) an attorney who has missed their filing deadline because of delays with this added chore.
It’s basically a rite of passage at this point to cry over your keyboard at 11:50 PM before a midnight deadline about the formatted line of dots in the TOA. Curse you, formatted dots!! (Apparently they are called “dot leaders.”)
How do I build a table of authorities in Word?
A Table of Authorities (or “TOA” as it is often nicknamed at law firms) may be a historical relic, but the requirement can throw a major wrench in getting important legal filings submitted on time. Creating the Table of Authorities is a stressful, tedious chore that often falls on new associates and legal support staff. Now, thanks to Clearbrief’s patent-pending AI, the quickest way to build a Table of Authorities is to leverage AI to extract every single reference to an authority in your document, with perfect formatting.
Before Clearbrief, most attorneys and their legal staff would use Microsoft Word’s tedious, multi-step process that requires someone to mark all citations in the document manually, confirm the formatting, and identify each subsequent citation before tagging the correct citation category in the References Tab. Other tech tools that strive to build a TOA are using rule-based tech that fails to capture all the citations in a document, especially less common citation types and short forms of the caselaw citations.
Our conversations with hundreds of attorneys, paralegals, and legal assistants across the country indicate that manually creating a perfectly formatted and accurate Table of Authorities can take anywhere from 3 hours to a full week, depending on how complicated the document is. And the attorney authors generally must pause their editing of the trial brief, appellate brief, or motion for summary judgment so that the Table of Authorities can include the “final” page numbers corresponding to each citation. That means you lose valuable time that you could otherwise use to wordsmith your filing and improve the substance.
With Clearbrief, you create the Table of Authorities with one click.
Yes, really. Just place the cursor where you want your new Table of Authorities to appear, and click 'Generate!' If you prefer, with a few more clicks you can set your own special formatting preferences, like sorting alphabetically or separating out circuit court opinions.
Click here to access a free trial of Clearbrief and instantly generate your Table of Authorities. You can get it installed in minutes from the Microsoft Add-In Store (we’ll send you a link to the private listing).
What should be included in a Table of Authorities?
The table of authorities organizes legal writing citations (authoritative documents and sources that support each statement and argument in the pleading) into seven basic categories of citations, listed here in descending order:
- Cases
- Statutes
- Other Authorities
- Rules
- Treatises
- Regulations
- Constitutional provisions
Procedural rules include nine other categories of authorities, but these are the most commonly cited categories.
Clearbrief scans the entire document to identify every citation to a legal authority—including all the “id.” references and any short form versions of the full citation—and sorts them into the correct citation category listed above. It will seem magical, but it’s the power of AI!
How do you organize a Table of Authorities?
The table is organized into categories of citations: cases, statutes, other authorities, rules, treatises, regulations, and constitutional provisions. This can be done using the semi-automated process in the References Tab in Microsoft Word, or with one click using Clearbrief.
Why do courts require a Table of Authorities?
Because it’s in the court rules, for one thing. But why do most courts have rules requiring a Table of Authorities for certain types of pleadings? We’ve talked with hundreds of attorneys and judges, and none reported finding a Table of Authorities to be a critical resource when reviewing or writing a brief. Many attorneys report that they are forced to write off from the client bill the time spent compiling a Table of Authorities. In defense of the TOA, some attorneys have indicated they use the Table of Authorities to compare briefs at a high level, while some use the process of creating a Table of Authorities as a proofreading tool.
What is the history of the Table of Authorities? Why does it exist?
For those curious about why the legal profession spends so much time torturing itself with the Table of Authorities requirement, we think you’ll find that the historical origins are quite fascinating! TLDR: the Table of Authorities is a throwback to simpler times when attorneys gave a bibliography to the justices and then talked for eight days.
The Table of Authorities appears to have evolved from judicial traditions established during colonial times. As a nascent country, the U.S. legal system relied on oral advocacy as the primary way to introduce judges to a case, as opposed to written briefs. The importance of oral argument came from the English common law system, in which the entire decision-making process is out in the open for the parties and public to see, and judges will rule from the bench after hearing the debate.
The U.S. legal system started with this oral tradition: judges learned about a case through oral argument. Lawyers submitted a couple of pages before engaging in lengthy orations. Yet, the courts have significantly evolved since colonial times.
(photo credit: https://weheartit.com/entry/253238220)Early U.S. Supreme Court rules called for attorneys to submit a short written document that included the material points in the case, but no substantive arguments like you would see in a brief or motion today. These short documents served as a jumping-off point for oral arguments that might run for days or a week. One case in 1819 heard arguments for nine days. Contrast that with today: Supreme Court Rule 28 allows for 30 minutes of oral argument per side.
By 1849, the Supreme Court encouraged written legal arguments by limiting oral arguments to two hours for each attorney and requiring written submissions. The attorney waived the right to oral argument if they failed to submit written points and authorities. Thus, the court encouraged attorneys to make up for the lost time in oral argument by writing out their thoughts.
The modern legal brief first appeared in the New York Court of Appeals by 1860 with a complete statement of facts, organized in outline form with fully developed sentences and paragraphs. These briefs ranged in length from eight to fifteen pages. Before this time, attorneys commonly submitted one- or two-page documents that were “summary, unpersuasive, and opaque” and then relied on oral argument to inform the judge of key facts and reasoning.1
In short, U.S. courts initially “required a minimal written submission to supplement oral argument; they then allowed a written brief to be submitted in lieu of oral argument; finally, they limited the length of oral argument in all cases.”2
Today, “written opinions are generally produced over a period of weeks or months, with the assistance of a professional staff, and often are the product of extensive research, drafting and editing.”3 While the Table of Authorities seems to have been, at one point, the precursor and substitute for a lengthy brief, it lives on as a formality and a requirement, much to the chagrin of lawyers and their paralegals, legal assistants, and staff.
Why does my Table of Authorities say Passim?
When a case is directly on point with your argument, you may cite to it throughout the brief. As a result, multiple pages will contain the same case reference. When an authority in the Table of Authorities is listed on more than five pages, you may use the Latin word "Passim" instead of listing each subsequent citation page number.
(photo credit: https://thesaurus.plus/img/synonyms/715/passim.png)Automate the Work out of the Table of Authorities
The Table of Authorities remains a formal requirement in legal writing, particularly in appellate court practice. Instead of letting this relic from colonial times slow you down, extract all of your authorities with one click using Clearbrief’s cutting-edge AI platform available right in Microsoft Word. We would love to show you how it works on your next brief! Sign up here to test it out today.
Citations
- Ehrenberg, Suzanne. “Embracing the Writing-Centered Legal Process.” 89 Iowa L. Rev., vol. 89, no. 1159, 1182 (2004), available at https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/fac_schol/205?utm_source=scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu%2Ffac_schol%2F205&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages. Accessed 21 05 2021.
- Id. at 1182.
- Id. at 1165.
