Easily Create Linked Citations in Your Emails and Research Memos

When you are trading emails with co-counsel and discussing the law, the citations to statutes and cases can start piling up. And when you deal with research memoranda, the number of these citations simply balloons. Of course, to check any of these, you have to copy the citation into Google or look it up. It would be nice if they could all be hyperlinks that took you exactly where you wanted to go.

Microsoft makes this relatively easy. And, it allows you to do it without having to include the entire URL in the body of the text, which means everything is still human readable.

So, let's use a simple example. Suppose I was to send a colleague an email with the line "The definition of who is a tenant can be found in Ohio Rev. Code s. 1923.02, which defines it as follows:". It would be nice if I could make the words "Ohio Rev. Code s. 1923.01" be a link that he can click and take him directly to http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/1923.02, which is where this statute can be found.

To do this, go ahead and type your whole sentence into your email or into your Word document. Next, highlight the text you want to turn into a link. Next, hit Ctrl + k, which will bring up the following window:

All you have to do is put the URL in the Address: box, which I've circled. You can either type it in directly, or, you can copy it from your web browser and just paste it in. Then, hit OK, and you now have a link right in your email or Word document. This makes it easier to use the email or document in the future when you want to check out the citation.