Tuesday Tips for Legal Professionals: After You Build Your TOC & TOA

Tamas Cseza
6 days ago
4 min read

If you work in litigation, you’ve probably spent more hours than you’d like to admit wrestling with a Table of Contents (TOC) and Table of Authorities (TOA) in Word.

Recently, I saw a great LinkedIn post from Julie Enez at Beyond Paralegals about creating TOCs and TOAs and properly marking citations. That’s the part everyone talks about.

From the printer’s side, we see the next part:

The TOC and TOA look perfect in Word… and then things go sideways at the PDF and print stage.

This Tuesday Tip is about what happens after you’ve done the hard work in Word—so the brief that lands in a judge’s hands still matches the careful structure you built.

1. Decide when the structure is “locked.”

Most of the problems we see are caused by “just one more tweak.”

You know the drill:

TOC and TOA have been built
Everyone signs off
Then someone adds a paragraph, changes a heading, or drops in a new case at the last second

On screen, it looks fine, but suddenly:

TOC page numbers don’t match
TOA references are off by a page or two
The bound copy doesn’t line up with what counsel is reading from

A simple fix is to agree internally on a “structure locked” point:

Once headings, TOC, and TOA are in place and approved, treat the structure as frozen
If you must change anything that affects pagination or headings, assume you’ll re-update everything, not just “fix this one line.”

It’s less glamorous than a discovery strategy, but it saves a lot of grief.

2. Do one last proper field update in Word

Word will do the heavy lifting on page references—if you actually let it.

Right before you create your PDF:

Select the whole document (Ctrl+A or Command+A).
Update the TOC: right-click → Update Field → Update entire table.
Update the TOA the same way.

That last update:

Pulls in any heading changes
Refreshes page numbers
Updates where authorities actually appear in the document

Skipping this step is one of the fastest ways to end up with a pretty TOC/TOA that doesn’t match the pages anyone is reading.

3. Export a proper PDF, don’t “recreate” it by scanning

From a printer’s perspective, this one is big:

Export directly from Word to PDF
- “Save As → PDF”
- Or “Export → Create PDF/XPS”

That gives you:

Clean, sharp text
Fully searchable content
A file that behaves well in e-filing systems and on judges’ screens

What causes trouble:

Printing to paper and scanning back to PDF
Using screenshots as pages
Running everything through a heavy “compressed PDF” setting and sending that as the print master

Those shortcuts are how you end up with soft text, fuzzy Bates numbers, and footnotes that no one can comfortably read.

4. Sanity-check the TOC and TOA in the final PDF

Once you’ve exported the PDF, don’t assume it’s fine just because Word looked good.

Open the PDF and:

Go to the TOC
- Pick 3–5 entries at random
- Jump to those pages and check that the headings actually match
Do the same with the TOA
- Pick a few cases and make sure the page references are still right

You’re not trying to proofread your own work all over again—just making sure nothing broke in the handoff from Word to PDF.

If something is off, fix it in Word, update fields again, and recreate the PDF. It’s faster than trying to explain mismatched references in court.

5. Remember this will live in a punched and bound book

Factums and briefs don’t live their whole life on screen. They end up:

Punched
Bound (Cerlox, coil, ring, etc.)
Read across a desk or lectern for long stretches

So before you send your file off to be printed:

Look at it like a physical object:

Margins
- Is there enough room on the binding edge so text isn’t eaten by holes or the spine?
Font size & spacing
- Does the body text feel readable on a printed page, not just on a big monitor?
Page numbers
- Easy to spot? Consistent across the whole document?

A layout that looks “tight and efficient” on screen can be tiring and awkward once it’s punched and bound.

6. How this looks from CETTEC’s side

When a firm sends us a brief that prints smoothly, it usually has:

A clear point where the structure was locked
TOC and TOA fields were updated right before the PDF was created
A text-based PDF exported directly from Word (not a scan)
Margins and layout that respect the reality of binding and reading on paper

When something’s off, we often see:

Page numbers in the TOC/TOA that don’t match the body
Text too close to the binding edge
PDFs that are scanned or over-compressed and hard to read

We can’t fix everything at the print stage, but we can:

Flag obvious problems that will get worse once the document is punched and bound
Work with your existing PDFs to produce clean, court-friendly copies
Help you translate all that work you did in Word into a physical book that’s clear and comfortable to use

Bringing it back to the source

Julie and the Beyond Paralegals community focus on building TOCs, TOAs, and citations properly in

Word—which is exactly where it should start.

This post is simply the next link in the chain:

You build it right in Word
You lock it down and export a clean PDF
You run a couple of quick checks
Your printer turns that into something judges and counsel can actually live with on paper

If your team wants, we can turn this into a one-page internal checklist—“What to do after you build your TOC/TOA”—that can sit right next to your factum templates and paralegal training materials.