How good are associates with MS Word?

In their October 2016 ABA Journal article, Tech comes naturally to ‘digital native’ millennials? That’s a myth, Darth Vaughn a partner and legal process services director, and Casey Flaherty, a counsel, both with Haight Brown & Bonesteel discuss the results of their surveys of law students' technology skills. The authors tested several law school classes on the following common MS Word tasks:

• Accept/Turn-off track changes. • Cut & Paste. • Replace text. • Format font and paragraph. • Fix footers. • Insert hyperlink. • Apply/Modify style. • Insert/Update cross-references. • Insert page break. • Insert non-breaking space. • Clean document properties. • Create comparison document (i.e., a redline).

They report that most law students were only able to perform about a third of these tasks. So, don't fall for the myth that the younger generation acquires basic software skills early on. They are apparently learning these techniques on the job.

You can expect someone with an MBA to have taken courses in Excel.