Background
A top-ranked U.S.-based law firm that provides litigation, business, and regulatory counsel to clients across highly regulated industries develops hundreds of legal briefs each year to guide the court’s understanding and support the firm’s legal position of each case they handle.
Challenge
The legal team needed to create a Tables of Contents (TOC) and Tables of Authorities (TOA) for legal briefs in Microsoft Word. The work mattered because legal briefs require accurate citation organization, reliable document structure, and preserved formatting controls.
Before introducing Microsoft Copilot into its workflow, the law firm and document production team found that creating Tables of Contents and Tables of Authorities for legal briefs required substantial manual review to identify brief headings, locate legal authorities, validate citation formatting, preserve page numbering, and avoid formatting issues such as orphan headings.
Testing also identified a clear capability boundary. While Copilot can support preparation, review, and quality checks, it cannot reliably complete the full TOC/TOA process end-to-end in Microsoft Word because it cannot insert or update true Word-generated TOC/TOA fields, preserve or manipulate page numbering, or manage the Word field codes required for final TOC/TOA production.
Solution
Integreon developed an optimized hybrid workflow that positions Copilot as a preparation, review, and quality assurance assistant while reserving final Word field generation, citation marking, pagination control, and legal document execution for a human user or dedicated drafting tools such as Best Authority.
Copilot-supported activities included extracting TOC-ready headings, identifying legal authorities such as cases, statutes, regulations, rules, organizing TOA categories, flagging missing authorities or inconsistent citation formatting, and producing a clean verification checklist
Copilot Preparation
Human / Tool Execution
Mark citations, insert Wordgenerated TOC/TOA fields, and preserve pagination controls.
Copilot QA
Review missing authorities, formatting consistency, short-form citation risks, and orphan headings.
Implementation
Prior to rollout, Integreon tested the approach using structured prompts in Microsoft Word. The prompts asked Copilot to assess feasibility, generate useful task prompts, review the brief for unmarked authorities, provide a clean authority verification checklist, and advise on proper TOA citation formatting for Rule 12(b)(6).
Results
Testing showed measurable efficiency improvement. Total production time decreased from 60 minutes and 36 seconds without Copilot to 16 minutes and 18 seconds with Copilot, saving 44 minutes and 18 seconds per document—delivering an approximate 73% efficiency gain.
Metric
With Copilot
Without Copilot
Impact
Key Metrics:
- 44+ minutes saved per document.
- Production time reduced by ~73%.
- Repeatable prompt-driven process for preparation and final QA.
- Improved citation accuracy, missing-authority detection, formatting consistency, and orphan heading review.
Learn more about how we help businesses and in-house teams move faster, scale easier, and deliver more.
Legal and Compliance Solutions
